Teen virtual world goes Hollywood

Some Habbo news ... it's not all about Second Life, is it?

Saw this while trolling the real world's virtual world, or something like that.

Teen virtual world goes Hollywood: "

Habbo, a virtual world for teens, signed a deal with the William Morris Agency, one of Hollywood's oldest and largest talent agencies. As part of the deal, WMA will promote its celebrity sports and entertainment clients within the digital world and help Habbo forge new promotional partnerships in Hollywood....

"

(Via CNET News.com | Tech news blog.)

Fun with Phones, GPS, Second Life, and triangulation

I find the idea of the real life hotspots that allow you to “see” into second life has a number of possible implementations. As I am unsure of what technologies would be used, are even useful, I have a few varying ideas. Here are some starters.

Since a hot spot is single point, it would be simpler to use a localized triangulation technique to establish it. This means setting up three sensors in an area that would detect when a phone is at a specific point between them. First set up sensor in a real-world café. Then create an item in Second Life I will call a HoloCam. I place the HoloCam in my Second Life art gallery. If I have a second life compatible phone, and I am in the café I can use my phone to connect to second life. From my phone I will be looking into my Second Life gallery. A user in second life would see, projected over the HoloCam, an image of my avatar, letting them know I am watching. Perhaps with a little work I could even use the phone to text chat with the person in second life. I could also use the keys on my phone to rotate and tilt my view of the space.

If the sensors in the café are good enough, I could also look around by “pointing” my phone where I want my avatar to face.

I could also use a variation on this. Instead of using sensors in real life, I could make it so that regardless of my location in real life, I could use an internet ready phone to connect to my Second Life HoloCam. This means that while in sitting anywhere with WiFi, I could see if anyone was visiting my Second Life gallery, and perhaps even text chat with them. If I were to mount a proximity sensor on the second life HoloCam, my phone could ring if someone were to enter my gallery, giving me the option to see who was there.

Government thinks Second Life anonymity leads to terrorism

Doesn't the government think everything we do is terrorism, no matter what it is -- going to church, school, playing in Second Life. Whatever. For the avatar discussions ...

From TechDirt.

Gov't Says Second Life + Online Anonymity = Terrorism: "Just as our courts on continually pointing out that anonymity is protected free speech, it appears that the federal government is trying to do away with anonymity entirely. We've already pointed out that National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has been saying that the government should be able to monitor all internet communications. Now, the government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has come out with a fear mongering report trying to suggest that online anonymity in 3D worlds leads to terrorism. It highlights things like Second Life as a breeding ground for terrorism. It's all quite scary if it weren't for the fact that it's totally baseless.

Virtual law

This is not Rob Scott's law firm, but it addresses many of the issues he follows. From Virtually Blind, a blog about virtual law and legal issues that impact virtual worlds ... a post about a lawsuit where IGE founder Brock Pierce alleges underhanded dealing at a virtual property company.

[from TechDirt's post: More Evidence of Why Virtual World Economies are Risky]

And did you know there's a virtual law conference?

WOW MMORPG legal article

Interesting article about Blizzard and chat spammers.

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/02/01/blizzard-puts-peons4hire-out-of-work/

Half-Formed Idea: Message in a Bottle

Okay, this is a half-formed idea, but I'm going to try putting it out there in spite of it not being too well thought out. Further, instead of my usually super-expansive (and unwieldy) thinking, I’m going to try and keep it short.


I was listening to On The Media (http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/02/01/07) when a guy brought up that an app named ForwardTrack (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html) had been developed as a way of getting people to look at ads online by allowing them to not only send the ad to friends, but to get info on who their friends in turn sent the ad to. I thought it was a brilliant way of getting people to map their own networks by giving them feedback on the nature of the network they were charting. In fact, people wanted to grow the their network of ad viewers in order to see how big they could go:


“Watts and Peretti set up a regular mass-market ad buy, running banner ads on several prominent blogs and news sites. Like many ads these days, they added a button on the ad that allows people to forward the ad to a friend--a way of collecting eyeballs for free. Typically, people ignore this "share with your friends" pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends.”


All of this made me think of the papers I’d read on semantic social networks and cluster maps. What if one hollowed out ForwardTrack and allowed people to forward images, text, links, whatever? Let people take such an app and do what they please--pushing messages, images, and seeing what networks of viewers they can get. The app will give them feedback in the form of semantic cluster maps (covering concepts, f2f relationships, existing ontologies, etc) of their choice regarding who looked at their media/message. This could potentially lead people to make new sorts of connections.


This new app could be a network or semantic analysis/research toolset that could be expanded and tweaked over time. It might be tested in Second Life (Can this sort of thing be done in SL?) before crossing the virtual divide onto the web or f2f social relationships. Perhaps future students might extend the toolset to design new collective intelligence or social networking apps in Second Life.


Dovetailing off of Dan’s post from Tim O’Reilly, a ForwardTrack-like app (Let’s call it “MIAB” for Message in a Bottle) could be used to create on the fly GIS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS) maps. It could also be used to support growing psychological research efforts in Second Life
(http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-virtual-laboratory) (http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2179)

What can mobile do for virtual worlds?

This is not virtual worlds specific, although with little thought you can see how virtual worlds and mobile might go together. Anyway, I posted over at last100 regarding Nokia's N-Gage gaming platform, and Ovi, the social media sharing site. Obviously Nokia has a content/social strategy, and it makes me wonder what can mobile do for virtual worlds.

Also, a brief note at the emac blog on the same matter, with an eye toward Mobile Lab and content creation. The last quote from a Nokia dude is interesting. Again, what can mobile do for virtual worlds?

gesture based augmented reality

Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide

For everybody interested in augmented reality and virtual worlds. Most things Tim O'Reilly writes is worth reading ...

Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide: "

By Tim O'Reilly

I'm jealous. The Prags have just published a book I wish I'd thought of first: Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide.

I've been talking quite a bit about augmented reality lately, especially when people ask me about what I think might represent a discontinuity significant enough to represent a paradigm shift of the scale of the PC revolution or Web 2.0. Sensors instrumenting the world and driving collective intelligence applications that provide new information layers in our everyday experience is one big element of this next revolution.

The topic also comes up whenever people ask me about Second Life, because I'm much more fascinated by the possibility of SL to create additional information layers on top of this world than I am about the idea of it as a complete alternate reality. I usually point to an SAP project I learned of last year, in which SAP is working with a Swiss property management firm to build instrumented models of their buildings in Second Life. That is, you open a door in the building, a door opens in the SL model. The building catches fire, so does the SL model. And of course, that's why I was so excited about Google's acquisition of Sketchup. It seems to me to be a really important long-term play in the mapping space. After all, so much of the built world we interact with isn't represented at all on the maps we use. An address on the 37th floor of a building looks just the same to our mapping system as one on the first floor. But does it need to be that way? Not in a future where we've populated our maps (at first perhaps Google Earth, but eventually web-based maps as well) with additional layers representing the human-built world.

Augmented reality is also coming at us in the news, especially forward looking news outlets (hint: 'News for nerds. Stuff that matters.') Take a look at these recent Slashdot headlines and think about them as all part of an emerging augmented reality trend: Smart 'Lego' Set Conjures Up Virtual 3D Twin, Cellphone App Developed that Could Allow For 'Pocket Supercomputers', Stanford's New Website Converts Your Photos to 3D, and The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey. Add in the recent Radar posts The Future of Cell Phone Headsets and More on the Virtual Reality Audio Headset. Season with a dash of Nintendo Wii and innovative cell phone games like Mobzombies (Radar post.)

We're clearly careening towards a world in which virtual worlds are overlaid on the real world, bits interpenetrated with atoms.

I should be clear that this broad-strokes definition of augmented reality isn't what's covered in the Prags' new book. They are focused on a more traditional definition: 'to create the sensation that virtual objects are present in the real world.' They provide some first tools for developers to explore interfaces and techniques for doing so, with an emphasis on overlaying rendered objects onto real time digital video. This is a subset of the big picture I'm drawing in this post, but an important one. And perhaps even more to the point, this book will help to socialize the idea and to get people started building the new skills that will be required as augmented reality interfaces go mainstream.

I was thinking after class about how we represent ourselves online, and how we could show a connection between ourselves and our avatars, when I happened along this neat idea for a sort of performance piece. Avatars, wearing approximations of our own face. now, I'll fancy up the handle for the item that it'd give up to the class, but if people are interested in taking part, they can send me pictures of themselves and I'll make the masks