Though the change will be a bit confusing for a while, it's fabulous for CMP Metaverse (or whatever our ultimate name turns out to be -- I won't bore you with that until we're decided). Under the new structure, we're gaining global corporate synergies under the UBM banner, while also drawing together with local siblings under a new, startup-like philosophy of community-building and community advocacy (which of course, is the virtual worlds sweet-spot). Meanwhile, we're not changing out the CMP name until AFTER the show, so all the SLURLs and links will keep working.

The build is being staged down in realtime by Xenius Revere: a formidable designer/modeler who's also emceeing our showcase of high-end modeling, sculptural and lighting design on Saturday, March 15, at 1 PM PST/4 PM ET. Watching Xenius build is a privilege -- his understanding of the constraints and liberties of virtual structures is profound. And we're extending the privilege, on and off, to our community on life20.net, via live video (go to the homepage and scroll down to check it out!)

The new amphitheatre is now installed and being fine-tuned. This may be the densest communal structure in Second Life -- a full 280 people, held comfortably within a 20-meter radius, enabling primary voice and text-chat without any dark spots. I had to write a programmatic seat-materializer to build out the space systematically (imagine hand-tweaking the position of 280 seats so close together), and I'm tentatively pleased with the results. We did an event, yesterday, with Sun's Dr. Richard Zippel, on RedShift technology, that went fine, and we're working remaining kinks out of the venue as we proceed through the weekend.

So I did my own back-of-the-envelope calculation, using Carr's same figures for server and PC wattage, and determined that our upcoming, six-day Life 2.0 Summit event -- with an average of 1000 concurrent attendees in SL and on the web -- will, over its 60-some-odd hours of "ontime," consume a total of about 9,048 KWh, which converts to roughly six tons of carbon. This is about 16% less carbon than one average American household releases in a year. (Or, I guess, about five average Brazilian households).

Let's compare this to the carbon footprint of a real event, which I calculated using the handy Excel spreadsheet at http://www.templerodefshalom.org/Copy%20of%20CarbonFootprintEventCalculator-v7%20(2).xls . Seems that, once all the fly, drive, taxi, light-up-the-convention-center, dispose of the trash, and watch pay-per-view-all-night-in-the-hotel-room stuff is added up (not sure what "hanging out in Second Life all night on the hotel's WiFi network" adds to this, but it's not much), a 1000-person national/global event in the real world will add something like 462 tons of carbon to the planet's burden. Yow.

This, I think, is a more important point -- that importing certain kinds of real-world activities into virtual reality saves a bagload of carbon. Or put another way, that it enables us to enjoy the benefits of global human community at small cost to the planet.

Interesting stuff -- this math was compelling enough that I've engaged with some experts to do a real analysis -- more later on results.

But the DNA of Life 2.0 is also wrapped around metaverse development – platforms and tools and building and coding. The heart of our mission is to help CTOs, software architects and technology creatives make good decisions when implementing virtual world solutions for their companies; and help them plug into the wellsprings of creative brilliance and technical expertise already present in metaverse communities.

So, as usual, we're opening Life 2.0 Spring with a very geeky weekend! On Saturday and Sunday mornings, March 15 and 16, we'll have "LSL University" – a six-hour crash course in Second Life software development, Mono and SL/web integration, aimed at getting advanced coders productive in a hurry. LSL University will be taught by a team of award-winning devs led by revered .Net and Rails developer Mike Gunderloy, CEO of Larkware, author of "From Coder to Developer" (Sybex, 2004) and many other books on coding best-practice.

In the afternoons of Saturday and Sunday, we'll turn our attention to building. Saturday afternoon, March 15 will see "The Return of Sculpty Day" – a five-hour lecture/showcase on advanced detail modeling tools and applications. On Sunday evening, March 16, we'll present "Modeling Light" – a special mini-symposium on light, shade and rendering led by Xenius Revere, formerly of Electric Sheep and now of 3Di, one of Second Life's most fabulous and innovative builders.

Anjin was followed by Cel Edman, author of a marvelous opensource sculpty toolkit; by Agrippa Skytown's Aminom Marvin who spoke on optimal techniques; TheBlack Box spoke about Sculpt Studio; and Yuzuru Jewell -- all the way from Japan -- spoke about the latest iteration of his sculpty software: Rokuro Pro.

The Dr Dobbs Island convention center has been filled with examples of the presenters' work -- a preface to creating a genuine teaching museum about this exciting technology and its applications.

Anjin Meili discusses voxel-hull tracing at Life 2.0 Summit Sculpty Day, Sunday afternoon

But that's not a conversation that can go anywhere (at least not anywhere fast) when you're talking to people who don't use SL. So in this situation, I decided to try a completely different tack, and look at the "why does TMP do this in SL?" question in simple, universally-accessible, 10,000-foot terms of brute technical and business advantage. Why, in other words, is doing job fairs in SL ... not a "novel way of doing business," ... not an "incremental improvement over other methods," ... not a "way of harnessing community," but just a dead-simple, you-don't-even-have-to-get-out-a-calculator-to-figure-this-out, hard-dollars no-brainer?

"Forget about the naked avatars," I said. "And let's look at the business problem. You have a large number of applicants, spread all over the country or the world. You have ten corporate clients, each fronting a three-person recruiting team. Your job is to make it possible for all these folks to engage one another over a several-hour or several-day timeframe; and do so in a uniquely-orderly and well-authenticated way -- perhaps through several rounds of interviews each. You need to manage open, group private and private one-on-one communications sensitively, to protect corporate reputations and applicant privacy, and comply with laws and regulations. You need to transport copies of documents and connect them with their owners. And you need to manage the timing of individual appointments, reminders, transportation and facilities with great finesse to make sure things proceed efficiently, your corporate clients get good value, and your applicants walk away happy."

"Of course," I continued, "you can't ask 1000 people to stand in line for seven hours while waiting their turns with a recruiter. So while all this is going on, you also need to buffer the crowd and keep people entertained -- probably by hosting lectures on better resume-writing, opportunities in various sectors, and "avatar dress for success."

It's not," I said, "a simple set of problems to solve. There isn't a unified web-plus-chat-plus-audioconference-plus-documents-plus-IM-etc. hosted-service platform in the known universe that can do this kind of thing neatly and sweetly at scale. And if there were," I went on, "it would cost whomping money to rent and configure for this particular event. Furthermore, even if you found a solution and ate that huge cost, the user interface for such a system would be both complex and unfamiliar to 99% of your users, who of course, don't attend job-fairs on this platform every day. So the user-experience would suck unless you spent more massive dollars on concierges and operators specially trained to run this infrastructure and hand-hold customers and applicants."

"Second Life," I contrasted, "does most of what you need natively, or with minimal scripting. It's globally accessible. It handles all the different flavors of voice and text communications (open, private, etc.) and item/doc-transfer you need for this kind of complex, multi-layered event. It provides a congenial, 3D environment where people can gather, network, go off to private interview rooms, attend lectures while waiting for a callback, etc. And it'll integrate with your web-based registration apparatus to provide access control, and your web-resident scheduling apps to provide appointment management, reminders, and so on."

"Because (by and large) you're dealing with applicants who are regular SL users familiar with the interface and SL's 3D UI vocabulary (i.e., they know how to sit in a chair, open a door and give a notecard from inventory), your customer-service issues are much reduced. You can hire the concierges you need from among the general population at reasonable rates, and they can be fully-functional with little additional training. So long as your scripts are well-written and your procedures well and clearly documented, the event -- in all its complexity -- should work, and should be guidable by mere mortals."

"Even if something doesn't work, it should be fixable by mere mortals. If the audio stream goes down in the middle of a lecture, everyone just starts typing, and the show goes on. Despite whining about SL stability, rich, immersive environments are much more robust than flat-web equivalents -- where the loss of one key function, like the audio stream in a web conference, tends to make the entire gathering moot."

"Taken all together," I concluded, "this spells 'no-brainer.' There's no other solution that lets mere mortals do stuff like this so easily and cheaply and improvably."

The upshot was that I won a convert. Your mileage may vary. Meanwhile, though it's certainly reductionist to present SL as "a really fluent, flexible, extensible global voice and multimedia conferencing system that's really cheap to use," it's not _wrong_. And this sort of simple benefits-talk may get us further, in the short term, than arguing why an interviewee's choice of AO can be as revealing as their MMPI scores (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to its friends).

I'd love to hear from presenters and attendees about this. To some extent, it's a moot point -- we can't suppress chat or IM, even if we wanted to (which we don't). I'm just wondering how it makes people feel. And beyond that, I'm wondering if we're actually seeing a sort of technologically-mediated cultural change in our idea of what constitutes appropriate conduct in public spaces.

The comparison has been drawn to RL events, where attendees IM and network via WiFi. This is different, I think. The presenter isn't aware of those communications, and is generally incapable of taking part, so it doesn't become, on the one hand, such a public issue, and on the other, such a matter of concern for "etiquette." In SL, if one wished to create a parallel system, people could (in principle) use the Life 2.0 group to quietly comment to one another during presos. But some of our attendees may not have joined that group, or even be aware of it -- so it excludes some parties. Conversely, having constant group messages coming across your screen while listening to a presentation can be annoying, and aside from resigning from a group, there's no way to filter that in SL (that I'm aware of -- if there is, I wish someone would tell me).

So is this cultural change we're seeing? If so, it's not without precedent -- back in Elizabethan times, it was common to attend theatre and (while performances were in progress) participate in a complex exchange of comments, heckling, eating of meals, and other social activity, some irrelevant to the performance. And this is true in other cultures as well, as anyone who's attended long performances of Chinese opera can tell you.

Feedback?
I like audio because it makes it easy on new residents, makes it easy to film presentations integrally, and because some presenters are quite comfortable with it. Audio troubles me because of lag, occasional technical problems, and because of the difficult burden it places on presenters to function in two 'modes' at once: to speak to the audience (at some remove of seconds in time, because of lag), and to interpret their feedback (normally given via (typed) chat).

So, predictably, for the past 24 hours, whenever I've had a free moment, I've been thinking of nothing but. And my best answer, so far, is "collisions."

I'll bet that if you create a stack of bullet-rezzers, each roughly the size of a bullet, and place them in a row along the axis of a weapon's barrel, you can script an object to collide with them in sequence, front to back, using collision-sensing in each object to trigger bullet-rezzing, thus creating a fusillade in which each bullet not only rezzes a fixed time _later_ than the one prior, but rezzes "behind" it, with respect to direction of fire -- thus eliminating great chance of bullets colliding in flight.

How'd I do? (grin)

Amsterdam -- as most of the readers of this column know, and as a group of hapless programmers at SD West who I led through the sim to demonstrate v-commerce last Wednesday quickly found out -- is one of SL's great wellsprings of kinky, alpha-tex'd lingerie and a center of the inworld (cough) "service economy."

Doesn't look like much, does it? But even simple objects in SL can hide significant complexity.

Let's start with the physical object itself. Four primitives: the cup shape (a stretched, hollowed half-sphere with the Dr. Dobb's Portal texture applied to the side), the handle-shape (stretched torus), and the black pool of coffee (black disk). These are linked to form the completed object -- the cup-shape is the so-called 'root prim,' and the rest are 'child prims.'

The 'steam' (which is animated, rises into the air, trails behind you if you walk around while carrying the cup, and fades out neatly in a second or two) is emitted by code residing in the black 'coffee' disk. This code parameterizes and calls the SL 'particle system' -- a software subsystem that runs on the SL client (so produces effects that are not part of the shared scenario represented on the SL server). The particle system is a very powerful tool for creating a wide range of effects -- fire, smoke, explosions, temporary phantom constructs, etc. Once triggered, the particle system will continue emitting from the object particles of appropriate parameters, which include alpha transparency, size and dimensions, gravity and negative-gravity effects, response to 'sim wind,' etc. Particles are typically given a lifespan, so survive only a fixed amount of time following emission. In this case, we create a gradual emission of 'puff of steam-sized' particles, white and highly transparent, which rise from the emitting disk and quickly disappear. The code embedded in the coffee disk is set up to execute independently, when triggered by the object's being 'rezzed' (instantiated) in-world.

So now we have a coffee-cup that emits steam. How do we drink from it? That's an animation, triggered by code that runs in the 'cup' object, and imposed on the avatar holding the cup (in fact, wearing the cup as an attachment on its right hand). The animation is retriggered about every 15 seconds, on a timer interrupt, so the avatar appears to hold the cup steady, then periodically tosses back a gulp. We appropriated this animation (from where, I don't recall) -- judging from its title, which is something like 'Hand Rt Handgun,' it was itself developed as an extension of a handgun-pointing pose.

But there's still a rub. In Second Life, when your avatar chats with other avs, it makes a "typing" gesture. And this typing animation runs at a very high priority. Which means that the 'holding the cup steady and level' animation gets overridden -- result: whenever you chat, it looks like you're pouring coffee in your own lap.

The fix is to make the cup vanish while you're typing, then reappear when you finish. This is sponsored by additional code in the 'cup' that polls the holding avatar's state, figures out when it's typing, and issues an llSetAlpha command to turn all prims in the set invisible.

This works for all the prims -- but not the particles, which keep emitting from the (now invisible) black disk. So an extra step in the cup code sends a message to the disk, which hears it on an inter-prim messaging interrupt and turns the particle-emitter off. The process is reversed when the cup senses that typing is no longer occurring.

Typical Second Life: Where a simple cup of coffee becomes an exercise in building, animation, client-side particle emission and inter-object messaging. Is it any wonder I love this place?

I think to myself: Oh, neat! Somebody used sine and cosine functions and conic sections to drive that bird-object-set through the air in linked expanding and contracting spirals. But when I flew in to take a closer look, I realized this wasn't the case at all. In the SL environment, there's a way of setting an object so it rotates on its axis -- sort of a one-shot, set-and-forget throwaway property that makes it easier to fabricate helicopter propellors and rotating waterbeds, right? But in this case, some anonymous genius had used it to create a kind of Calder mobile stack of invisible rotating arms, one atop the other, all with different lengths and rates, and mounted the seagull at the end of the topmost arm. The result was a beautiful, counterintuitively complex effect obtained, as it were, by analog means -- computationally altogether more efficient and sim-friendly than my gut-level, "throw numbers at the problem" approach would have been.

A far more jaw-dropping example of this kind of felicitous improvisation is found in the SL sim "Svarga," (slURL), a huge, functioning ecosystem. Designed over the course of a year by the artist Leukosargas Svarog, and embellished with beautifully-designed skyways, observation platforms, libraries and education centers, the Svarga ecosystem ties together quasi-independent artificial lifeforms in a living mesh: plants of many types and diverse characteristics, bees and birds of several species that pollinate them and spread seeds, and some clever enhancements to the SL weather system that generate a random water-cycle across the terrain.

The result is a lush, fully-functional, organic environment -- because the flora and fauna are reproducing and cycling independent of direct human intervention, they've arrayed themselves in forms of great and mysterious balance and complexity, which change constantly -- spend a few hours in Svarga, and you actually can "watch the plants grow." And the whole hypnotic, gorgeous deal is apparently (i.e., from what we've been able to judge by peering inside a few plants and birds) generated using code little more complex than the four-rule Conway Life simulation, implemented by distributed scripts colluding with one or more cleverly written central controllers. Though one detects that the real "intelligence" of Svarga isn't so much in the code that ostensibly drives it, but in the thousands upon thousands of unvoiced aesthetic/technical decisions made in creating the physical forms of organisms that inhabit it. And this, of course, whether it was created in this place by the artist's instict or meticulous intent (jaw-droppingly impressive in either case) is how nature really works, right?

Anyway, back to Arianna Huffington's 'Girls' Night Out' bash at the iVillage loft on Sheep Island (which is also, incidentally, where SL creators, Linden Labs, also have their main in-world corporate offices). The joint had been beautifully tricked out by virtual-loft-party experts Electric Sheep (one of two companies, the other being MillionsOfUs, who currently do most of the high-end brand/buzz-builders in the SL MetaVerse). They pretty-well maxed the sim (and probably several mirrors) on this one, but the Dobb's crew snuck into the VIP line and managed to shoulder our way to the bar without having to unholster heat or rez a particle-based Roman Candle as a distraction.

Since this was, officially, a 'Girls' Night Out,' (and because I am not officially a girl ... I mean officially not a girl ... You know what I mean -- and stop giggling!) I sent my transcendentally-beautiful companion into the scrum, while I did what I always do at loft-parties in virtual reality filled with transcendentally-beautiful women (most, but not all, with human-looking heads and conventional appendages) -- which is: hide in a corner, listen to the room-chatter, and IM with the guys back at the Top Secret Dr. Dobb's Virtual Lab, who were apparently trying to get a cannon to fire as part of a game-physics test suite.

After a while, I got bumped into by something below waist-height, and looked down to see a beagle sniffing around my ankles. I typed "Hello, puppy (pat head)" -- which seemed appropriately cordial, and the puppy responded "Hey -- you came as a _guy_? And here I am, the only other guy at this party, and I'm dressed as a dog??" To which ... Well, I must admit that no immediate reply came to mind -- at least no reply that would avoid my having to confront the irony that at a party filled with (ostensible) women, I'd managed to pat the head of the only other guy in the room.

Sahra, meanwhile, was having more luck squeezing her way into the dense crowd surrounding the guest of honor. She even managed to snap a photo (see below) -- Arianna is the one in the white sweater, center frame, whose face you can't see because digital cameras in Second Life are just as laggy as real ones. In case you're not familiar with Second Life communication motifs, rest assured that Arianna is not trying to claw the decolletage of her correspondent -- they're just talking. (When you chat, in SL, the default animation portrays your avatar as typing intensely, with appropriate "rustle-rustle/clickety-clack" sound effects. A large, crowded party (without an audio track) thus sounds like a troop of chipmunks dancing a buck-and-wing in a thatched roof).

The conversation, such as I could overhear, was about empowerment and creativity and freedom in virtual reality, and was entirely banal in a capital-markets-friendly, "this might be the next Internet bubble and we all have some skin in the game" sorta way. At one point, someone asked if perhaps, beyond all the empowerment and liberating energy of virtual reality, there might be new forms of fear waiting to be discovered -- which I personally thought was a really interesting question; but it was definitely not the kind of question that was getting answered last night.

Arianna and her handlers swiftly moved on to sample the boites and barrel-houses of the archipelago, and the mass of iVillage party-goers settled in to listen to a live set by Cylindrian Rutabaga, a talented and funny singer-songwriter. Towards the close of her (excellent) set, a giant cockroach walked into the room and sat down on her piano-stool -- but she didn't seem to mind. Neither did I -- I figure, if nothing else, the cockroach made three of us in the room who were definitely guys.

Colin's simulation, meanwhile, is a real high performer. He's set it up to run against a 50-city standard test-case benchmark (EILON50), and his ants apparently converge to within a few percentage points of the best solution known, within 100 passes over the training set. Go ants!