/blog/aiblog/ 2008-03-07T12:48:27-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2008/03/identity_migrat.html I love the last ten days before a big show, when final pieces of the program start falling into place. Sun's Nicole Yankelovich will be keynoting on Tuesday the 18th, discussing Wonderland: Sun's powerful 3D collaboration world for knowledge-workers. Yankelovich is Principal Investigator in Collaboration Environments for Sun Labs, and is a bonafide pioneer in user experience design -- an early innovator in IP telephony, speech UI, shared shells and similar technology. Following up at 2 PM PST/5 PM ET will be Sun's Chief Gaming Officer, Chris Melissinos, who'll give us Java-heads the latest and straightest on Darkstar, Sun's massively-scaleable "redshift" platform for multi-user game and virtual world building. Meanwhile, I've been on the email since the wee hours with Cisco's Christian Renaud, Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments, who's been (as usual) waxing insightful about how virtual worlds re-intermediate between people and economic actors who might otherwise be disenfranchised and driven apart by hyperconnectivity. We're looking forward to his keynote on Friday, March 21 at 9 AM PST/Noon ET.

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2008-03-07T12:48:27-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2008/02/life_20_as_gree.html A little more than a year ago, Nicholas Carr, author of "Does IT Matter?" and other influential books produced a back-of-the-envelope analysis of the environmental impact of Second Life. The relevant blog entry can be found here. His math shows that the average resident of Second Life consumes about as much energy, annually as the average citizen of Brazil. Subsequent math, by Sun's Dave Douglas, quoted on Carr's blog, converts this to the equivalent of about 1.17 tons of carbon, per avatar, per year.

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2008-02-27T17:47:42-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2008/02/directors_cut.html As soon as an event stabilizes, it reduces to formula – driven by the pressure to differentiate, by marketing's desire to drum out one simple message, and by the human herd instinct. But a fast-growing show like Life 2.0 can get away with being what I like to call "productively schizoid."

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2008-02-20T11:16:36-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2008/02/registration_op.html Life 2.0 Spring registration officially opened today. Naturally, about 24 hours in advance of my actually being ready to open registration. But ... welcome! We're doubling the size of prior events -- working on four sims plus scale-free realtime video to the web. Over 100 presenters in six tracks — covering technology, tools and best-practice for metaverse application and business development. We'll dive deep to explore opportunities offered by 18 emerging virtual world platforms. So you should register right now and then come back daily for the fast-emerging story. You'll be happy, I promise.

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2008-02-08T13:38:00-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2007/09/sculpty_day_fin.html On Sunday afternoon, September 16, under the auspices of Life 2.0 Summit Fall, we presented Sculpty Day -- a mini-symposium of sculpted-prim toolmakers and artisans. Present were Anjin Meili, who set the tone for the afternoon with a brilliant explanation of SL's sculpted prim technology and its antecedents and parallels elsewhere in computer graphics, and demonstrated some of his amazing tools for dataset-to-sculpty conversion and inworld 3D voxel-hull 'tracing' of linked-prim forms for conversion into one-prim sculpty datasets. A crowd of a little over 100 attended ...

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2007-09-17T08:47:02-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2007/08/job_fairs_in_sl.html I was speaking with a friend of mine the other day -- a very bright, technically-competent corporate attorney. He'd been reading about TMP's upcoming Job Fair (their second), and asked why corporate recruiters are interested in this kind of thing. "I read about people showing up at virtual interviews without their clothes," he laughed. "And it sounds like some of the job-related nightmares I've had. Why would a recruiter want to interview an avatar, anyway? Wouldn't a phone call work just as well and be cheaper?"

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2007-08-24T09:56:48-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2007/05/chat_during_pre.html Most presentations over the past four days of Life 2.0 Summit have been delivered via audio (i.e., teleconference to ShoutCast, hence back to attendees via the theatre parcel's Music URL). This leaves audience members free -- effectively in a separate "channel" from the speaker -- to discuss and feed back via Chat. And a colleague of ours has raised the question whether this should be encouraged.

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2007-05-02T09:07:16-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2007/05/timeless_says_n.html Okay, so it's not collisions. The big problem with collisions (among other ... now hitting own head) is that firing an object down a barrel whose direction constantly changes with gun position is annoying (though in refutation, the LOCAL parameter to llApplyImpulse might be used, here). And conceptually, it's a pretty wack idea to fire a gun via "blowback" -- seems a little counterproductive. But the point is, that's not the secret. Research continues.

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2007-05-02T09:01:58-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2007/04/collisions.html At a special presentation on Saturday, Timeless Prototype, originator of the MultiGadget (whose MG chairs dot the IBM sims and our own) was discussing weapons. Specifically, he was talking about how to use multiple objects/scripts to rez many bullets in succession without running into energy and timing limits.

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2007-04-30T14:26:46-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2007/03/stroker_we_hard.html Stroker Serpentine's world-famous 'Amsterdam' sim has apparently sold for $50,000 on eBay to an unnamed Dutch entrepreneur.

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2007-03-29T13:02:52-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2007/02/how_to_make_cof.html The Dr. Dobb's/InformationWeek coffee hours (Tuesdays at 7 AM SLT, Fridays at 12 PM SLT). have been running for several months now, and are becoming popular get-togethers for some of SL's kickiest devs, builders and entrepreneurs.

]]> Freelancer Blog jjainsch 2007-02-20T17:36:32-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2007/01/svarga_sl_ecolo.html We've been doing a lot of building and coding in Second Life over the past few months. And it's occurred to me more than once (read: "hourly") that one of the great things about the SL environment is the range of opportunities it creates for fertile improvisation. The LSL script language and building tools are rich and (somewhat) well-structured, and -- like all developer toolkits -- clearly intended to promote and facilitate certain kinds of approaches to problem-solving. But they haven't yet been surrounded by an institutional envelope that dictates thinking about best practice. Too many diverse minds are working simultaneously on too broad a set of problems.

]]> Editors Blog jjainsch 2007-01-23T12:49:26-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2006/12/test.html Last night, my virtual social secretary and I dropped in an iVillage party for Arianna Huffington, and exchanged some dactylographic bons mots with the political opinioneer herself.

]]> Freelancer Blog jzhaoying 2006-12-15T12:21:45-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2006/12/minskys_emotion.html Marvin Minsky has just released his first book in 20 years. Titled "The Emotion Machine," its thesis appears to extend and nuance the vision Minsky popularized in The Society of Mind -- the idea that mind is the net result of dynamic interactions within a messily-hierarchical population of more or less-specialized agents, which jockey for position and evolve as a result of their commerce. In the new book, or so the reports of early readers suggest, Minsky shows how emotions work in this context, how they compute and can be computed, and are, at base, just "another tool for thinking with."

]]> Editors Blog jjainsch 2006-12-05T13:00:24-05:00 /blog/aiblog/archives/2006/08/antcolony_algor.html Andrew Colin's article, Ant-Colony Algorithms is a great introduction to swarm-based autonomous computing. Andrew presents the basics, constraints, rules and working code for using (in this case, simulated) swarms of simple autonomous 'ants' to find good solutions to historically-intractible AI problems (e.g., Traveling Salesman).

]]> Editors Blog jjainsch 2006-08-28T11:12:57-05:00