AI / Robotics Blog

Identity, Migration and Critical Density

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:48:27 -0500

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.

Life 2.0 - As Green as Five Brazilian Households

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:47:42 -0500

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.

Director's Cut: Schizoid is A-OK

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:16:36 -0500

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."

Registration Open for Life 2.0 Spring

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:38:00 -0500

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.

Sculpty Day - Finally!

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 08:47:02 -0500

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 ...

JOB FAIRS IN SL - PERSPECTIVE SHIFT REQUIRED

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 09:56:48 -0500

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?"

Chat During Presentations - Question for Audience and Presenters

Wed, 02 May 2007 09:07:16 -0500

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.

Timeless says "Nuh-UH!"

Wed, 02 May 2007 09:01:58 -0500

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.

Collisions!

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:26:46 -0500

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.

Stroker! We Hardly Knew Ye!

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:02:52 -0500

Stroker Serpentine's world-famous 'Amsterdam' sim has apparently sold for $50,000 on eBay to an unnamed Dutch entrepreneur.

How to make Coffee in SL

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 17:36:32 -0500

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.

Svarga SL Ecology Simulation

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 12:49:26 -0500

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.

Second Life ... Third Shift

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:21:45 -0500

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.

Minsky's Emotion Machine

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:00:24 -0500

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."

Ant-Colony Algorithms

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:12:57 -0500

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).