Sorta weird, but I suppose some people are thinking of thought and mind transference into virtual avatars in Virtual Words like Second Life.  I didn’t hear anything about that last week, when I was at Virtual Worlds Hollywood, but the subject was brought up today in Social Media Today in a post titled Could we live forever in virtual worlds?

“… a team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York successfully created an avatar called ‘Eddie‘ who had the intelligence (if you want to call it that) of a four year old (or ‘AI boffins create four year old loser‘ as the trade mag the Inquirer memorably put it), pointing to the day when the digital representations of ourselves could indeed have a kind of existence of their own.”

I think there was an TV show from the 80’s or early 90’s about a dying scientist who’s mind was kept alive in a computer - but the model for this kind of continuance of consciousness is more something I saw a while back in Star Trek.

Personally, I’d not want to see myself or anyone else captured that way, but I could see something more in the way of avatars that help us figure out problems, as intelligence, that lives in a virtual world.   In other words, I don’t think we should really ever get to the point where we want to keep someone alive, and we can transfer what they do to some kind of sentient form, in worlds, but we could put useful knowledge in some type of embedded avatar where it’s easier to interact with.

Just a thought on this Sunday.

Read an article that's timely and helpful (too bad the Brand Managers who think up of most of the failed Second Life Islands don't read this stuff).

I won't go into the details - just read the article.  I've found, with my work on the IBM Business Center - providing metrics -that one part of my analysis is providing metrics - who's coming, what they did, why…etc.   Another part, which I've held back really promoting - is accessing if the idea of what's being built is really effective or not.

By in large, the biggest failure of Virtual Worlds so far, is not the platform, it's the people who are thinking 2D when they need to think in 3D; they take a 2D website concept and try to make it work in Virtual Worlds - and most of the time, it doesn't - and the results are dismal.

Don't need to find fault with the platform - even though it has it's limitations.

Ha Ha Ha .. and I thought the Sheep were doing so well ….. not.  In Interview: Electric Sheep Company Lays Off 22, Repositioning for 2008 Virtual World News reports:

The Electric Sheep Company, one of the leading virtual worlds developers, laid off 22 members of its staff today in a rightsizing and repositioning of the company to address the changing virtual worlds market, Valerie Williamson, VP of Marketing and Business Development, for Sheep tells VirtualWorldsNews.com in a telephone interview. "We have seen tremendous growth over the last year and this is a right-sizing of the organization," she says. "The company is very healthy and not in financial trouble." The marketplace is changing and Sheep is changing with it.

If they're doing so well - why did they need to cut so deep?

Just found out that Discovery Channel will have a segment called LEVEL FIVE - Rise of the Video Game, that covers Second Life and it will first air this Wednesday, 12/19/2007:

Here's the information:

 ".. LEVEL FIVE

• Premiere: Wednesday, Dec. 19, at 8 p.m. ET/PT
  The advent of the Internet has changed everything — including videogames. When ARPNET, a military precursor to the Internet, went live in 1969, gamers almost immediately began using this new technology for gaming. But what began as text-based adventure games called MUDs (multi-user dungeons) quickly evolved into graphic-based online adventure games called MMOs (massively multi-player online games). Millions worldwide have battled together and against one another in the latest genre of videogame. From Ultima Online to the most successful MMO of all time, World of Warcraft, gamers now are attracted to virtual second lives as they battle friends and foes across the globe from the safety of their home computers. In the virtual world, gamers have found they can be anyone or anything. The ability to reinvent oneself virtually has become an irresistible experience for many, and has some critics wondering whether the line between the real world and the virtual world has become dangerously blurred. Many gamers spend more time in the virtual world than the real world, but they argue that the virtual experiences of MMOs are still human experiences simply delivered via the latest wave of technology — the videogame. This episode includes interviews with Cory Ondrejka (chief technology officer at Linden Lab) and Richard Bartle (British writer and game researcher best known for being the co-author of MUD)."

Word comes from IBM that a fully functional web browser for Second Life has been betat tested - http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/10/viewing-induali.html:

"..According to Pelican CEO Clive Jackson, inDuality transmits about 95% of the SL experience from the world to the web."

We'll see once I can beta test - There's a form to sign up for the inDuality Beta test at this link.

Missed the CSI-NY Episode last Wednesday CSI:NY Down the Rabbit Hole but I did manage to download the OnRez Browser and try enter the crime scene and orientation - however, as I re-entered with my normal avatar I found I could not transport anywhere else outside of the CSI-NY island.

Also heard that Electric Sheep was bought by CBS, but I don't know if that's true or not, or it's more of a partnership.  

I see the CSI:NY Rabbit Hole Second Life connection as an experiment to see if you can take a crime drama, or any drama, and extend it beyond the boundaries of the show itself.   It seems to me that, in this sense, the CSI Crime Scene is more of an extension of the 2D Web - you could have done most of the things that your doing at  the Official CSI:NY Virtual Experience from CBS from any Flash website.

But the trend to move online to Virtual 3D games is more telling - and illustrative of the kinds of things Brand Managers were talking about doing at the first Virtual Worlds 2007 that I attended in New York earlier this year.

I would think CBS would be finding a way to connect people who say the show (and perhaps saw it on Cable vs. Online vs. those who heard about it but didn't see the show) and entered into the CSI:NY Virtual Experience with web metrics or whatever analytics they could get ahold of. 

Based on what I've heard, The Sheep don't have any real analytics - so I'm wondering what they're using for Analytics?  

You'd think, if someone is going to build a new browser, they'd all put some metrics collection in it - at least, that's my thinking.

As far as the OnRez browser - I don't see it as any major advance or much of an improvement over the standard Second Life Browser - perhaps more useful for the CSI:NY Virtual Experience but not for much else.

Improved Search is coming to Second Life sometime soon according to the Official Linden blog:

"…We have built a system that creates ordinary HTML web pages out of data from the Second Life system. We upload these web pages to an ordinary web server. We have purchased Google Search Appliances to perform the indexing and the new search results. These servers are an off-the-shelf product which Google makes available for purchase by an individual or organization, and the servers and data are hosted at Linden’s co-location facilities. We have not entered into any working partnership with Google."

On the face of it, I was expecting something more exotic than the Google Search Appliance as the solution to search problems in Second Life - though using the Google Search Appliance is a good idea.   I suspected, for several months, that Linden Labs was working on a search project ….. I thought they were actually writing something from scratch.

I wrote about the Brain-computer interface for Second Life in SmartMobs yesterday in a post titled: Using Brain Waves to control Avatars in Second Life which I thought was pretty cool - and reminded me of Wild Divine, which used Biofeedback to do, just about, the same thing (but there were differences in the Wild Divine approach, which looked exciting 5 years ago, but never really took off).

"…A research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a BCI system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. To control the avatar on screen, the user simply thinks about moving various body parts — the avatar walks forward when the user thinks about moving his/her own feet, and it turns right and left when the user imagines moving his/her right and left arms. "

That's truly amazing - that you can think about moving your right arm, or you left foot, and it moves and you can see a movie of all of this at http://bme.bio.keio.ac.jp/01news/images/BCI_secondlife.wmv.

According to The Pink Tentacle: "….a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle."

I take it that each person would probably need to train a program that adapts to their own brainwaves (calibrate the program much as voice recognition software needs to be calibrated to each speaker) and the price of the interface, gadget, whatever it's called, lowered to where someone can buy it (IE: 130 dollars USD) and then, I think, you'd see a large number of people using it.

Wild Divine was able to make a biofeedback device that worked with its own software for about 150 dollars, and for what it did, it was/is very sophisticated - the problem for Wild Divine - they never bought into Second Life or User Generated Content - they kept their "game" so closed in and "occult" that it's appeal  was far too narrow, and too limited to be satisfying in any real way, beyond a couple sessions of playing the game.

But this new Brainwave device, along with Wild Divine, are part of what could, if used with Web Analytics, determine real engagement - because they measure response of a human being where as analytics along, measures just the response of what a person does on page, does on a site - and often, not that well.

Not only do Brainwave analysis and biofeedback devices improve online situations where and interactive response is called for - but they can be decoded and added to web analytics data in an overlay that …measures real visitor engagement - which is the holy grail of most brand marketers …this is the thing they most want to know - and hardly anyone can even figure out how to do it, much less what engagement really is.

In fact, that's part of what my committee at the Web Analytics Association is working on right now …. a set of definations of Social Media and how it would best be measured…and to read more about the Social Media Committee of the Web Analytics Association - here's the link - http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/cmt/?16 .

Briefly tried the new Second Life Web Browser that I heard about from New World Notes in a post titled: Movable Metaverse: Japanese company creates 2nd Web-based Second Life browser. 

While the browser worked and I was able to log in transport around, I found the overall experience unsatisfying at this point, as I could not really do all the same things in Second Life I normally do - and using a Google Maps mash-up seems to be not quite the right way to go.

But that's just me, maybe I'm expecting too much from the first web browser experience of Second Life that actually works - that I can get to.   I was imagining I'd be doing and seeing everything in a browser the same way it's seen when running the Second Life client.  Perhaps, my expectations are unrealistic, at this point.  According to New World Notes:

"…..  The system has professional polish and runs fairly well; also, the company claims not to retain your account password and other data, which is instead transmitted directly to the Linden servers (they say.)  Judging by its Terms of Service, 3Di plans to earn revenue through advertising and sponsored promotions.

So which is the better SL-to-Web solution?

At the moment, I'd say the lovably modest hacker girl maintains the innovation lead, for you can pay L$ through AjaxLife, a potentially revolutionary innovation.  Movable Life has no discernible way of doing that.  What's more, Katharine has open sourced her code, while 3Di has not.  Still, they offer a compelling alternative; Internet Explorer-versus-Mozilla, let's say."

Merging the real world, our world, with Virtual Worlds is a dream for some, a reality for others.  The Gate (or Hole in Space, Reloaded) is a project that will happen in Brussels next week.

"…The Gate is an installation connecting real life and Second Life, a junction point, a door between two worlds and two representation spaces. Basically, it is a simple window between both worlds where real users and SL users see each other and can meet. A view of the SL Gate is permanently projected in the real life venue; when an avatar comes in front of The Gate, it is visible in the public space; when one arrives physically in front of the door in the public space, he/she can interact with the SL user currently in front.

The result will be a kind of happening where the virtuality of SL is transferred in the physicality of our public space and vice-versa; a stage for performance and interaction, something between a breakdance platform, an inter-dimensional portal and a peep show through parallel universes."

There's certainly "interest" in creating a merging of both "worlds":

"…The Gate is installed on Odyssey, an island in Second Life dedicated to art and performance. In the opening hours of iMAL (October 5 - 6, 11 AM - 7PM [2AM - 10AM SLT]; October 7, 10AM - 8PM [1AM - 11 PM SLT]), people, avatars and performance artists are kindly invited to come, perform and interact at The Gate, both in real life and in Second Life. During the vernissage on October 4 (8:30 - 12 PM [11:30AM - 3PM SLT]) Second Front, the first performance art group in Second Life, will use The Gate as a in-between stage in front of iMAL visitors and SL passer-by."

I'll try to attend the performance in Second Life but I'd like to be part of something similar to this.