I continue to be amazed at the irrational assumptions made about kid avatars in SL. I have already written numerous blogs on various aspects of this issue. Some people seem to make an automatic assumption that if one has a kid avatar they must automatically be some kind of pervert. I have met a lot of people that have kid avatars, and know that assumption is not true. I have also had to study my share of statistics, and realize that given a large enough population, we can also expect that some of the people with kid avs are going to fall into a category that can or will carry out behavior in real life that are actual crimes.
One of the questions that have come up in various conversations as we try to understand this new frontier of the metaverse is about people that have such impulses: if someone is using a virtual world to act out the impulses and fantasies that, if they were done in real life, would be crimes, does this increase or decrease the likelihood that they will be more or less likely to do those bad things in real life?
I happened upon this article that recaps some studies that are finding that access to violent movies and internet porn is correlated with decreases in occurrences of violence and rape. It could very well be that the current reaction – to try to punish and prevent people for using pixels to act out fantasies of which we don’t approve – may actually increase the likelihood that instead of a consenting avatar being the victim, a real life person is victimized.
Maybe we should be more tolerant of people exploring their imagination in the metaverse.
From the Pais Kidd science desk… What if we could have a computer display in a contact lens? Talk about augmented reality possibilities. One of the cool thinks I like to demonstrate with my new iPhone is an astronomy program called Pocket Universe that uses the compass, GPS, and tilt/motion sensors of the phone, so I can hold it up at night and it shows me the names of starts and constellations. It does more. It is cooler than a MystiTool. It is a nice example of augmented reality (AR) with the iPhone.
If you haven’t seen this TED.com demo of the “sixth sense” invention, check it out:
Think how much better this could be if instead of projecting images on stuff, we just see it in our eye.
I get a little queasy thinking about putting a bionic contact lens in my eye, but I have to admit, this would be way cool if and when they get something like this to work. Read more about the research here.
My buddy Shakespeare came up with a great idea – Saturday morning cartoons! Caleb provided a place to do it, a neat clubhouse that has a big screen TV. If you want group membership for getting reminders, IM Danny Regenbogen, otherwise show up at the Clubhouse at 10:00 SLT on Saturdays.
There were a number of things that I got out of this. First off all, anyone who has been a soldier or knows soldiers returning from a deployment in a war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan knows that there can be lasting effects, like disabilities or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, that are not easy to overcome while at the same time trying to get back into a civilian life. The military is struggling to provide help. In a couple weeks, Dr. Morie will begin launching an island in Second Life called “Coming Home” that will be a place for soldiers to congregate online, as sort of a “VFW Hall of the 21st century”. The veteran’s healing center will focus on both social activities and intervention therapies. The therapies will be complimentary and alternative medical intervention – not mainstream, but proven effective for post-traumatic stress and other disorders. One of the aspects of using Second Life is that many veterans returning home are separated from others, and thus an online world is a good way for them to have a chance to congregate with others that are going through similar experiences. It may be possible that those that shun therapy otherwise may take advantage of it in Second Life because they can do so anonymously, and thus avoid the real or imagined social stigma that comes with it. ICT is a research group, and thus will be measuring the effectiveness of Second Life to help with post–deployment soldier support. It will be interesting to see what they learn from this.
Speaking of ICT’s research – I took a look around their website and saw they have a lot of cool things they’ve been doing for some time that may be really cool to see in virtual worlds. For instance, they have 10-15 years of research on virtual humans. “Imagine a simulated training where the characters you interact with are almost human — they converse, they understand, can reason and exhibit emotions. Such a simulation will open up whole new horizons for teaching and learning.”
Another interesting avenue is the Virtual Reality Cognitive Performance Assessment Test: “The VRCPAT makes use of virtual environments to create a battery of neuropsychological measures to assess the ways in which the structure and function of the brain relate to specific psychological processes and overt behaviors: attention-vigilance, effort, abstraction-flexibility, executive functioning, spatial organization, visual-motor processing, processing speed, visual memory, verbal abilities, and verbal memory and learning.”
This kind of research will help us understand more of the mechanics of how our brain, emotions, and senses interplay with virtual realities. This type of work will can help us make better use of virtual worlds for not only fun and creativity, but also as a tool for important things like learning and healing.
The in-world meeting of the psychology of immersive environments group
Last week Dusan posted in his blog about the Psychology of Immersive Environments Technology Working Group (or PIE.TWG for short) and I decided to attend their meeting. The group is still in the formative stages, but so far its responsibilities are:
1) Advancing basic and applied research on the psychology of immersive environments, 2) promoting immersive experiences and programs that are psychologically beneficial, 3) defining best practices for the early identification and assistance of at-risk users of immersive environments and the treatment of individuals currently manifesting symptoms of immersive disorder, and 4) collecting and disseminating scientific and professional information on the psychology of immersive environments.
This made a lot of sense to me. I was a little tweaked by the comments made on Dusan’s post. I know most comment sections on any given web page seem like looking into the asylum for antisocial hating misfits who monkey-smear feces on the walls of the blogosphere, but that is not usually the case with Dusan’s blog. Yet people were scoffing at the prospect of people exploring psychology of virtual worlds, so perhaps the smartass comments made me more determined to see what they were up to. So I attended the in-world meeting they called to talk about their working group.
You can look through my other posts and see that many of them are based on my trying to understand the nature of our interactions within virtual reality, how we express our selves, and how it affects us. Why not properly study it? Why not look for ways to use it as a tool? Why not try to enable collaboration with those who are also engaged in these interests and research?
Then there is also the term that they mention “Immersive Addiction or Disorder” – and I guess it was one of the first type of place where people might need the help in a therapy aspect of psychology. First off, from my interpretation, we can assume the “immersive” is analogous with “virtual worlds” or “second life” for that matter. Second, I can think of at least one stark example in my experience of a friend that had to leave second life for this very reason. So the types of reactions I was seeing in people that seem to think there is no place for psychology is simply insensitive, ignorant, or both. When my friend (and most likely, if you know Pais you also knew and loved this guy) left SL, I could not fathom what may have happened. He had lots of friends, he had an avatar through which he created an ultra cool persona, he was an awesome and original DJ, he had developed cool, clever, and successful business lines. Then he was gone. I couldn’t imagine why, and I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I was worried that maybe he had an accident, gotten ill, or maybe arrested, abducted, or any number of things. Finally I found a way to get my email through to him and I was able to find out that he just had to leave. The best that I can understand it, his RL and SL got out of balance, and after he tried different ways to regain a balance, he eventually had to walk away from SL.
We need to understand the forces at work in such a situation, what are ways to identify when we are out of balance, and how to get ourselves back in balance.
I don’t need to steal working group’s thunder… they have a website and a well-written charter. The charter reads like a white paper. They talk about psychological implications of immersive environments, approaches from which to understand immersive words, and an interesting list of scenarios that provide examples. For the academics in the crowd, they have the beginnings of a bibliography that collects scholarly papers in this domain.
Maybe you don’t want to get in the weeds of psychological research. I don’t either really, but I have been interested in the kinds of things we can learn from them and how we can apply it to improve our SL experiences and in turn, our RL. I am also encouraged to think that those of us that could use a little more help and understanding to help us make sense of the world might be better informed and enabled thanks to this kind of work.
“Technology has allowed people to develop larger social networks than previously done. But as a result, we have more relationships than we can manage. Social Gardening explores using plants as metaphor for relationships, hoping to encourage us to tend our social connections like we do our garden. By tracking and analyzing communications through email, instant messaging, social websites, SMS, and phone, Social Gardening proposes to give feedback on how our relationships are flourishing or wilting. It may also provide a practical interface to browse and manage conversations and contacts.”
Another portion of the MIT project poster
I was looking at the poster they had created, and you can see in a portion I excerpted above, that some people are shown as potted flowers and Natasha is an unpotted cactus.
This got me wondering – in this metaphorical garden, who was Natasha? Was she represented by a prickly plant because she had ready defenses in her personality? Are the other people in pots because they are somehow insulated from their true natures?
And then I was thinking that if this social garden tool was able to monitor communications to see how much we were tending to others, why not go further and look at the kinds of interactions we are having – are our messages exchanged positive or negative? Are they nurturing us? Are our moods improved after our interactions? Who is initiating contact? There are so many kinds of things we may be able to understand if the transactional data can be extracted, analyzed and then represented in a way that we can see more about their nature than we do now.
And what if we might be able to aggregate our metrics of social interaction so that we have a kind of karmic scorecard? How and when would we want to show others how nice we are to our friends, family, co-workers, and strangers?
Dig around that MIT site and there is another project where cars learn our driving behaviors. They were thinking that this information could be used so that people that practice safe driving could use data collected by their car to lower their insurance rate. But what if this information, which is easily observable externally, could then be displayed for other drivers to see, so that rude drivers may be recognized and conditioned by other drivers, for instance. (So perhaps if your driving quotient being displayed tells people you have been a jerk at every opportunity, then perhaps you’ll never given those little courtesies that are normally given, and until you learn to be nice you’ll never get let into a busy lane again)
If we kept better track of our behavior and our communication, would that help us to be better people, or just give us reason to hide our true natures better?
Sometimes it is fun to let the kid part of ourselves get excited when a new episode of a serial is set to open. I found this little gimmick while checking out previews on the film’s website.
Update, 22 July 2009: I saw the movie a couple nights ago and enjoyed it. I am not sure what it would be like for those who hadn’t seen the previous movies or read the “Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince” book. In the weeks prior to this movie’s release, I watched the five previous movies in sequence, then re-read the sixth book to become as fully immersed in the story as possible. It seemed like the movie, which had a lot of material to cover from the thick book, had to move pretty quickly through the story, so little time was spend establishing scenes or re-iterating previous story lines.
I thought the cinematography and acting was excellent. The story was amended from the book more than had been done previously, but I think it improved the logic and flow without changing the overall story. I was happily surprised that Harry’s character was better played by Daniel – or perhaps it was the directing as well as the acting – giving much more depth.
The Pais in me had a lot of fun exercising our imagination with this movie.
You need to be at a meeting you can't physically attend. The guy on the right is your surrogate/avatar. You interact with through the helmet he is wearing.
This idea comes from James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau and I guess it is the combination of the serious and austere way they present combined with the wackiness of what they are presenting that make this so intriguing to me. OK, add in a couple ideas like machines that feed off pests – something that I have fantasized about for ages – and I get a real kick.
One of their scenarios for social telepresence is described this way:
“Through the rent-a-body service the customer can rent the physical body of another person. The rented body effectively has his senses removed, he can see nothing and hear only the voice instructions of his user. His body becomes literally a host. This enables the customer to either visit ‘socially’ inhospitable, unethical places or to attent meetings or events without physically being there.”
The user of the telepresence can use immersive sensory input to experience the remote location.
One reason to use telepresence is because one is physically unable to be at the remote location.
Don't want to be seen going to a particular entertainment venue? Rent a host for your telepresence, while you take in the sights and sounds remotely.
Think of this way, we are used to experiencing virtual worlds through the perspective our our avatars, what if the information we are being sent is simply on another person, or for that matter, for a furrier perspective, something actually furry…
I like the quirkiness of this notional set up. What we also need is remote-control of the dog's movements.
Computer-generated "Milo" interacting with a human using Project Natal's sensors
Last night Flo gave me a link to the video, below, from a trailer that was shown at “E3″ (Electronic Entertainment Expo) this week that has gamers asking if they are seeing the next big thing. I don’t have a Wii or Xbox or any other game controller hanging off my entertainment center, so I will leave the hyperbolic questions of how this will affect the gaming world to gamers.
However, if what we are being told in this demo is true – if the Project Natal sensor and its software are able to pick up our motion and emotion, as well as understand what we are saying, then games are only the entry point for this technology.
So Milo appears to be an interactive personality – what it will be able to do beyond that demo or how it will be marketed is still a mystery to me, yet it makes a pretty impressive demo so far.
A more generic video shows a number of other game-context uses for the Project Natal sensor
I could really care less about whether this works in games driving cars or blowing up stuff. I think that may all be cool and fun, and I appreciate that gaming is basically funding these innovations, but my interest is elsewhere. I also realize that this isn’t really directly connected to Pais and how I interact in vitural worlds. However, it was through Pais that I got interested into related aspects of using the computer as a way to interact with other people. This is is now a way to interact with the computer is only partly related to SL, along with irony indicated in my title for this blog, seemed to make this somewhat relevant to this blog.
Remember the book “Snow Crash” that Philip Linden/Rosedale said influenced part of his vision for Second Life? When characters in Snow Crash jacked into the metaverse, it was not only to interact with other humans-as-avatars like we do in Second Life, but also with the computer – it was also was able to see and hear the 3D world of the humans as they interacted with the metaverse. One of the things from the book I have wanted to see in my reality is the vitual research assistant/librarian that Hiro Protagonist (the aptly named character in the book) interacted with to do his research on things like ancient Sumaria to figure out what was causing the snow crashes that were blanking the minds of programmers.
With the Snow Crash Librarian, we were able to imagine a computer with which we can interact without a keyboard or mouse – by having a conversation, moving, and gesturing – and it is also able to process between what we are talking about and the available libraries of human knowledge and data. So now, dear readers, justapose what we see in Milo with the another new thing in our world, Wolfram Alpha, and you start to see where I think this can be taking us. Add in what we should be seeing soon from the commercialization of DARPA’s PAL work that started around 2003, that we discussed in this video. Giving the computer 3D interactivity with us will likely make all these technologies change the way we interact with not only games, but our collective knowledge and information.
When Hiro interacted with the Librarian, it was in a virtual space, so as he did his research, he saved parts of that work (photos, objects, text, data, video) arranged in his library room… kind of like having an infinite desk/notebook that you can walk around in, so that as you are talking to the computer that geography of information and discovery can remain a tangible context.
I have been thinking a lot about using virtual worlds to communicate and collaborate with other people – a way to avoid the cost and time of travel to work with people in other places. I think we still need to be using avatars in one form or the other, since I don’t think the holograms we have seen are quite ready. One of the questions is how well we can communicate as an avatar when so much of our face-to-face communication is non verbal. If Project Natal is really able to pick up emotions and gestures, then it could better animate our avatars, and vastly improve our human-communication bandwidth.
There are so many things I have been hoping and waiting for that seem more possible now than a week ago…
One more thing I will mention before I close this… I remember another Microsoft project from years ago, even before their attempt at an assistant called “Clippy”…. it was supposed to be a way that Windows could listen/see the user and use that information, combined with what we were doing with keyboard and mouse, to help it understand our situation. I have yet to see any of this, until now, perhaps. I do remember one of the things they said it might be able to do at the time… imagine we are using Word and it does one of those autoformats when we don’t want it to, so we curse at the screen – this assistant would sense our anger and realize it needed to do an “undo” – or better yet, apologize.
4 June 2009 Update: Someone made a Wikipedia page for this. More info and links there.
Get ready to work your camera angles and the snapshot button at Art Box
I was looking around for a fun place for the Kulture Kids group to visit, and Art Box is certainly fun, but probably not for a large group.
The top part of Art Box is a bunch of easels with paintings, when you click one it changes the bottom part of Art Box (the studio, if you will) into the set of the painting with pose balls and props, if needed.
If someone else is in the studio trying to take snapshots, and someone upstairs is selecting another painting, it changes the set. Thus, this place is no fun if a lot of different people are trying to use it.
This mock-up of the Maxell ad was just a wee bit too big for a kid-sized avatar.
Some of the shots have places for more than one... I had to TP Sacha away from his K-Grid work to pose for a couple
I was glad I saved these to my hard drive versus uploading to SL so I could easily edit - mostly cropping, but here I removed color.
Sacha is actually doing dishes behind the counter.
