Sparkle is a $4.99 iPhone app that can be used to log into a location in Second Life or OpenSim so you can chat or IM. There are rumors of a graphical version of this kind of thing, but so far, for the iPhone, chat is about as far as you can get. Which, of course, is a nice option if you want to keep in touch when away from your computer, or have a way to explain to your friends that your net connection or computer client just crashed and you can’t get back in-world for a while.

Of course, a lot of people have been hitting my blogs that talk about accessing K-Grid (with the Hippo or the Emerald clients), so I thought I would share how to connect to K-Grid with Sparkle.

First, you will need to purchase and download the app from iTunes (on the iPhone, you can search for the “sparkle im” app).

Then you need to set up info for K-Grid and your account. It is not that hard, just a matter of finding the right setting screens and then knowing a how to put in the info for K-Grid and a Landmark. I am going to show you how to get a landmark for HelpIsland.

HelpIsland in K-Grid

Sparkle Main Screen

The first image is the home screen for Sparkle. As you can see, I have already entered information for my account, so it will look different from what you see on your phone.

For our purposes, there are two menu items to choose from – the light blue “Location:……” and the settings button that below it that looks like a gear.

Start by entering your account and grid information, starting with the gold settings button with a gear icon. That will take you to a screen like the following listing your accounts:

Account Settings Screen

You can add a new account by hitting the plus “+” button in the upper right corner.

The Add Account Screen

Click the “Select Service” button

The Grid Service Selection Screen

You can see I have already created a service for K-Grid in the above screen capture. You can do so by clicking the plus “+” button.  This next part is actually the only part with info that you might not have already had.

The Add Grid Screen

On this screen, you fill in the grid name “K-Grid” and the URL info Sparkle will need to know to find K-Grid, which as you can see from above, is “grid.k-grid.com:8002″. After you have that entered, click “Done.

Next, on the Edit Account screen for the K-Grid setting, add your account and password. Note that for your account you will need to enter both first and last name separated by a space, for example, “Pais Kidd”.

Click “Done” and now on the Grids screen, you can K-Grid listed with your name.  If you need to edit your account info, click the blue arrow on the right side of that Grid’s entry. Otherwise, select it by clicking on it.

Now get back to the Main Screen, and click the big “Location: …… ” button in the middle of the screen.

The Start Location Screen

Above is the Start Locations screen. As you can see, I have already entered a location. The main thing you need to do is to go to the location you want to be, get the sim name and coordinates from the top of the client. Realize that once you log in with Sparkle, you won’t really need to move, so you can either pick a nice spot out of the way so you can IM with friends, or pick a place where your friends hang out so you they can be in chat range.

I will give you the HelpIsland location. This is a location that is also connected with the K-Grid teams IRC chat, so they can answer questions that people chat here.

On the Start Location screen, click the blue arrow on the right side of the line that says “(custom)”.

The Custom Location Screen

Now you need to enter the region name, in this case “K-Grid_HelpIsland”, but you can copy the name of some other sim name that you’d like. On the next lines enter the X, Y, and Z coordinates (129, 181, 21), as shown, or whatever location you want.  Click “Done” and now click your new entry in the Start Location screen.

Now you should be back to the main menu, so click the “Go” button and you should be logged in. Your avatar will appear at that location. You will be able to IM friends, do search, local chat. You can view a bit of a friend or other’s profile to IM, pay, or Teleport them to your location. Not a lot, but if you want to chat with your K-Grid friends and don’t have another method to do so, then Sparkle might be fun to use.

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.

25 October 2009 – update – I got confirmation from Robin that the suggestions for doing this in Windows works. Also, I added a change suggested by Silas that explains what you need to tweak in the command line if you are using Windows 7.

19 October 2009 – update – wouldn’t you know it? One day after I created this, there was a new version of Emerald created with a change in the app’s name, so I updated a few things. Also, BeBoo gave a hint on how to adapt Emerald to K-Grid in Windows, so I added some more info about that too.

K-Grid is an OpenSim -based virtual world. I previously created a blog post on how to create a K-Grid account and use the “Hippo” client. That still should work, but the Hippo client is no longer being supported.

The good news is there is a client available called “Emerald” that you may like even more – it is based on the Second Life client’s code, but they have made a few changes that are cool. I am a noob with it, since I just started using it yesterday.

Note that I have only done this on a Mac – this will work on Windows, too, but of course there will be some differences. If someone wants to tell me  what Windows users need to do differently, I will add it here (email pais.kidd at sbcglobal.net).

1. Get a K-Grid Account: First off, if you don’t have a K-Grid account, you can create one at k-grid.com
2. Download and Install the Emerald Client: Now, download the Emerald viewer (formally known as “Emerald GreenLife”). Their home page is here. The official download page is here. Be sure to get it from their website, since the code is available,  and others could compile versions that steal your passwords or other nasty stuff. If you are paranoid, download the source code, go over it, and compile your own version.
3. Tell Emerald how to connect to K-Grid: At this point, once you do the install, if you run it, it will connect to Second Life, so we need to tell it to connect to K-Grid. This is the part that I can describe for the Mac. Hopefully later I will have more info how to do this in windows.

Mac Method:

• Move the “Emerald Viewer.app” (or whatever the app name is) to your Applications folder (or where ever you want to install it).
• If you want to use Emerald for Second Life as well as K-Grid, make a copy of the Emerald  .app package file, and use one copy for SL and one for K-Grid.
• If you aren’t doing it already, use the Finder to go to the Emerald .app package file. If you didn’t know it already, a .app is really like a folder with various files and folders that the application may use, so now we need to get inside so we can modify one of those files. Control-click on the Emerald .app package file that you want to use for K-Grid, and select “Show Package Contents”

Screen shot opening the Emerald.app package file

• So now you are looking at the files and folders of the app’s package contents… look in the “Contents” folder, then within that, the “Resources” folder to find the “arguments.txt” file. This file contains the command line arguments used when the actual executable file is called to start Emerald. (There are probably more elegant ways to do this, but I am just creating a quick way to get at this).

• Edit that file so it contains the following text. After you copy and paste the following text to replace what is currently in the arguments.txt file, you need to make sure each argument is preceded by a double hyphen (so it looks like the image of this below)

--channel "Emerald Viewer" --settings settings_emeraldviewer.xml --loginuri http://grid.k-grid.com:8002 --loginpage http://K-grid.com/loginscreen.php --helperuri https://secure.k-grid.com

Screen shot of editing the contents of the arguments.txt file

• Now return to the Applications folder, double click the Emerald .app package file you just changed, and you should see the K-Grid login screen, that looks something like this (the background image and other stuff changes a lot, but you get the idea):

Windows Method:

• • I haven’t been able to test this, since I can’t seem to get the client to deal with Vista running under VMware on my Mac – however, BeBob posted a comment today that suggests to do the following
  • Right click on the shortcut (either the icon if you installed one on your desktop, or link in the program menu), and select “Properties”
  • You can then edit the command line arguments that the shortcut uses to start the Emerald program – you will find this text string in the “Target” blank (see the screen shot below).

  • 

    Screen Shot of the Emerald program shortcut properties

  • I suggest playing with this, since I am only guessing how to edit this. Perhaps make a copy of the shortcut and experiment with that, so if it doesn’t work you can start over. I started the text edit program, copied the contents of the Target blank, then pasted it in the editor so I could edit it. Below is my guess of what should be used to replace the contents of the Target property:
  • "C:\Program Files\Emerald Viewer\Emerald.exe" --channel "Emerald Viewer" --settings settings_emerald.xml --loginuri http://grid.k-grid.com:8002 --loginpage http://K-grid.com/loginscreen.php --helperuri https://secure.k-grid.com -set SystemLanguage en-us
    
    
  • For Windows 7, if you are running 64 bit version, there is a slight change in the path to the program executable – the addition of “(x86)” – the rest is the same:
  • 
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Emerald Viewer\Emerald.exe" --channel "Emerald Viewer" --settings settings_emerald.xml --loginuri http://grid.k-grid.com:8002 --loginpage http://K-grid.com/loginscreen.php --helperuri https://secure.k-grid.com -set SystemLanguage en-us
  • One more note: if this string is too long, you can eliminate the “ -set SystemLanguage en-us” part and use the rest.
  • Thanks to BeBoo for the initial windows hint – thanks for Robin for letting me know it works, thanks to Jim Builder for the hint about removing the extra text, and thanks to Silas for the hint about Windows 7.
  
  

I saw this today and thought this was kind of funny, especially since I this morning was reading in-world the message sent to the Milk N Kookies group about one of the topics for their 5 September 2009 show – SL avatar bots that you can rent as your personal friends or pets. I don’t remember all the details, but basically the deal is you can go to a vendor to rent an avatar bot of some sort that can be interacted and conversed with. The bots are probably using some form of artificial intelligence (AI) chat. Do a web search on “AI chat” and you will find any number of them for which you can enter text and engage in a conversation. These have been around for years.

Who knows, perhaps soon we will be resorting to Turing or Captcha tests for avatars we meet in the metaverse.

I am not saying there is something wrong with artificial companions. We all probably got a lot of fun, companionship, and comfort from our stuffed or other toys when we were kids. I am constantly amazed how I feel toward the sculptie bot cat that Pais has at his home. Before I cat-proofed the place by building a fence around the main area, the cat would wander into the sea or under a floor and would get stuck there for days. I would either be gone for busy and forget that he wasn’t trotting up to see me or bumping and annoying my visitors, then I would go looking for him. Normally I would find him caught in the water or something, struggling against the slope, a wall or other prim, or the border of my parcel, and I would feel a pang of sadness for the pour creature, even though I know he’s just a couple prims and a script. Some may argue a real cat is nothing but a biological machine, but thankfully most people treat them with a little kindness, too.

Concept rendering of a contact lens

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.

Watching cartoons at the new clubhouse on Aspen

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.

Cartoon clubhouse

Virtual worlds may provide ways to help veterans transition to civilian life

I heard an interview with Dr. Jacquelyn Morie (avatar name Chingaling Bling) of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) discussing the Transitional Online Post-Deployment Soldier Support in Virtual Worlds.

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.

Part of a poster graphic from the MIT project page

I have been pondering the interaction of technology and our social lives. I saw a project page at MIT called “Social Gardens” that was kind of interesting.

Here’s their description:

“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?

Half-blood Prince mania

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.