Disclaimer: I have made a number of posts here over the course of Meta7′s history, but I am not a member of the team or the LLC. I am a friend and enthusiast.

The official announcement and FAQ will have to speak for itself for the time being. I had been outlining an entirely different blog about Meta7 this week when this announcement was made. I know this is a devastating situation for the Meta7 team and their loyal supporters. There has been a lot of work, money, creativity, hope, and dreams put into Meta7. This is a sad day.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo are experimenting with augmented reality by superimposing false images and scents over a plain cookie. The “meta-cookie” (I hope they checked the trademarks on that term first) is then tasted by the subject. So far the, over 70% of the test subjects thought they were tasting the virtual flavor of cookie they chose.

What is this good for? The article suggests it may be a way to enhance food that is typically less than tasty, such as hospital food. In my humble opinion, it adds to the types of information that helps us to understand how we can use virtual or augmented sensory information to incorporate into our larger reality.

See the source article for more information in how they made this work, and a video demonstration.

I lifted this directly from PonderAbout.com. I wanted a separate copy because there never seems to be an end to the dubious assumptions people choose to make about having a kid avatar.

The quote is attributed to Madeleine L’Engle

“Mashed” graphics from Frank King’s Gasoline Alley

If I were more original or engaged, I might not have used Gasoline Alley, but maybe Calvin and Hobbes or Toy Story characters, who are more familiar to me. Perhaps now that this is in the back of my mind, I will redo this once I find the right C&H panels or TS stills…

Federal Virtual World Challenge 2011 logo

We’re seeing interest from the US government in virtual worlds. You can take a look at a recent Metanomics interview with Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds conference leader Dr. Paulette Robinson.

If you like to tinker and program in virtual worlds, perhaps you might like trying for the $25,000 (or other) prizes. The US Army Research Laboratory Simulation and Training Center would logically have an interest in virtual worlds. This year, their challenge is theme is Artificial Intelligence (AI). At their challenge website, They say “examples may include adaptive learning system, intelligent conversational bots, adaptive behavior (objects or processes)..” They also provide more “hints” that they are looking for applications that demonstrate transparency, ease of use, depth and breadth, implementation complexity, and creativity.

Screen shot of the virtual choir video

If you haven’t seen this virtual choir, you may enjoy this video.

It is not exactly a virtual world like Second Life, but it has some of the same kinds of characteristics. Of course, when I heard the sound of the choir together, I thought about any other use of home computer microphones where there is such bad acoustics and interference, and was in disbelief that it could really work. I suppose the real trick was it wasn’t in real-time, but that “untold hours” were spent editing and mixing.

Here’s one of the individual choir member’s contributions:

There’s more at the Eric Whitacre’s “how we did it” blog.

I know a choir composed of individuals on their computers in separate times and locations may seem antithetical to the nature of choral music, since I have thought that a component of choirs is joining our voices, breathing, and perhaps minds together into a resonant union of oneness. However, there is the quote from the above blog: “When I saw the finished video for the first time I actually teared up. The intimacy of all the faces, the sound of the singing, the obvious poetic symbolism about our shared humanity and our need to connect; all of it completely overwhelmed me. “

I entered virtual worlds several years ago with a not knowing what was on the other side. I had no expectations that compare to the impact that have come through that portal. This “need to connect” and the potential to do that in virtual worlds are what make them most interesting.

Sometimes we're the ones under the microscope

Second Life can provide a rich resource for study. Since it is a ‘second’ life, it can provide a laboratory for developing or testing theories about ‘first life’. Since it also is a one of the new ways technology is changing our sociocultural landscape, we can also study that.

I came across the proceedings for a conference on weblogs and social media sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. While this kind of reading may be a bit wonky if you are not a researcher, it can still be interesting to see what kinds of things are being studied, the methods they use, and what kinds of conclusions they draw.

For instance, if we want to study the role of social structure in economic activity, it is difficult in the real world since most of the structures are hidden from the economists and the sellers. The authors of this paper were able to use anonymized data provided by Linden Lab with snapshots of social and group affiliations, chat patterns of users, and free and paid transactions. From this they can analyze the patterns of transaction activities and the relationship to social indicators of the buyers and sellers.

There is poster paper presented by Chen-Yuen Teng and Lada Adamic of the University of Michigan, who studied user retention in Second Life. We watch Linden Lab going through a number of changes and try to decipher their motivations and vision. A study like this that looks at what keeps users active would be of interest to anyone in the business of virtual worlds – what are the most important predictors of whether users stay or leave?

There are also the many businesses and other groups that have come to set up shop in SL. Remember some of the large companies that jumped on the virtual world bandwagon, bought sims, paid for someone to build there, only to get basically no traffic? My guess was that they got excited to see hundreds of thousands of active logins and all the other indicators that SL was an exciting place, but yet they had no idea what the actual juice of that excitement was. Maybe studies like this will help give people a clue.

Of course, if you’ve been a resident of Second Life for a relatively long time, you don’t really need this study to tell you why you have stayed, or how much SL has become more or less interesting to you – you’re living it. What you might interest you in the paper is how researchers get the data to crunch to do their analysis. For instance, one of their measures of social network is to look at how often users chat with others, as well as transactions (buying/selling or giving/getting items).

Another poster presented at the conference used chatbots to record public conversations in several sims to identify social network structures and then compare the difference in those structures between the different sims.  I won’t try to comment on their conclusions because I think that the usefulness of their work may not be what they think they found, but in their learning how to set up ways to measure and analyze social interaction.

Below is a TED presentation by neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran. He describes a function of the brain using “mirror neurons”, that are a subset of the neurons that let us sense and control our body. While other neurons are doing the sensing or controling – like picking up an apple – the mirror neurons are also firing.

I bet you are wondering how this ties with Virtual Worlds. I think it does, and in a big way.  Note that I used my category tag “Identity and perception of self”. This is because I am fascinated not only with virtual worlds, but how and why the VW seem to be enabled by weaving with how our minds create identity and work with how we perceive ourselves.

So back to our brains: When our motor command neurons fire so we can control our body, the doctor says our mirror neurons are also firing. This next thing is the discovery he’s made: when we see someone else doing something, like picking up an apple, the same mirror neurons are firing in our brain as if we were picking up the apple. His theory is this is a characteristic of our brain allowed man to learn from others so well.

I think this is also why we can have so much meaning connecting through an avatar into a 3D virtual world. This brain wiring of mirror neurons can be co-opted so we can use them to better connect with another body that we can mirror in our mind.

Think how we function in VW when you watch the video.

And don’t just think of how we create and reinforce a projection of our bodies in 3D space, think about how some users go a bit further… Have you ever been talking to someone unfamiliar with Second Life, and they ask, “I have heard people have some sort of cyber sex there… how could that possibly work?”?

I have wondered about that as well. I think if there is a way understand this, we can look to mirror neurons. Perhaps you will agree when you watch the video.

Here’s the link.

They talk about a number of things, some of the history of starting with OpenSim, then K-Grid, then Meta7; their vision for how they want to focus their efforts; the fact that their official opening is coming up in a few days with a big party – that’s right – lot’s of live music and other fun in Meta7 on 30 January 2010 starting at 8pm UTC and continuing until 1am UTC.

Recently the programmers working at Magne Metaverse Research rolled out a new capability called LightShare Technology. You may remember WindLight capabilities that was added to Second Life some time back. I remember seeing screen shots back then that gave me more reason to want a new computer, so I had a video card that could deliver such beautiful views from the virtual worlds.

LightShare takes this control over a region’s atmospheric parameters to a new level, since it allows the region owner to use scripts to make changes. This may not be a big deal if you don’t build or do any scripting. If you do, LightShare will give you more capability to control the environmental appearance in the virtual world spaces you create. By using scripts, your worlds can be even more dynamic than before. To find out more, go to their LightShare web page.

I had a lot of fun playing with this. I didn’t really do any permanent building or scripting, but I did make a couple videos. In the first, I stayed in one location, but captured views using different atmospheric settings, to demonstrate how dramatic they can be. The second video talks about how to do this yourself.  Don’t watch these on this page, pop out to see them on their youtube pages – be sure to use the “HD” option, especially in the first one.

LightShare in itself is relatively minor, but it does give us a taste of things to come from Magne Metaverse Research for Meta7 – fun innovations for their virtual world users.