Cranial Tap opens virtual business showcase

I'm not sure if I or Aleister Kronos noticed the presence of Cranial Tap last year, but they've been around a while. The first time I ran into them was with the Things To Do group (Good old days) when we visited the Cyberextruder in June 2007. Another one of their projects has been 1-800 Flowers, blogged at KZero. These were pretty cool projects and when I received a press statement today, I didn't have to take long before putting it up. Here's the introduction.

Cranial Tap, Inc. today launched a business solutions showcase geared specifically towards 3D online virtual worlds. Located on Cortex Island in Second Life®, businesses and organizations can now connect remote teams, conduct
research, offer training, recruit candidates and conduct meetings. These solutions are aimed at increasing productivity while reducing operating expenses.

The four showcase areas provide working technologies that demonstrate the benefits of Teleworking, Virtual Meetings, Training and Presentations. Visitors are encouraged to participate in the featured solutions. Upon arrival, visitors are greeted by Tia, a computer driven character (bot) that provides information related to Cranial Tap and their services. She serves as an example of an automated character that can be used in place of human hosts.

Read the full press release here.

Folks over at Cranial Tap are doing pretty slick things at the moment. Go check out their website and visit their showcase in Second Life:

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cortex/27/231/5

First peek at Hangout

Last week I wrote a first piece about the new 3D environment called Hangout, on hangout.net which currently is in Private Beta. Fortunately I have received an invite for private Beta testing.

Step 1 is registering and creating your avatar. It's pretty sleek, flash based and has a limited set of options right now, so could not make an exact replica of the mighty handsome VeeJay Burns that walks Second Life, but this'll do for the time being.

Step 2 is to download a 400Kb app installer to render your room. This is the amazing Unity webplayer, amazingly small, yet powerfull and full of potential.

Step 3 is to log in and get going. However, something went wrong and I crashed about six times

My Hangout

What I intended to show you was a 3D embedded version of my hangout. Something went wrong there. I'll keep you posted

What you see now is a snapshot of my Hangout... Well, I still have a lot of decorating to do. If you want to see the real thing, you'll have to add 3D to your browser.

When virtual money becomes a horrid reality

There's no denying trouble at the Dow, or any other Stock Exchange. Some even say the storm of the century is blazing across Wall Street. There's so much going on that even I felt the need to comment on it, even while I focus on Virtual Worlds.

Come to think of it, it isn't that farfetched as the NYSE guys and shortshellers didn't speculate with real money either. They've thought up a virtual capital, a virtual economy, uncovered wealth to push the market in the direction of real profit. Now speculating with this virtual wealth falls through and to many people it becomes a horrid reality as they run into credit or mortgage trouble, or might be fired in the coming months.

Techblogger Robert Scoble wrote an article called Economic Idiocy and at this point in time we may face Idiocy, maybe even frenzy, but at its core is something much darker: It is greed. A ‘little while ago” Descarte wrote: “Cogito Ergo Sum”, I think therefor I exist. In the past century -and especially in the USA -it has grown to I shop, therefor I am.

Marketing guru’s like Edward Bernays have found the triggers that make us buy things we don’t need, all to keep the economy running. Now throw in a bunch of greedy stockowners and shortsellers and you’ve got a volatile mix, focussed on short term profits. Profit is the main driver in our present economy. We lack long term vision and that’s what’s killing us now.

In our drive for profits and growth we have overextended ourselves. Where did sound economics go that said “Don’t buy if you can’t afford”? Instead we’ve invented credit card debt. We let go of the gold standard an have invented trillions of dollars of State Debt. We started speculating with money we don’t have.

Well, now we drop dead shopping. Back to thinking, looking at what we’re doing out there. What do we need, and why do we think we need more? Why do we desperately want to have a bigger car than our neighbours, or a bigger house than our colleagues. If you’ve done healthy financial management, didn’t overextend and are debt free, the storm will pass. Maybe we’ve got to accept the fact that in other cases it’s a dreadfull, yet necessary correction to our unbridled greed.

The Revival Of Consumer Virtual Worlds

During the weekend topnotch research agency Forrester released a new paper on Virtual Worlds: "The revival of Consumer Virtual Worlds -- Virtual Worlds Emerge From Their Initial Boom/Bust Cycle". Here's the executive summary from the 6 page paper:

"The two years since virtual worlds went "mainstream" have been a roller-coaster ride for all involved; for every success like World of Warcraft, there have been negative developments such as the media backlash against Second Life. Now, as a number of new worlds are appearing, the technology is improving, and interest levels are growing, virtual worlds are ready to enter their second phase. Forrester recommends that consumer product strategy professionals watch the space carefully — if they are not involved already — as we expect the next 12 months to be momentous for consumer virtual worlds. Much-heralded new worlds will arrive, marketers will return to the medium after initially being burned, and Web3D elements will start to creep into consumers' lives. "

The first sentence makes me extremely sceptical immediately, since Virtual Worlds are far from being "mainstream yet" Especially with the market behaving as it is (The Dow downed severely today after the US Governments bailout failed in congress) I predict there won't be many consumer product strategy professionals out there that will take a shot at immersion.

In short, Im not yet up to paying $ 280,- on this paper yet, will have to wait for it to become available through my office.

Linden Lab appoints Tom Hale as CPO

Early this morning Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, released a press statement in which they announced Tom Hale as Chief Product Officer. To Linden Lab it is the next of many steps they've taken over the past year to move Second Life from a startup to a viable, mature, business.

Linden's CEO Mark Kingdon says:

“Tom brings deep experience at every stage of the product lifecycle – from creating, launching and marketing great products to building large businesses
around them. Second Life is made up of an unusually complex array of products, and few executives have the range required to craft and execute a product strategy for such a rich, vibrant and diverse experience. Tom does. He will play a pivotal role in taking Second Life to the next level and will be a great partner for me.”

Indeed, Second Life is made of remarkable products, but most of these reside with the inworld residents. It will be Tom's job to productize the grid, splitting it up into neat customer and business-ready packages to monetize.

Read the full press release here (along with Tom's CV)

Curious to see where Second Life be going? Then join in for tonight's Metanomics session where Philip Rosedale, former CEO of Linden Lab will be attending a panel discussion on his vision for Second Life.

Virtual Banking (17): Banca MPS

Banca MPS

Amidst all the turmoil on the financial markets I decided to see if there has been any chance in the status of a couple of banks I spotted a while ago in Second Life. The sim is called Banca MPS, which stands for Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SPA

"Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SPA (MPS) is the oldest surviving bank in the world. Founded in 1472 by the Magistrate of the city state of Siena, Italy, it has been operating ever since. Today it consists of approximately 1,800 branches, 28,000 employees and 4.5 million customers in Italy, as well as branches and businesses abroad. A subsidiary, MPS Finance, handles consumer finance.

Its headquarters in the Palazzo Salimbeni in Siena are host to a magnificent art collection and a large number of priceless historical documents spanning the centuries of its existence. However, this collection is not usually open to the public" [wikipedia]

On the sim you see a complex of buildings, in which nothing much happens. I've spotted this sim about a year ago and the evolution has been slow. Yet the the detail on the buildings is pretty good.

As I couldn't get in, I couldn't explore the buildings. However, I could peek through the opened doors allowing me to get a view of classical Italian paintings. I suspect this is the collection Wikipedia refers to. If the Real Life collection is not usually open to visitors, giving them a free entrance in Second Life would probably be a good thing. So why not open up folks?

In the Netherlands, Banca MPS is primarily known for acquiring Banca Antonveneta from Grupo Santander late 2007, which took over a part of the Dutch ABN Amro Bank, which in its turn had just aquired Antonveneta, making it the first non-italian takeover in the industry in Italy

(Okay, this is a soap... ABN AMRO was taken over by a trio of banks, aside from Santander, these were Barclays and Fortis. The latter of which is now being rescued by Belgian, Dutch and Luxemburgh governments and there are talks of selling the ABN Amro part again at a severe loss, most likely to the Dutch ING or French BNP Parisbas).

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Banca%20MPS/128/128/0

Banca Transylvania

The second bank on my list is Banca Transylvania, but this one is also closed for public. It has no neighbouring sims so I couldn't get any snapshots of that one. Hopefully someone can give me a few pointers.

SLURL http://slurl.com/secondlife/Banca%20Transylvania/128/128/0

The Walled Gardens of Second Life

In the past year and a half I've been exploring Second Life, mostly seeking out corporate sites. Most of these had maginificent builds, some were utterly disappointing. The general consensus though has been that no matter how beutiful the build, most of the companies haven't got a clue of what to do with a virtual world yet.

They have been marketing showcases for most, and a lot of these have already withdrawn from Second Life, such as Vodaphone, Pontiac / Motorati, Mercedes, ING and Wells Fargo, to name but a few. A number of these companies have withdrawn from virtual worlds completely, quite a number have moved on to a more private world as they figured their customers needed some privacy.

Quite a number of companies still continue to explore Second Life in relative privacy, with islands unaccesible to the general public. Among these are (to name just a few):

• Banca MPS (Italian Bank)
• Capgemini (IT)
• Diageo (probably the worlds largest alcohol provider)
• Unilever (Dutch / Global food and other stuff giant)

Also, a number of companies have come and gone almost without noticing, such as

• Red Bull
• Heineken
• Shell

Which have had private islands, but no report exists on what they have been doing out there. The general idea is that thse companies have made it to Second Life and have explored the possibilities for inworld training and conferencing.

Ian Hughes, IBM's metaverse evangelist says:

"Second Life and its public nature make it a wonderful place to let people explore the potential of virtual worlds and human interaction there, which then leads to them understanding how they might apply the principles to inside or outside their enterprise. The need for privacy, the need to grow and understand, the need for a company to still act as a tribe of some sort if a common pattern.

When we started Eightbar back in 2006 it was with a private" island. It let my IBM colleagues join a public space but feel a bit of safety to experiement. That very quickly led to the need to have real privacy, internal virtual worlds as people very soon understood that they could communicate and gain value from avatar based meetings in virtual worlds over and above telecons and emails and even instant messaging.

At the same time that sparks off into a discussion of how can our business and our customers business reach their customers and partners in a public space. The two are similar, but different, an intranet in normal web terms has a very different purpose to an internet presense. Sometimes
the technology is even different. Also there are two diverging approaches to what an environment needs to do and they are based on the mix of communicating instrumented information (mirror worlds showing machine rooms, traffic problems in a real city etc) and emotional and human connection through expression (building, sharing, acting in a web2.0 open way, avatar customization)

Understanding these approaches will only help once people have experienced a connection of some sort at a personal level. Then the business ideas will flow. It still wont be for everyone, but most people are visual, and we live in a 3d space. We communicate non-verbally, sit next to people we know in RL and in virtual environments. Ignoring that and filtering it with telecons and IM is clearly restricing our potential. A little more about this is on Eightbar.com"

If you know more about these companies and what they have done in the Virtual World, would you please let us know what your experiences have been?

Virtual Manufacturing, Real Jobs at Boeing

Last year I've blogged a little about Brussels Airlines in Second Life and just recently have been talking with someone at KLM airlines on what airliners could do in virtual worlds. Their core business is of course transporting passengers from a to be, or metaphorically from their Real Lifes to their dream destinations (in case of holiday flights). Other focuspoints might be in crew training, but today I caught up on an interesting article in the Newark Advocate, published about two weeks ago which deals with Boeing's ventures into the realm of virtual worlds.

The Boeing Company is a major aerospace and defense corporation, originally founded by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Its international headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois, US since 2001. Boeing is the largest global aircraft manufacturer by revenue, orders and deliveries, and the second-largest aerospace and defense contractor in the world. Boeing is the largest exporter in the United States. Its stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. [Wikipedia]

Building an airplane isn't something you do in a few days. It's a major production process in which tens of millions of parts need to be fitted together meticulously, which is pricey stuff to do, even if you do it 'first time right'. It takes a lot of training, space and equipment. Virtual Worlds may aid in this process.

Boeing's new Virtual Manufacturing Center not only provides a detailed three-dimensional model of yet-to-be created products, but it also shows how to build them. Employees at the company's Guidance Repair Center on the Central Ohio Aerospace and Technology Center campus will watch through 3-D glasses on a huge video screen how to assemble a product only in the design phase.

The precise computerized images use physics to demonstrate the assembly process, down to details such as which screw or bolt to attach first. The information in Heath will be used at Boeing sites across the country.

The defense contractor showed off the center's capability to government and business leaders Wednesday, beginning with a virtual ribbon-cutting, virtual fly-in from above the site and virtual walk-through of the facility, with precise re-creations of every detail in the building.

The $1.2 million center will bring 30 to 60 new jobs to the Heath facility within 12 to 18 months. It will speed up design and production, and cut costs and training time. "Implementing virtual manufacturing seems to be, on the surface, an overwhelming task, but we've taken the first baby steps," said Mike Emmelhainz, director for the Guidance Repair Center. "We're actually going to see a product we'll start building the first quarter of next year.

Read full article here.

Twones: Something new or yet another me2?

It's that time of year again... No, it's not yet Christmas, but september has been a blast with the Virtual Worlds Conference & Expo, TechCrunch Top50, PICNIC 08, EmTech and one on Digital Content Distribution all in one month. No wonder one or two new and exciting startups get overlooked.

Today I came across yet another new startup: Twones, which just went into private Beta. People say it's cool, so let's have a look.

Twones is a music service lets you store, organize, find & share music played all over the web (tracking many services, see image above) or on your computer (like iTunes) to one single point of access. Twones ties all music together and let's you share your taste with others in its most direct way.

It basically works in 4 steps:

1. Track
2. Store
3. Socialize
4. Discover

I'm not much of a music freak myself, well yeah, I'm an 80's fetishist, but I usually play CD's and don't listen online to music. I've tried Last.FM, it didn't bring me what I needed. So I'll pass on this one as there are enough other lifestreams and aggregators to follow, so for me, Twones is just another Me2 site whcih yet again fails to crack the code. If you are a music lover and use all sorts of media sites you might still wanna check it out.

The good new is that it is yet another Dutch startup like the übercool Project E, which I blogged yesterday.

Microsoft: 3D Future will be Photosynth

There's only one place to be for the techcrowd this week, and that's Amsterdam with the Eduverse Symposium on the 23rd followed by 3 days of PICNIC 08. It isn't the only event going on though, there's also the Emerging Technology Conference (in short EmTech) at the MIT Campus.

"Microsoft's Craig Mundie has dismissed the potential of "synthetic virtual worlds" like Second Life, saying that the potential for immersive environments will be likely realized through 3D tools that capture and model the real world.

Mundie, who oversees research and long-term strategy for Microsoft, devoted a significant portion of his "Rethinking Computing" presentation at MIT's Emerging Technology conference to what he called the "Spatial Web," a blend of 3D, video, and location-aware technologies. At the center of several of his demos was Photosynth, a Microsoft software tool that can create 3D models using 2D photographs taken with an ordinary digital camera. In one brief demo he showed how a small, camera-equipped robot could be used to model a large room. In another, he showed a 3D model of a commercial district in Seattle that had been created with Photosynth, and demonstrated how a virtual visitor could come to the district using the Internet, enter an art shop in the area, and examine and buy a virtual sculpture that had also been "photosynthed" by the shop clerks or the artist.

Mundie noted that Microsoft is counting on the creation of a 3D "parallel universe" modeled with tools like Photosynth. However, he dismissed the potential of social virtual worlds that include user-modeled objects. "Many people are familiar with Second Life, which is a synthetic virtual world that
people came quite enamored with," Mundie said. "Our view was that there was a fairly limited audience who was willing to deal with the construction of avatars and operating in that virtual space."

[read the full article at The Industry Standard]

I would go along with Mundie when it comes to short term vision -only to a certain extend though. I agree with the part that there is a huge market for the Paraverse, virtual worlds that mirror our own real world, and that these mirror worlds will be fit for business sooner that general VW's in all likelyhood when augmented reality kicks in.

Question is... will the dominant one be a Microsoft product? I would have been very surprised if Mundie would have said the future is in the hands of Google Earth, but I don't think Microsoft, despite Photosynth being a cool product, has what it takes at this time to be a thoughtleader in this area.

So, speaking off the next couple of years, he's right and the paraverse may get a bigger business crowd moving, but in the long run, I wouldn't put my money on Microsoft.

Too many ideas to handle

Get your own 3D place to Hangout

Earlier this week I got an invite from one of the guys over at Hangout, one of the latest 3D startups this year. Hangout was launched for private Beta testing on september 8 (at the TechCrunch conference) and released a lengthy article on PRWire:

"September 8, 2008 -- Building on the popularity of social networking, online games, and digital media, Hangout Industries (http://www.hangout.net/) unveiled the world's first casual and immersive 3D social networking experience that allows teens and young adults to create and customize their own virtual rooms featuring real brand-name products, and where their friends can join them in a safe and secure environment, to hang out and have fun together. For teens, Hangout helps My Space become My Place." (full article here)

Especially in this business, with so many worlds and environments being released, I would be very hesitant to use the words "the world's first..." in a press release. However, the guys made it to the TechCrunch finals. Here's their Crunchy presentation:

Looking at Hangout I must admit they've done neat things with the $ 6,000,000 of VC funding, but. The graphics look very good and already they've managed to get a bunch of sponsors in, youth-focused brands which want to make sure that Hangout users can interact with their favorite products in the room including AllPosters.com, Cardboard Robot, Café Bustelo Coffee, Celsius, Dank Squad, Dim Mak Records, Dim Mak Collection, Imperial Motion, IS eyewear, Milo, Monster Energy, Mumz the Werd, Neff, Ogio, Pioneer, Pony, Rockwell Time watches, Sessions, Skullcandy, Suunto Watches, Triumvir, Zappos.com, and Zuriick. Colin Brickley, Director of Sports and Entertainment Marketing at Pony commented "Hangout's visual quality lets us present our brand online, with no quality compromises. If we can get kids to put our shoes on their virtual selves, they are that much closer to buying our physical product. We can't afford not to be in Hangout."

Did I already tell you it looked good? But will that be enough to survive in the business, as the concept in itself isn't new. It's up for heavy competition in the industry in which, I think, it is not about the world or 3D hangout itself anymore, but ultimately about its connectivity, its integration with social thingies etcetera. Looking forward to seeing where this one will end up.

Google G1 Android

Yesterday Google presented it's iPhone competitor, the G1, which basically is a very ugly HTC phone and is running on shabby T-Mobile network. Nothing spectacular.

The phone features a 480 x 320 HVGA display, sports 3G, GPS, has a (lousy) 3.1-megapixel camera, supports up to 8GB of memory (of unspecified format), and batteries powering 5 hours of talktime with 130 hours of standby. It doesn't do video capture, stereo bluetooth, requires a Gmail account (fortunately I have one since I use blogger) and won't be sold at stores outside of a 2-5 mile radius of T-Mobile's 3G coverage areas (which basically limits the market severely)

And yet we all do believe it will actually be competition for the iPhone and a possible threat to other large phone-factories all because of it's OS. It's operating system is called Android and is Open Source software. It's kind of a revival of the Mac - Windows - Linux battle we had in pc-space. Open Source means it allows you to put new applications into your phone for free, instead of doing some heavy account upgrading.

Google Android has the potential to take on any competition, or rather facilitate competition as it allows anyone to quickly start your own (e.g.) Nokia. The only thing you need to do is to design a slick phone and put the Android in it.

Can "Hello My Name is E" cure the identity confusion on the web?

I've been discussing the need for better Identity Management in the web 2.0 era for a long time now, see for instance my blogposts on Identity Confusion and the tribal migration between social sites. Earlier today I ran into "Hello, my name is E." which is was launched today at the PICNIC 08 event in Amsterdam and is currently selecting beta testers.

"Nice to meet you!
I’m your online life, right inside your pocket.
I integrate your social services and make sure you can share your online identities in real life.
I am the physical link to social networking.
My name is E. "

That sounds very welcoming. Small print says you'll need a mobile device capable of internet access, such as a Blackberry or iPhone. Does this exclude simple pc users? And, does it exclude new Google G1 users (since that was also launched today) too?

I can't wait to actually start beta testing this. We really do need to find ways to keep our data centralised, one account to rule them all so to say. One single point of entry with the ability to distribute content through different (media)channels to a variety specified contacts and groups.

I don't wan't to go to twitter, pownce or jaiku any more to type that I've blogged this to a selected audience of my twitter followers, then go through the same motions of spreading the word on LinkedIn or Hyves or Facebook, not even daring to think of autosyncing with Xing, Ning, Plurk, and so forth, yet I do want some control over whom I sent the information to as well. This last bit... that will be the challenge to tackle for the folks over at Hello My Name is E. or any other social media. I do want to discriminate. My family can see more of me (or less), my colleagues can see different thingies and my social network (and my virtual network) can see yet again other things. I want to be able to manipulate these datastreams with preconfigurable settings.

Passions of Black Swan Fashion Show machinima by Rezzable

Check out Rezzable's new machinima vid from the recent Passions of Black Swan Fashion Show!

check the video here: http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=7615757&msgid=128369&act=LUIZ&c=212229&admin=0&destination=http%3A%2F%2Frezzable.com%2Fblog%2Frightasrain-rimbaud%2F15fps-fame-passions-black-swan-fashion-show-vid

Philip Rosedale at Eduvere Sympoisium

Yesterday I visited the 3rd Eduverse Symposium in Amsterdam, which Sogeti Netherlands kindly sponsored. Probably one of the highlights of the long and intensive day was Philip Rosedale's talk on his dreams for Second Life.

Phil's speech started with his initial dreams for Second Life, a lush green forest world -a sort of Utopian Garden of Eden - and how it evolved to what it is right now. The good thing about stepping down as CEO from Linden Lab is, according to Phil, that he nw once again has time to work on his dreams, one of them is to bring SecondLife to the 3rd world.

His speech was passionate about how virtual worlds are easier to use as an interface to knowledge than the worldwide web. He admitted it was a troublesome experience to get to know Second Life and people would have to go through extreme pains for 7 or 8 hours to try and understand how to navigate the world, but... That's far less than the time it would take to teach a n00b how the internet works.

His second argument was that virtual worlds are cross-cultural and do not stop at language barriers whereas the internet has difficulties to overcome these barriers as it needs you to understand the language of the page to be able to navigate and understand the contents .

CIGNA Healthcare in Second Life

One of the latest, more interesting, corporate excursions into Second Life probably has been the immersion of the US Based insurance company Cigna.

"CIGNA can trace its roots back to 1792, and the founding of the Insurance Company of North America (INA), the US's first marine insurer. Its first life insurance policy was issued two years later. In 1865, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (CG) was formed in Hartford, Connecticut. Nearly 120 years later, in 1982, CG and INA merged to form CIGNA. In 1993 CIGNA introduced its Tree of Life brand identity. In 1998, CIGNA sold its individual life insurance business to Lincoln National Corporation, and the next year it sold its property and casualty insurance business to ACE Limited. In 2000, it sold its reinsurance business to Swiss Re. In 2004, it sold its pension business to Prudential Financial. CIGNA's business segments include CIGNA Healthcare, CIGNA Group Life & Disability, and CIGNA International, all core businesses designed to help customers improve their health, well-being and security." [wikipedia]

Cigna has teamed up with Metaverse Development Company Method to shape their virtual presence. In what I think is a highly succesfull build the company focusses on health awareness, as thinking in the Healthcare business (and thus healthcare insurance) shifts from treatment to prevention.

Unfortunately the island itself is closed for the general public, but I hope to be able to post some more info shortly. In the mean time, here's some links to the press coverage the immersion received:

• Cigna deploys a Second Life island for health education (The Standard)
• CIGNA Tests Second Life Tech (Health Data Management)
• Cigna rolls-out virtual world program pilot for healthcare (Healtcare IT News)
• Communities Dominate Brands: Cigna does virtual world healthcare
• Cigna launches virtual health project in Second Life. (VWF Blog)
• Cigna deploys a Second Life island for health education. (SL Forum NL)
• CIGNA Creating a Virtual Health Care Community (Businesswire)

New Metapage: SL Shop Directory

On the main MindBlizzard website I've created the MetaPages a while back which basically is a list of links to virtual worlds, metaverse development companies and the well know RL Brandlist of Real Life companies in Second Life.

This weekend I've made a start with a new page; the SL Shop Directory, which now is a list of about 140 links to websites of well known Second Life shops.

As usual, updates to the list are welcome, through reply on this blogpost, but better yet, why not register at the MindBlizzard website and be able to suggest links directly.

9/11 Commemoration today in Second Life: Giving virtual voice to those who were lost

There's this odd blog, which I read every once in a while, and almost always, it has great articles. The blog I'm referring to is "The click heard round the World" by Rikomatic. Today it featured a great story on the 9/11 commemorations.

"Today was a particularly emotional day for lots of people from around the world. However most of us don't have the luxury of sharing those emotions and thoughts in the middle of a workday with our friends and family. So virtual spaces like Second Life serve a potentially important role in providing emotional outlets and support for people on days like September 11.

I checked in briefly on the memorial service going on in New York NYC sim (click here to teleport). What I experienced reminded me again of what a special place Second Life is.

There were 70-80 other avatars present, beaming in from
who knows where. Several friends of mine were there, who I exchanged greetings with. Most folks sat on the grass in respectful silence, restricting communication to instant messages. A couple of avatars in soldier's uniforms stood at attention.

Believe it or not, it means a lot for a bunch of avatars to sit in silence. It just never happens, unless they are
camping."

Read the full blog here.

LHC, Higgs, Hicks, Asimov, Creation and Entropy

Yesterday I blogged about one of my favorite stories, "The Last Question" by the late great grandfather of Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov, which raises the question whether or not entropy can be reversed.

The word "entropy" is derived from the Greek εντροπία "a turning toward" (εν- "in" + τροπή "a turning"), but it's a slightly different matter than the virtual world of Entropia we're talking about here (but may have been their inspiration). What we're dealing with here is:

"As a finite universe may be considered an isolated system, it may be subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, so that its total entropy is constantly increasing. It has been speculated that the universe is fated to a heat death in which all the energy ends up as a homogeneous distribution of thermal energy, so that no more work can be extracted from any source.

If the universe can be considered to have generally increasing entropy, then - as Roger Penrose has pointed out - gravity plays an important role in the increase because gravity causes dispersed matter to accumulate into stars, which collapse eventually into black holes. Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking have shown that black holes have the maximum possible entropy of any object of equal size. This makes them likely end points of all entropy-increasing processes, if they are totally effective matter and energy traps. Hawking has, however, recently changed his stance on this aspect." [wikipedia]

In Asimov's story, all energy is consumed at the end, time no longer exists and the universe is once more cold and void, as it was in the beginning, Creation has expanded untill it could no more and returned to it's cradle. This is why the story came to me after first blogging the LHC testrun.

The LHC, or Large Hadron Collider is supposed to simulate what that 'cradle' looked like, how the universe looked like just after the 'big bang' (if you buy that stuff - I'm more a Creationist), hence I wondered if the LHC would answer Asimov's question: What happens when the lights go out, how do you turn them back on? Surprisingly, Asimov an immensely laureated scientist and outspoken atheist gave the answer, using the words of Divine Creation:

"Let there be light - and there was light."

I decided to ask Dr. Kenneth Hicks from the Ohio University (a well respected scientist, yet humble enough to point out it's the Higgs Particle we're dealing with, not the Hicks particle):

"Regarding Asimov's short story, The Last Question, this is a great one to think about. While the LHC will not answer all of our questions about the Big Bang and the eventual fate of the universe, the LHC's results will get us a
little bit closer to a fundamental understanding of what happened at the earliest moments of the Big Bang.

Actually, Asimov's story is much more relevant to the people who study black holes, such as Stephen Hawking, who at one time claimed that some entropy was lost near a black hole (later, it was shown that entropy is still OK even in the highly distorted space-time of a black hole).

Progress in sience is slow when it comes to answering the big questions, like those posed in Asimov's story. Still, it's a great story to read, and very thought-provoking."

Whatever happens when the LHC is fully up and running, it won't produce a functioning red button that says: 'Switch light of the universe back on', but maybe bring us a wee bit closer to understanding how this magnificent universe works.

For now, I think I've said enough on the LHC (or Doomsday Device as you like) and the Higgs particle. Thanks to Dr. Hicks for his immediate response. Perhaps I'll return to Asimov's "Last Question" once more as I'd like to see how Asimov's Biblical conclusion to the story (let there be light) holds up against these hardcore scientists. Finally, again, the link to the online version of Asimov's short story at Multivac.

How the LHC works - pretty basically

Someone said to me: "Okay, the LHC may be the Doomsday Device, but how does it work?"

How does it work, well, that's pretty easy: Shoot a stash of pink balls to yellow tube and have them crash into a glass tube. Stick a battery and a magnet to the tube and the pink balls will mysteriously turn blue, and they crash .That's all folks.

Pretty simple and unexciting stuff for a 30 billion dollar gadget ain't it?

Pratchett to touchdown in Second Life

Although my latest entries to this blog may speak a different language, this blog still primarily deals with virtual worlds, with occasional outings to other fields of interest, such as good reading stuff. Occasionally there's a cross-over when great authors visit Second Life (we've had Gibson in the past), this time it's Terry Pratchett, author of the hilarious Discworld series.

"Terry Pratchett is to make an appearance in the virtual world Second Life. Pratchett will feature in a sim version of a South Pacific tropical island, modelled on the island Nation which features in Pratchett's new novel, NATION.

The island will be created complete with scenes and locations from the book. Pratchett will appear on the Nation and take part in a live question and answer session with fans on 9th October at 8pm.

The month long Second Life promotion, which runs from 11th September to 10th October, will enable visitors to take part in themed quiz nights, special events and fancy dress competitions. A treasure hunt will lead users through a series of clues to find virtual books and treasure as well as real, physical prizes.

An exhibition will be organised in Second Life to promote the new book, and free e-book samplers will be available in Random House UK's own bookshop on the Elysian Isle, from where visitors will be able to travel to Terry's websites at http://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/ and http://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/.

NATION will be published in the UK on 11th September by Doubleday, price £16.99 and in the US on 30th September by HarperCollins."

Thanks to @Torley Linden for pointing it out.

Will LHC answer Asimov's Last Question?

Scientists at CERN have sucessfully run a first test on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and several particle beams made a looping. In the previous article I wrote about some people running about shouting "Doomsday Coming", but we're still here. For now...

For now, as this was only a stationary run of the LHC. After a series of tests they will start shooting multiple beams into the tube and corresponding crashes might still trigger a black hole to appear in Geneva. So please pick your favourite date for doomsday fast.

The thing is, after watching this testrun almost become a new media-hype memories of an old tale came back to me, a story written by Isaac Asimov - in the days that Gates and Jobs didn't even know the smell of diapers yet - which is called...

"The Last Question"

This story first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was reprinted in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973) and Robot Dreams (1986), as well as the retrospective Opus 100 (1969).

The Last Question” is a story of a computer with exceptional intelligence, the Multivac, presented with a recurring question through many stages of history, “Can entropy ever be reversed?”

Without spoiling the story, “The Last Question” is a wonderful glimpse into the technological singularity towards which we are accelerating.

Apparently, it was one of Asimov's own favorites as well:

Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn’t have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer. Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably “The Last Question”. This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, “Dr. Asimov, there’s a story I think you wrote, whose title I can’t remember—” at which point I interrupted to tell him it was “The Last Question” and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles.

-Isaac Asimov, 1973

You can read the full story at Multivac. Ever since I read this story I have wondered why an acclaimed scientist and outspoken atheist like Asimov would conclude with the very words of Divine Creation "Let There Be Light"

The Question the short story deals with, is "can entropy ever be reversed?" I wonder what Dr. Hick's view would be on this. Would the LHC hold the answer to Asimov's Last Question?

LHC: Higgs and Hubs

Beam me up Scotty

Today is a hail from a different verse. It's not from the one of the virtual worlds of the metaverse, nor even a representation, a shade of our own in the paraverse, but hypothetically a glance back into the birth of our own universe: It's the first LHC beam day at CERN, the European Institute for Nuclear Research.

I received updates of the first beam-day through @CERN on twitter:

• It's LHC first beam day. Beams at the door of the LHC, ready for first injection. http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/...
• 9:30. First beam injected and stopped at 1/8 of a circuit. Loud applause in the control room.
• 10:00 The beam has now done half a lap. Still going well. This is the big moment. Next injection should one full circuit.
• 10:25, 10 September 2008. Historic moment. The LHC first beam has just circulated. Amazing moment.
• 13:55, the LHC's second beam is now on its way.
• 15:02, that's it. Second beam all the way round and the LHC is up and running.

The big question is, what's so special about this LHC, or Large Hadron Collider in full. The LHC is a 27 km. tube circling around (or actually under) Geneva where 9.000 scientists at Cern pull a stunt with boosting a particle beam almost at the speed of light. The particles should round the circle about 10.000 times per second, so it's over before you know it even started.

The thing is, it costs over 6 billion and it took 30 years to build this thing which has all sorts of nice gadgets, like the Atlas, a snappy photocamera which makes about a million snapshots per second to try and 'capture' particles crashing into eachother. Does this make sense to you? Well here's a little cartoon to explain a little more.

Today was first beam day, so only one particle beam was shot, it'll take some time before they actually start shooting beams at eachother, but expectations are that what happens then either resembles armageddon or the start of the galaxy, just after the 'big bang'. Problem is, they don't have verified testdata on how stuff looked like back then.

Higgs and Hubs

One of the key elements scientists will be seeking is the mysterious socalled Higgs-particle (dubbed the 'god-particle' by some) which should be the basic building block for all matter in the universe. Every self-respecting Physicists will be examining testdata from the LHC in the coming years, and they're estimating several Petabytes of data will be pumped round the world a year. Central distribution point for every non-European institute will be the Netherlands:

But we'll have to wait and see if there still will be the Netherlands, as some see doomsday coming when CERN actually starts crashing beams. Some say there's a risk, that when the beams collide a black hole will start to form in Geneva. Here's Dr. Kenneth Hicks view on things:

"I have been asked by friends if