Virtual worlds update - 1.7 b ww accounts

Virtual worlds – there’re not dead yet!! In fact the opposite is true. Virtual worlds have passed out of the spotlight in some regards but growth persists, with a heavily youth-oriented userbase. According to UK-based virtual world market research firm KZERO, there were 1.7 billion worldwide registered users of virtual worlds as of the end of 2011. This was more than double the under 800 million users at the end of 2009. As Figure 1 indicates, 97% of these accounts are currently held by users 25 years old and under.

Figure 1: Virtual world account holders by age tier as of December 2011.

Source: KZERO, Virtual world registered accounts reach 1.7bn in Q4 2011.

On average, users have four avatars and are active in multiple virtual worlds. Habbo Hotel and Second Life are still well-known virtual worlds, the latter with 20 million regular users. Further, over 100 open sim grids are running using Second Life’s platform software, one of the larest of which is the education-focused Reaction Grid. Entertainment, socializing, and education continue to be application areas of focus in virtual worlds. Premium subscriptions, and in-world advertising and product placement, as well as virtual product and service sales remain the business model.

Open Global Courseware

The U.K., long an adopter of surveillance technology, announced recently that high-definition CCTV cameras from Classwatch have been installed in 94 schools. The result has been improved classroom management and there are plans to install hundreds more cameras nationwide in primary and secondary schools.

Free global education resource
With minimal effort, this internal surveillance initiative could be expanded into a worldwide sousveillance victory. A global education resource could be generated by broadcasting and archiving the live feeds to the web for access by teachers and students worldwide in their own classrooms and via cell phones. This is essentially an extension of MIT’s open courseware concept.

Language imperialism and the return of the British Empire?
The U.K. might briefly enjoy the notion of re-establishing the British Empire by exporting English-language education, but

language is becoming more fungible over time

The issue of language imperialism could be avoided with the use of audio translation tools (Google Translate – audio version?) and by opting in CCTV broadcasts from schools in other countries. The pilot project phases could be U.K. transmissions targeted at India and Beijing, etc. transmissions targets at rural Chinese schools.

PenPal 2.0 flattens the world
Classroom broadcasts could quickly become interactive with commenting and messaging on the streams. Students worldwide could get to know each other and work on team projects together in virtual world classrooms like Second Life’s Teen Grid; a multi-dimensional PenPal 2.0. Students in India could come up with ideas to work on problems in the U.K. by interviewing British students and vice versa. Teacher and student exchange programs could arise. Students could vote on the curriculum.

The real way to raise test scores would be to have live head-to-head competitions between different schools in a district, country or around the world (“The class in Chennai did 5% better….”).

Local community engagement tool
Internet broadcast could also enable the local community. Parents could tune in to their children’s classrooms (“Mom, did you see what I did around 10:30?”…”What happened at school today?” “Mom, just watch the feed archive…”). The social networking dimension could deepen student, teacher and parent interaction as many are already managing homework assignments colaboratively on the web.

American Idol Teacher: injecting abundance
Classroom broadcast could bring more abundance to teaching by providing acknowledgement (whuffie) for good teachers. Innovative and engaging teachers could reach a global audience and become YouTube celebrities. There could be competitions for the Best Teacher of the Pythagorean theorem, Best Teacher in Swindon, etc. as nominated through video clips. Videos could be linked to teacher ranking websites. From a policy perspective, education could become easier to evaluate and standardize. Countrywide best practices could be culled to train new teachers.

Conclusion: inevitablility of full-life recording

It seems inevitable that video surveillance/sousveillance will increasingly penetrate public and private areas for a variety of reasons ranging from safety and crime control to life-logging. One classic opposition argument is that recording inhibits ‘natural’ behavior, however most people quickly forget and adjust and it could be likely that the ongoing recording of society will advance without much opposition as long as there is a balance between surveillance and sousveillance (e.g.; there is popular access to the technologies and streams).

Youth mentoring adults

As Don Tapscott suggests in Grown Up Digital, for perhaps the first time in history, youth knows more about something - social media and other technologies - than adults. So it could be quite valuable for youth to mentor adults, despite the issue that most adults do not perceive a need for this. Adults may start to think that they should hire a social media consultant for business purposes, e.g.; “How should I be using The Twitter for my product?” or “Oh, virtual worlds are for more than gaming? I could actually run my worldwide customer community groups at an in-world sim for about 300% lower cost?” but most adults have not yet appreciated the pervasive personal and professional impact that social media could have on their lives.

Mentoring 2.0
A more experiential concept and format of mentoring than it is traditionally conceived together with the conventional 1:1 conversations could be most effective. Traditionally, it would certainly be informative to hear youth’s views on all manner of personal, community and global concerns, and to learn from the way youth makes decisions; one example is contemporary youth having many more options and a deeper consideration of the trade-offs between options (e.g.; work on my Internet startup or my homework; stay working for a startup or go to college).

Experiential mentoring

The new mentoring’s interaction medium should be experience not dialogue.

For example, the venue could be a café setting with youth and adults and their laptops, mobile and other devices with Wi-Fi and refreshments. Everyone is just hanging out, not formally interacting, not in 1:1 match-ups but in small groups where everyone might feel more comfortable. Adults could see what tech is being used and how, and ask youth about it and try to understand it and install and try the apps on their machines and think about how they would apply it to their personal and professional contexts. The mentoring could be two-way, with both groups benefiting.

Heard from the future…

• I don’t feel like myself in this upload anymore
• I only got 98% fidelity in my revivification
• You must be a newbie, you never get full reload on a reviv
  
• I don’t want to be so present to my experience
• I don’t want to remember all my memories, I want to edit out x, y, z and enhance a, b, c and…
• I don’t want all my actions (and possibly thoughts) recorded by public cameras and sensor nodes
• Why did I reembody as a (man, dog, robot, hummingbird, bee, network node, airplane, etc.)?
• What is the construct "I"?
• Is this virtual world virtual? Where is the real virtual world?
• I think that AI over there is a few methods short of a class library

Top 10 Computing Trends for 2009

Here is a quick list of my top computing and communications predictions for 2009 ranging from smartphones to supercomputers.

1. Smartphone AppMania continues
The explosion of application development on smartphone platforms like the iPhone and G1 continues, particularly in location-based services, social interaction and gaming. More computer science departments offer smartphone application development classes. There is more standardization of USB, earphone and other ports. U.S. ARPU is over $100/month.

2. Twitter is the platform
Despite renowned technical glitches, thousands more flock to messaging-leader Twitter and the fastest-growing user group of the microblogging notification system is non-human tweeters using the service as a data platform, example: Kickbee. Web 2.0 continues to bring back network computing, turning the web into the computer and human and object-based messaging becomes the new RSS.

3. Minis go mainstream
Mini PCs such as the Asus Eee PC, MSI Wind and Dell Inspiron continue to proliferate. Minis are fingertip candy; a travel machine for the on-the-go tech-savvy and too cheap to not be affordable for others at $200-$400.

4. Supercomputers achieve 8% human capacity
With IBM’s RoadRunner and Cray’s Jaguar running at just over 1 petaflop/s currently, the world’s fastest supercomputers could reach 1.5 petaflop/s in 2009 (unconfirmed results here), about 8% of the total processing capacity of the average human.

5. Chips: 32nm node rolls out amidst sales declines
Intel rolls out its 32nm node 1.9 billion transistor chip despite worldwide industry sales declines. Gartner forecasts a 4% decrease in chip sales in 2008 vs. 2007 and a 16% decrease in chip sales in 2009 vs. 2008. The biggest speedups continue to come from hardware, not software, and there could be additional breakthroughs in memory (flash, NRAM), magnetic disk storage, batteries and processor technology.

6. iWorld persists
The 200 millionth iProduct is sold before Apple’s CEO succession plan is in place.

7. WiMAX roll-out still stalled
WiMAX services could roll-out to 1-2 cities beyond Baltimore by year-end if Sprint and Clearwire’s operational and legal challenges are resolved. WiMAX would help to stratify connectivity offerings with a recession-attractive price point and bandwidth package (2-4 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload speed; 6 month introductory price of $25/month, then $35/month).

8. More flexible media consumption models
More models for flexible on-demand pay/free video content viewing are launched for Tivo, Netflix, DVR, media PC and Internet consumers.

9. Video gaming grows
Video game titles, types and hours growth continues as escapism and low-cost entertainment options flourish.

10. Extended use of virtual worlds
Virtual world penetration and proliferation continues (Sony’s recent launch: PlayStation Home) at a slow and steady pace for both entertainment and serious use. The largest platform, Second Life, saw a 50% year-over-year increase in total hours and a 100% year-over-year increase in land ownership (much less exposure to virtual subprimes), and this rate of growth could easily continue in 2009. In the natural evolution of the Internet, virtual worlds continue expanding from the 3 Cs (communication, collaboration and commerce) to more advanced rapid prototyping, simulation and data visualization.


Other advances that could be around the corner:

• Speech-recognition version of Google translate
• More automated quantified self-measurement tools like the GoWearFit and FitBit
• Device convergence, one example: automated quantified self-measurement sensors built directly into existing mobile devices (G3?)
• In Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), basic video gaming avatar movement functionality via non-invasive EEG-based helmet; not quite working yet
  

Still waiting, a few other (non-comprehensive) opportunities:

• Semantic web
• Natural language processing
• VLT (very long-term) laptop batteries
  
• Wireless power
• Ubiquitous free Wi-Fi
• Paper-thin reader for newspapers, eBooks and any printed content
• Cognition valet and other AI services

21 century skillsets: the new literacy

Almost no one in the traditional education world, in both K-12 schools and higher educational institutions, has noticed the new literacy.

Not only is there a necessity to be more generally technically literate, but

the educated person of today must be able to read, write and express thoughts in a variety of technology-based media

MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld notices “From a combination of passion and inventiveness I sense that students are reinventing literacy. Literacy has been boiled down to reading and writing, but the means have changed since the Renaissance. In a very real sense post-digital literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming.” (Source: a paraphrase of Gershenfeld's Edge interview)

This should really be extended to say that the new literacy includes expression in traditional writing and in computer software, 3d printing, virtual worlds, video games, synthetic biology and visual storytelling.

Does everyone have to excel at expressing themselves in each of these media? No, but the most effective people are able to communicate through multiple forms of media.

An interesting analysis would be in evaluating the types of expression that are possible in each of the media. How is the same idea different in writing, in software, in 3d animation? Which media are better in which cases? Imagine the assignment to create a representation of yourself through biology, by assembling DNA sequences for different actions from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts database.

There has never been such an explosion of venues for creativity and self-expression. The result is very exciting – a richer interconnectedness of humanity and a new level of collaboration opportunities as more people can now connect through their user-generated content.

Next steps for virtual worlds

Interest in virtual worlds is growing, platforms are proliferating and virtual commerce continues to rise but there are several key steps needs to reach the next level: expanding awareness of virtual worlds uses, providing technical interoperability and establishing a financial payment network.

1. Marketing - virtual worlds are not just for recreation
Conceptually, there is a marketing problem. The popular belief, even by technology professionals, is that virtual worlds are exclusively for recreational use, and even more narrowly, that they are children's video games. This stems from three factors: the vast popularity of teen and pre-teen virtual worlds, the fact that this market segment is making the most money in the virtual worlds space and some high profile acquisitions like Club Penguin by Disney in Aug. 2007 for $700m. Maybe this is what happened with the wheel in Peru; it got defined as a children's toy early on and the greater extensibility of the technology went unrealized.

Enterprise Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds are the natural evolution of the Internet and one of the biggest potential uses is for enterprise applications. Enterprise virtual world killer app #1 is videoconferencing. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on video-conferencing. This can all be replaced with the free infrastructure of virtual worlds, and even improves on the traditional methods as participants have higher levels of engagement and use virtual world workforce collaboration apps.

Enterprise virtual world killer app #2 is the application presentation layer. Virtual worlds are the obvious next generation front-end to any data application. Exponentially more information can be seen at a glance and perceived immediately through visual image rather than read and processed (example: Bashiba). Problem drill down and resolution is also quicker and more effective. Many companies are moving to virtual control centers as the front end to their data applications. IBM features green data centers for both internal and client use to provide lower-cost improved control over nationwide data centers and remote process administration (SLurl). Facilities manager Eolus integrates SAP in the back-end with virtual world platforms in the front-end, representing multiple dimensions of information in a 4-tier virtual map for optimized management of global operations.

Enterprise virtual world killer app #3 is eCommerce. Virtual worlds are the obvious next generation platform for eCommerce, with detailed visual representations of products available for inspection and avatar-based navigation instead of locating items through menus. This trend will strengthen as more cell phones are smart phones and mobile virtual worlds clients are available.

For more information and images of Enterprise Virtual Worlds applications, please see Slides 16-22 of this presentation.

2. Interoperability
The 60+ existing virtual worlds platforms are isolated silos (lists of virtual world platforms: Virtual Worlds Review and VirtualWorldsNews). It is as if every website used a different flavor of html and required a separate login identity. There are two levels of the interoperability challenge. First, export and import functionality needs to be standard between 3d modeling software programs (3DS Max, Maya, etc.) and into virtual worlds platforms. Second, avatars and inventory need to be portable across worlds. One idea is to have a namespace registry system and avatar servers like DNS servers. Open-source platforms like realXtend and OpenSimulator are starting to emerge but do not have the traffic of the vast established worlds like Second Life, There and Entropia Universe.

3. Micropayment Network
The third vital step in moving virtual worlds forward is the establishment of a micropayment network. The breadth and amount of activity could be substantial. The network would be like PayPal, spanning any and all gaming and virtual world platforms, and could also handle web-based and brick-and-mortar transactions. The regulatory hurdles are sizable particularly given the international dimension but one possibility could be harnessing the emerging cell phone payment networks for virtual world micropayments.

Capital markets 2.0

In the last few years, a variety of innovative capital markets have arisen to supplement and extend traditional large institutional capital markets. The new markets fill niches of demand for capital and investment, and allow greater granularity of investment information and capital direction. The currency may be money, reputation, ideas, social good or any combination of these. Some of the new capital market vehicles include:

• Virtual World Economies (Second Life, There, Entropia Universe, World of Warcraft),
• Peer-to-Peer Lending (Prosper, Zopa, Lending Club),
  
• Micro-Lending (Kiva, Grameen Bank, Accion),
• Social Capital Markets and Venture Philanthropy (GoodCap, Blended Value, New Profit),
• Ideagoras (Innocentive, The Point, Zooq) and
• Prediction Markets (Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade, ZiiTrend).

The first category, virtual world economies, is burgeoning and complex and provokes an interesting debate about how these new market vehicles should evolve and integrate with traditional economies. The virtual worlds There and Entropia Universe have had a hands-on approach to economic regulation, for example approving parties for in-world banking licenses. On the other hand, the virtual world Second Life has been more laissez-faire at the outset but then stepped in with prohibitions where self-regulation has been inadequate. Gambling was outlawed in July 2007 and now banking activity has been effectively outlawed:

"As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment ... without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter. (Full text here)"

Risk, Cost of Capital and Acceptable Return
One value of the new markets is that they provide capital in cases that are less attractive or irrelevant to traditional financing entities. These situations often have dramatically different risk, growth and timescale profiles than traditional investments and are conceptually similar in many ways to doing business in a high risk country.

The risk is higher, so the return too must be higher in compensation. Looking at annualized interest rates may not make sense in the accelerated time environment of virtual worlds where the economy (as measured by land and money supply) is currently growing 6% per month in Second Life.

What is an appropriate cost of capital? Anecdotal interest rates on Second Life loans have ranged from 7% per month to nearly 50% per month, and experienced a 20-30% default rate. This is the cost of capital for people who do not want to declare their physical identity details or seek other means of capital. In the physical world, it is not unusual for payday lenders to charge 300%+ per year to cover their high default rates. Peer-to-peer lender Prosper found that U.S. state-based usury laws did not allow the site to charge enough interest to cover subprime borrower defaults.

Virtual economies are chided for not having sustainable interest rates at the same time as the subprime lending crisis is crescendoing through physical world capital markets, itself a reprise of the 1980s RTC crisis.

Law, Regulation and Jurisdiction
The appropriate norm is to comply with traditional governing entity rules and laws, including being flexible with business models in order to do so. Peer-to-peer lenders had to structure their businesses in specific ways to obtain licensing and comply with U.S. usury laws which vary by state.

Virtual world economies will likely need to be even more innovative to receive physical world approvals. The pervasively global and anonymous virtual world medium suggests that geographically-based physical world regulation will be challenging to apply in reasonable and effective ways. However, anonymity is probably less important as an attribute for virtual capital seekers, as when a benefit is conferred, people are generally willing to give up anonymity. For example, peer-to-peer lenders found that people are perfectly willing to have their credit reports posted publicly on the Internet in return for the ease of potentially obtaining a loan.

In addition to traditional law and regulation, new capital markets may face another layer of compliance in the form of specific in-medium practices that develop. Complying with in-medium practices is important both reputationally and in the instance of in-medium adjudication and dispute resolution mechanisms.

Virtual world killer apps

Virtual worlds seem to be distinct from the Internet but are really the natural evolution of the web as a communications, commerce, information and computation medium; a move to real-time 3D interaction from 2D text.

Virtual worlds are no longer exclusively recreational, they are becoming increasingly routine for a wide range of professional activities. Will Sun Microsystems be the first to announce their corporate earnings simultaneously in-world as they do now on CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog?

There are about 50 virtual worlds in various stages of funding, launch and adoption. Linden Lab’s Second Life is the largest and most complex with an economy in excess of $1.5m USD per day. With the surge in activity, killer apps are starting to emerge.

Consumer Killer App: 3D Immersive Shopping
Shopping could be the killer app of virtual worlds for consumers, just like email drew people to the Internet. Shopping, not in the sense of avatar couture, coiffeur and custom animation, although this is an important sector of the virtual world economy, but in the sense of physical-world retailers having virtual showrooms for customers to review and potentially purchase their products in a 3D visual immersive way, everything from cars to furniture to electronics to tax services to books and music.

Steelcase furniture showroom
Click here to teleport

EOLUS/SAP experimental shop
Click here to teleport

Business Killer App: the Interface
For businesses, it is not about the application but the interface, the interface is the application. Virtual worlds are the modern functionality-extending overlay for any existing application, a 3D real-time information-rich collaboration environment. Some examples include IBM's virtual NOC business, constructing VNOCs for their own and client operations, Intel's in-world Dev Zone developer network meetings and Coke's "Virtual Thirst," Cisco's "Connected Life" and Osram Lighting's "One Million Dollar Idea" virtual world creativity campaigns.

IBM Watson's VNOC (Virtual Network Operations Center)
Click here to teleport

Pervasiveness
Due to resource consumption, virtual worlds are not yet used pervasively by most people; they are an application to log into intermittently, just like the Internet was before broadband. It could be in five years that computer processing power and broadband speeds, including on the mobile platform, make virtual world pervasiveness possible. Even before then, it will probably be as natural to book an airline ticket in-world via a travel sim as it would be to go to Orbitz.

How could progress not be underway in an evolution from users to residents?

Unregulated stock exchanges in Second Life

A variety of unregulated economic activity has been occurring in the virtual world Second Life. In-world banks sprang up a few years ago and have experienced considerable volatility, mostly closing and reorganizing, for example the high profile collapse of Brazil-based Ginko Financial in September 2007. Some banks have extended their activities into in-world securities. Though eventually repealed in real life, Glass-Steagall provisions could be helpful in preventing conflicts in developing virtual world economies.

There are at least three stock exchanges currently operating in Second Life, the SL Capital Exchange (physically based in Syracuse NY, USA) with 20 listed companies, the World Stock Exchange (physically based in Australia) with 15 listed companies and the recently launched Ancapex (physically based in New Hampshire, USA) with three listed companies. There is even a Second Life Exchange Commission to provide standards of performance, operations and ethics for in-world market participants.

Listed companies have not provided detailed financial statements (much less third-party audited financial statements), have not indicated a dividend policy and do not have RL (real life) professional CFO/CPA personnel. A prospectus is sometimes provided (example) and the RL's CEO name and location may be optionally provided.

Nonexempt issuance
Considering offering and purchasing activity in the U.S., the stocks do not appear to qualify for any U.S. securities registration exemptions. The only nod to RL securities laws is a disclosure at SL Capex, claiming that the securities are a fictitious simulation, however given the easy conversion of Linden$ to USD and legal precedent in this situation, it is likely that the Second Life activity would be deemed securities issuance.

Are the SEC in the U.S. and other corresponding national securities regulators likely to take an interest or is the issuance too small, the venue too novel and the cross border challenges too great? If there is enough $ value of harm incurred by investors, an investor could file a complaint. But to whom? To securities authorities in their country, to Linden Lab, to the securities regulator of the exchange or listed company, to the Second Life Business Bureau or other in-world adjudication bodies?

While creating virtual world analogs to those in the physical world is to some degree laudable, the attempts might be ultimately more successful by incorporating a greater balance of physical world regulation and protection mechanisms to build a sustainable ecosystem.

Second Life reaches 10 million residents

Exemplifying the electric growth of Web 2.0 companies, the virtual world Second Life has grown from under 1 million residents to over 10 million in a little over one year.

While 10 million residents is perhaps not the best measurement metric for the world’s success (users may have multiple resident accounts and not more than 10% of them so far do anything more than have one quick look around), it is still an important milestone.

Source: Second Life Metrics

Other Second Life indicators reflect vigorous health, for example, a robust economy exceeding $1 million USD per day and a routine concurrency (the number of residents in-world at any time) of 30,000-40,000 with a new peak concurrency of 50,000 reached for the first time in early September 2007. Other statistics are available here.

The virtual world space is itself burgeoning, with 10-20+ worlds now available or about to launch targeted at different age segments (pre-teen, teen and adult). Second Life, There, ActiveWorlds, Multiverse and Kaneva are the best known, several of whom are coming together to develop standards for avatar, object and economic transfer between worlds.

Another growth indicator is the industry gatherings, the second meeting of the Virtual Worlds conference, Oct 10-11 in San Jose CA, attracted over 1,000 attendees, nearly doubling from the first conference. The third annual volunteer-run Second Life Community Convention, Aug 24-26 in Chicago IL, also attracted a crowd of about 1000.

Diverse Participants and Applications
Perhaps most exciting is the broad audience and variety of applications that virtual worlds are attracting; entertainment, enterprise, education, non-profits, governments and individuals are all exploring the medium amidst a flurry of both positive and negative press. Groups of every sort are coming to virtual worlds to collaborate in richer ways than have been possible previously. For example, below is a sim featuring LAX airport traffic data visualization.

Source: Daden Prime

FutureSex

Would you still feel like yourself if you modified your body or tried on a different body? Would you have the same sexual appetites and desires? Would it feel the same to be with your partner sexually if you were in a different body? If he/she were in a different body? If you were both in different bodies?

Selecting different bodies would separate the physical and mental aspects of sex. Pheromonal and other elemental physical chemistry might be surprisingly different in different bodies (as Richard Morgan explores in Altered Carbon). There is probably a wide dispersion in people's preferred mix of physical and mental sexual characteristics.

Consider for example senescent seniors trying on teenage bodies for a sexual romp. Should it be illegal to have sex with a body aged below the age of consent if it is inhabited by an adult?

The range of sexual issues that are challenging to discuss in relationships now could explode. Current issues regarding virtual world sex are just a warm-up, for example, is it cheating to have virtual sex with an avatar inhabited by someone other than your partner?

My partner wants to be someone else
How should I feel if my lover wants to experience being in a different body? What if I don't want to have sex with the person he/she wants to try being?

My partner wants me to be someone else
How should I feel if my lover wants me to be in a different body? Is self-agency diminished in inhabiting a body picked by my partner or is it just a more extreme form of doing what I know my partner enjoys? Would I or should I feel rejection pangs if my lover wants me to wear the Angelina Jolie body or would it be fun? Then of course the respite to the novelty could be the really wild - lets just wear ourselves tonight...

Its all about me...my partner is a sexual substrate
Would sex disappear as a special interaction amongst partners in favor of a way to explore individual desires? How could I be desiring my partner if I want him/her to wear someone else's body? Do I still desire my partner or is he/she just a sexual substrate if I can have sex with him/her as Brad Pitt one night, as Angelina Jolie the next, etc.? Does it matter if we are both wearing each others fantasy bodies? How could turning current fantasies into reality be achieved in a healthy way that doesn't hurt feelings but rather opens up new doors to fun and exploration?

We generally don't expect our partners to mind if we engage in other means of entertainment and relaxation with others, could an evolved understanding of sex be as casual? As possibilities increase, the possessiveness of sex probably diminishes.

Does it depend on whose body?
Is it different if it is another real person's body (the Brad Pitt) vs. a fictional body (the anonymous Pleasure Bob model)? In an advanced society, there should be no difference in the connotation of a partner's desire for the Brad Pitt body, the anonymous pleasure model, the Next Door Neighbor or the Guy from Work that you met at Happy Hour.

What would the world be like if we could all have sex with our neighbors, co-workers, celebrities and politicians via a filter worn by our partners? Ironically this could strengthen monogamous or polyamorous bonds and allow relationships to revolve around non-sexual aspects.

Multi-flavor
It could be that the Brad Pitt model is actually not that well-endowed, and would need to be modified mid-stream, or switched to the Johnny Depp or the Marilyn Monroe model, or become a rotating kaleidoscope of morphing physicality.

How should I feel if my lover wants two copies of me simultaneously? This is actually a new concept of having sex with yourself. Would I want a threesome or foursome with multiple copies of my lover? How would I expect my lover to feel if I wanted to experience a multiple-some with copies of him/her?

Presumably sexual options will eventually extend at minimum to wearing a neuro-experience filter mapping real or imagined partner behavior to personalized sensors and magnitudes, experiencing your partner wearing someone else or having sex with humanoid robots.

If different bodies can be tried on, sex is but one area for discovery, ethics and imagination.

Virtual currency and the attention economy

Market mechanisms are being increasingly introduced for more efficient exchange of capital and other resources (example: P2P lending marketplaces), for knowledge or opinion sharing, reputation building and preference indicating (example: prediction markets) and for now value attribution and broadcast in their latest launch, the enterprise email venue.

Seriosity, the Palo Alto CA-based serious gaming startup, initially reported to be focusing on enterprise applications in a World of Warcraft-like setting has now launched a virtual currency for the attention economy. The attention economy refers to the modern problem of information overload competing for a person's scarce attention. So far, the serios can only be used with Microsoft Outlook email, the sender applying a number of serios from their finite supply to indicate importance to the recipient and/or to vote on ideas, projects, etc.

The Serio Economy in Practice
The purpose of the serio economy is two-fold, directly indicating value and preference and also allowing meta relationships amongst participants to be seen. However, the importance of email is already generally known, by the sender or by the sender indicating urgency. Having serios attached to email may actually exacerbate the attention economy problem by encouraging people to read and evaluate emails they traditionally ignored. An interesting use case for serios would be charging for emails sent, thus perhaps limiting the number of people cc'd on email.

Regarding visibility into meta-relationships, Seriosity has an early study showing that serio economy relationship webs are different from those elucidated in traditional social networking email studies but it is not clear what new information or value this provides. Unlike prediction markets which have been shown to contribute important new information when appropriately executed, such as with anonymity, the serio economy is not anonymous and so is likely to do little more than codify the existing importance hierarchy and visible power relationships. If observed, people are likely to vote more serios in support of a supervisor's idea or for anyone else with whom a game theory relationship exists.

Since Seriosity is the central bank of the serio economy, issuing serios to market participants, some interesting future situations could arise if serios are transferable between organizations. For example, an individual could finally hedge their job, their long human capital exposure by taking an opposing position in the serios of a competitor or industry basket, similar to the way regional interest rate futures now allow individuals to hedge their long exposure in home-ownership real estate. SEC-attention attracting situations could also arise as individuals take arbitrage positions based on inside information.


There are a myriad of other interesting uses for virtual currencies, for example...

1) Work assignment facilitated by micro-economies
Virtual currencies could help workgroup micro-economies to develop, where arbitrary work assignment would be replaced by an economy. Managers could post projects to the micro-economy with assigned serio loads indicating project importance, drudgery acknowledgment, timeframes and requirements. Individuals and teams could signal available time, skills and interests and bid for tasks. The market mechanism could also reorganize schedules dynamically as priorities shift. Not only would a micro-economy more effectively clear supply and demand for work assignments but would also provide the side benefit of transparency, offering visibility into the direction and progress of the workgroup, sub-teams and individuals.

2) More effective shared resource allocation
Individuals and workgroups could use virtual currency allocations to more effectively allocate scarce resources such as conference rooms, office seating, computers and other supplies, food and drink preferences, vacation scheduling, etc. in a bidding process. Interesting workgroup cultural attributes could emerge from allocation behavior such as the engineering team putting all of their currency towards new computer resources while the marketing team puts more emphasis on conference rooms.

3) Information modulated with value
Just as there should be a rating system for all Internet content, a digg or "Was this helpful?" functionality for all news articles, blog posts, reviews and comments, either as a binary yes/no or as a quantitative rating, so there should be a rating system for an organization's internal and customer support forums. Readers could evaluate posts and postings could then be sorted by value, providing a means of distinguishing the usefulness of information and navigating the ever-growing sea of content that includes forum posts, blog comments, etc. Information modulation would be a higher order step in resolving the attention economy challenge.

4) Preference indication on organizational policies
Having a vote on organizational issues would be an important step in increasing individual inclusion and agency. Virtual currency (anonymously voted or not per the user) on the intranet would be an efficient way to discover majority preferences on issues ranging from preferred holidays, vacation policy, travel policies, preferred health care plans, 401k plans, degree of organization-wide executive communications and supply ordering to more sensitive situations such as lay-offs and salary decreases.

Our avatars ourselves

As companies and other organizations take to immersive worlds, it may be that new employees are assigned an avatar and virtual office space along with their security card and computer. Blogging is now part of some job descriptions and soon employees may be encouraged to spend time in-world for both corporate socialization and professional collaboration purposes within and across corporate lines.

There is a lot of energy around synthetic environments including a full track of virtual world programming at this week's SXSW Interactive in Austin TX and at the upcoming Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in NY March 28-29. Second Life is sneaking up on 5m users and a $2m/day economy and There engine Forterra has its hands full with enterprise and government clients for custom enterprise applications as well as government and medical simulation and training exercises. If you are not in-world somewhere for your company, you can work as an extra in someone else's world. Sim exercises are populated by "external role players," a new and expanding job category which simultaneously underlines the marketability and necessity of tech-savviness and another step in the Yochai Benkler shift to an economy of distributed individual participants vs. industrialized entities.

Professional avatars will likely be influenced by corporate guidelines and norms regarding appearance and behavior, analogous to the physical world; at least virtual suits are more comfortable! One result of this could be an even more diffuse exploration of virtual identity as humans have a closet full of avatars for all of their different professional and personal virtual activities. Other new job categories are probably already proliferating: avatar imaging, avatar reputation management and consolidation...

Avatar and other content portability across the different emerging public and private virtual world environments is also a non-trivial matter. IEEE avatar translation protocols and standards as well as intra-world authentication services could help facilitate avatar portability. Poor portability could mean poor rendering which could result in miscommunication, prejudice and other dynamics which can be theoretically avoided with virtual worlds. An avatar discrimination lawsuit re: virtual world employment practices would not really be a hoped for milestone.

Second Life exponentiates to 2 million residents

Today the virtual world Second Life welcomed its 2 millionth resident, exponentiating in growth from the 1 million resident mark on October 18, 2006 in less than two months and after barely having 100,000 residents at the beginning of 2006.

It is not Second Life’s 2 million residents, 10,000-20,000 of whom are in-world at any given time, nor its $650,000 per day economy ($237 million per year; $119 per capita, exceeding that of the Congo, Ethiopia and Burundi) that signals that the immersive world medium has arrived, but rather the existence of its opposition. The Register often highlights critical and problematic aspects of Second Life which it refers to as Sadville, for example citing "saddenfreude" and an analysis that time spend in Second Life contributes to global warming, as an avatar and a Brazilian consume roughly the same amount of electricity. (TV and media center electrical consumption was not mentioned.)

The brewing anti-SL movement has even moved in-world in hopes of better capturing SLer attention. The World Development Movement's anti-poverty campaign reminds passersby that there are still problems in what they refer to as "the Real World" such as a preventable child death every 3 seconds.

The ongoing presuppositions of the anti-SL movement are strange. They seem to think that SLers are 1) responsible for and 2) capable of contributing to world-problem solving in some unique way that TV watchers for example are not; and that 3) SLers are in fact not working on physical world problem solving in the physical world or via Second Life although there is much evidence to the contrary (such as the awareness raising Darfur sim where SLers can experience the refugee camp experience more closely).

When was the last time TV watchers or online Bix contest participants were blasphemed for watching TV or surfing the web instead of working on the world’s problems in their relaxation time?

Countdown to 1,000,000 Second Life Residents

Metaverse World leader Second Life barely had 100,000 residents at the beginning of 2006, and enjoyed strong growth in the first half of the year, reaching 300,000 residents at the end of June.

Then Second Life makers Linden Lab changed the registration policy such that no credit card information was required. The world's registered residents began to exponentiate, particularly helped by international residents swelling from 25% to 50% of total residents. Certainly residents do not correspond to unique users, as people may have one or more "alts," alternative avatars.

The Second Life website tracks that about one third of total residents have logged in within the last 60 days and that there are an average of 10,000 residents in-world during Second Life (US Pacific Coast) prime time hours. Private estimates suggest that about 10% of total residents are actually active in-world.

$7 million of transactions were run up by Second Life residents in July and there are a factor of magnitude more SKUs available in Second Life than at Wal-Mart (hello Long Tail).

On its current course, Second Life will reach the million resident mark well before the end of October and probably even before the end of the upcoming weekend. w00t!

Life after Second Life

Why be content with Second Life when you can join ...the Multiverse Network... and access and interact in hundreds of virtual worlds all via one portal? Multiverse Network sees itself as the browser of metaverse worlds as users gatewaying through their site will have a universal sign-in, unified billing and centralized marketplace commerce. Interworld communication and travel is planned, as well as social mechanisms for world discovery and collection with personalized "world playlists,” user rankings and contests.

The few hundred development teams in the Multiverse Network's closed beta are finding the virtual world platform to be a unique, fun and high-functionality way to create MMOG worlds. The platform, soon to be in public beta, is being used for traditional game development (Force of Arms) as well as non-gaming work and learning applications (Project Mars which includes Mars-like gravity) and is described in more depth here.

The Multiverse Network's push in releasing worlds to end-user consumers in 2008 will likely trigger a further explosion in synthetic world commerce. One implication is that vendors making avatars, objects, textures, animation scripts, etc. for use in on-line worlds would no longer have to be tied to just one world, as the Electric Sheep Company, SLBoutique and Aimee Weber are to Second Life. Network content developers would have a panoply of potential customers and leveragable products and services.

Interworld connection will allow massive cross-world collaboration networks based on affinities to evolve; what would it be like to be with 1000 avatars online in the same space? While virtual space allows for smaller avatar form factors, communications challenges will likely abound with multi-channel chat streams erupting with some predictable asymptote of crowd participants.

Identity (that temporary and anachronistic human construct) will be different in a multiverse network with larger identity and avatar portfolios to manage (this theme is already occurring in Second Life whose nearly 1 million "residents" correspond to far fewer biological equivalents). Identity experimentation will be fun in multiverse worlds too, such as by being able to be multiple avatars in multiple worlds simultaneously and by permissioning avatars for independent tasks and activities with low-level AI methods.