Showing posts with label linden lab. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linden lab. Show all posts

03 February 2010

LoveMachine: Virtually the Singularity?

A few years ago I had the good fortune to interview Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life. Now, say what you might about that virtual world, and what it has become, but there's no denying its splendidly metaphysical origins:

There's a book I read ... that we were talking about a lot, which really informed our design, and that's Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. That was one of the most important things because it was in 2001, 2002, that we got into this idea that the way online games worked was just completely inconsistent with what we're trying to do, and that Everquest or online games of the time were what Jane Jacobs was talking about when she said that planned cites all failed.

Then you read Death and Life of Great American Cities, and what that says is that it all has to be random. The randomness gives way to overlapping behaviours where some people are walking to go to the store, some people are walking to their home, some people are walking to go to work. Those people all run into each other, there's a kind of a commons behaviour where they'd like to just double click on their work and get there immediately, but they can't: they have to walk. That means they entertain each other: some of the times you're the one being entertained, and some of the times you're the entertainment, that's kind of what Jane Jacobs said. And we were like, oh yeah, that's exactly what we want. Because if the world is just created by everybody, then you'll have this very haphazard, crazy kind of feel to it, and that'll be incredibly powerful the way New York is.

The Mystery of Capital was like a follow on to that, because it said for people to build that way everybody has to own their own intellectual property - including of course physical real estate - in a very explicit way with alienability and all that stuff.

Rosedale left Linden Lab a while back, and has been working on something memorably called LoveMachine. Now we have the first inkling of what that might entail - and it's suitable big:

Recently, a Second Life veteran named Hikaru Yamamoto told me about the plans she'd heard Philip Rosedale was cooking up for his new company, LoveMachine. He wasn't just building a public version of Linden Lab's employee rating system. Turns out that was just one project. A somewhat more ambitious goal, she told me, was, well, creating a sentient artificial intelligence which existed in a virtual world.

"He wants it to live inside Second Life," as she put it to me. "It will think and dream and everything." Indeed, the company's website now lists as one of its three projects, "The Brain. Can 10,000 computers become a person?"

Never a dull moment with that Mr Rosedale...

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02 April 2009

Second Chance at Life

Two years ago, the virtual world Second Life was everywhere, as pundits and press alike rushed to proclaim it as the Next Big Digital Thing. Inevitably, the backlash began soon afterwards. The company behind it, Linden Lab, lost focus and fans; key staff left. Finally, last March, Second Life's CEO, creator and visionary, Philip Rosedale, announced that he was taking on the role of chairman of the board, and bringing in fresh leadership. But against an increasingly dismal background, who would want to step into his shoes?

From the Guardian.

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18 November 2008

New Open Source Second Life Viewer

Linden Lab's decision to open-source its viewer (and ultimately its server, too) has triggered a wave of creativity in Second Life free software. Here's the latest example:


More than two months after Jacek Antonelli and team launched an initiative to create a more user-friendly, open source version of the Second Life viewer, cheekily dubbed Imprudence, the first release candidate is available for download.

30 September 2008

The Second Life of Philip Rosedale

Last week I chatted to the founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale. He was telling me how happy he was that he'd found a new CEO to take over the day-to-day running of Linden Lab. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Except that in this case, I believe him....

On Open Enterprise blog.

09 June 2008

My Oh EMI

This is getting interesting. After appointing a top Googler as its "digital president", EMI Music has now nabbed Cory Ondrejka, most recently at Linden Lab, and the main technical brains behind Second Life:

Two weeks ago, I joined EMI Music as SVP of Digital Strategy.

Why EMI? By hiring Douglas Merrill, EMI has demonstrated a commitment to capitalize on all the technology available to make the music experience better for artists and fans. At Linden, the most important changes I drove were blends of technology and licensing, so when Douglas asked me to join him at EMI, I jumped at the chance. Music touches everyone in the world and is uniquely part of our lives -- how could I not take this challenge?

Two people who really get the digital world at the top of EMI Music: surely *something* good must come of that?

09 April 2008

Second Life's Grand Opening

I wonder whether in retrospect Linden Lab's decision to open up the code of Second Life will turn out to be as momentous as when Netscape gave its Navigator code to the new Mozilla project? Interestingly, Linden Lab specifically invoked that precedent when it made the announcement:


In 1993, NCSA released their liberally licensed, but proprietary, Mosaic 2.0 browser with support for inline images arguably heralding the start of the web as we know it today. In an act of either acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation, Netscape Communications released the bulk of the Netscape Communicator code base to form the foundation of projects as Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

We are not desperate, and we welcome the inevitable with open arms.

Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.

A year later, it's a good moment to review where we are, and here are two useful contributions, one from Wagner James Au, the other from LWN's Jonathan Corbet. Things seem to be moving on, and it will be interesting to watch how this area develops.

03 April 2008

Your Private Second Life

It's been an open secret for some time that IBM has been creating intranet-based virtual worlds, but this seems to be the first official news about it:

IBM said on Wednesday it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own computer servers.

...

IBM employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas which are hosted behind IBM's corporate firewall.

This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through the servers of privately held Linden Lab.

14 March 2008

Philip Rosedale Gets a New Life in Second Life

Wow:


Linden Lab Chief Executive Philip Rosedale said on Friday the company he founded has begun a search for a new CEO with more operational and management expertise.

Rosedale will become chairman of the Linden Lab board when his successor is found, replacing Mitch Kapor, who will remain a board member and the company’s largest investor. Rosedale said he will also keep a full-time role at the company working on product development and strategy.

“This is my life’s work,” he told Reuters in an interview. “I’m not going anywhere, and I’m still full-time on this, probably for the rest of my life.”

Second Life’s growth has slowed after a period of rapid expansion. Rosedale’s replacement will face the difficult task of regaining that momentum, working within Linden Lab’s idiosyncratic corporate culture and winning over Second Life’s impassioned users.

Presumably it's the slower growth that has encouraged Rosedale to make this move in the hope that fresh blood can get things moving again.

22 January 2008

An Insider's History of the Metaverse

It was sad news that Cory Ondrejka was parting company with Second Life, but it looks like there's a silver lining:

I think it would be fun to make a semi-regular part of this site different moments from my memories of the first 7 years of Second Life.

Once upon a time,

Around August of 2001, back when Second Life was called Linden World, there was no scripting language in SL. Primitar was about to replace the spaceships and floating eyeballs that were the original avatars and James was doing the first major UI revamp so that we could add to the world without shooting. The entire team had been debating how to add behavior into the system for months, with Philip arguing that we should just use physics. Philip had some really good points, because if we were able to use Havok for all of our behaviors, residents would be able to gauge the complexity of an object by just looking at it -- like mechanical systems in the real world -- and we wouldn't have to divert scarce resources into a project that could take significant time and effort. Mitch was also an advocate of visual complexity representing behavioral complexity, and I think there was something to that idea.

Now read on...

10 October 2007

Virtual Worlds Get a Second Life with IBM

I was lucky enough to interview Irving Wladawsky-Berger for the Guardian shortly before he retired from IBM. One of the most intriguing hints of things to come concerned virtual worlds:

Does IBM have its own internal virtual world system - an intraworld running on its intranet?

We plan to build them; exactly how is all under discussion. We very much feel that many of our clients will want intraworlds in the same way they have intranets.

Then you want to make the navigation between the intraworlds and public worlds as seamless as possible.

Some of the "how" regarding interoperability is being addressed with this interesting collaboration between IBM and Linden Lab:

IBM and Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life (www.secondlife.com), today announced the intent to develop new technologies and methodologies based on open standards that will help advance the future of 3D virtual worlds.

...

IBM and Linden Lab plan to work together on issues concerning the integration of virtual worlds with the current Web; driving security-rich transactions of virtual goods and services; working with the industry to enable interoperability between various virtual worlds; and building more stability and high quality of service into virtual world platforms. These are expected to be key characteristics facing organizations which want to take advantage of virtual worlds for commerce, collaboration, education and other business applications.

What's striking about this announcement - still rather lacking in details, but clearly very good news for Linden Lab - is the emphasis on openness:

Open source development of interoperable formats and protocols. Open standards in this area are expected to allow virtual worlds to connect together so that users can cross from one world to another, just like they can go from one web page to another on the Internet today.

No surprise there, really - open standards are the only way to build resilient, heterogeneous systems. And if you're contemplating linking together myriad, disparate virtual worlds, it had better be resilient in the extreme. (Via Clickable Culture.)

Intellectual Monopolies Go Virtual

This was bound to happen:

Eerily ergonomic, infinitely adjustable, incredibly expensive, the Aeron chair is a fetish item in the computer industry, so it's not surprising that Residents have made virtual versions of them in Second Life since the very beginning. All that's changed, however, because Herman Miller, the company behind the Aeron, has just set up their own official store in SL, and is giving away chairs made with their official imprimatur. For a limited time, Residents with knock-off Aerons can bring them to the Herman Miller outlet in Avalon and exchange them for an officially branded SL version, for free.

...

And with that announcement, the first public salvo has been fired: a real world corporation is loudly and actively asserting its real world intellectual property rights against Resident-made objects which allegedly infringes them. Many wondered when this moment would come, and though DMCA notices have been quietly filed by companies through Linden Lab, this is the first move I'm aware of that's being done in conjunction with an official move into Second Life, and a marketing offer.

17 May 2007

Exporting Jurisdictions - the Other Way

We're used to seeing the US exporting its own ideas of what consitututes illegality when it comes to copyright and patents - notably through its free trade agreements - but here's a useful reminder that in today's interconnected world, things can flow the other way too:

As Second Life grows, the European market becomes a larger and larger part of its user base. ComScore estimates as a much as 61% of Second Life's residents are based in Europe (including 16% in Germany). While ComScore's likely overestimated the number of active European residents, there is no doubt that European users have made up a substantial percentage of Second Life's rapid growth over the last eighteen months. Enough growth, that Linden Lab is rumored to be looking for European collocation space. And with servers in Europe, the Second Life content on those servers would unequivocally fall under the laws of the nation(s) those servers are based in.

And since you cannot usefully carve up the metaverse based on the physical geography of its users, this means that European laws - notably on virtual child pornography - are likely to be applied to the whole of Second Life.

05 April 2007

What's in a Name?

This is a seriously bad move:

Online fantasy world "Second Life" will soon introduce the virtual equivalent of vanity plates, allowing residents to customize their characters' first and last names.

"Second Life" spokesman Alex Yenni said the feature, likely to cost $100 up front and $50 a year, would debut by the end of the year.

Domain squatting is bad enough: at least there it's something abstract like a Web site. But if someone steals your real name in a virtual world and, shall we say, besmirches it, there's no way you can prove in-world it's not "really" you, no way to reverse the damage to your reputation both in-world and beyond. And as we know, in the Web 2.0 world, reputation is everything.

If Linden Lab is stupid enough to bring this in, it can mean only one thing: that it is really hard-up for dosh. For the first time, I have my doubts about its long-term survival.

01 April 2007

Hacking Second Life (Properly)

Now that the code for the Second Life client is available as open source, I wondered who would be the first to offer a how-to. And the winner is...Peter Seebach:

In this series, I introduce the client (or "viewer" in Linden terminology) and explore the development environment, documentation, and more. Developers who are used to an open source environment are sometimes a little put off by things that might be done differently in a commercial environment, and this project offers a number of opportunities to explore some of the tradeoffs. Of course, the best way to explore a program is to do something with it, so this series gets into the code to make a few changes.

06 March 2007

Second Life's Second Innards

Talking of guts, here's a piece about Second Life's intestines. I've written about this in various places, but there are more details here:

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said.

27 February 2007

3D Viewer for Second Life

Sounds cool:

The University of Michigan 3D Lab has brought Second Life one step closer to real life by developing stereoscopic support for the Second Life viewer. This recent addition allows visitors wearing special glasses to see the objects of Second Life pop out of the screen similar to watching a 3D movie. Using the recently released source code by Linden Labs, Gabriel Cirio and Eric Maslowski have developed a stereoscopic version of the Second Life viewer that works with a large-screen stereo projection system. This lowcost system uses passive stereo based on polarizing filters and was built from off-theshelf components.

Further proof, if any were needed, of why opening up the code is good for everyone.

05 February 2007

Virtual World, Real Lawyers

Lawyers thrive on complication and ambiguity. Things don't get more complicated or ambiguous than in cyberspace - it's no coincidence that Larry Lessig rose to prominence as one of the first to wield the machete of his fine legal mind on this thicket.

Things are even more complicated in virtual worlds, because they are inherently richer. Here's a nice round-up of some of the legal issues involved. Two paragraphs in particular caught my eye:

One complicating factor is jurisdiction. Linden currently operates under California and U.S. law. British IP attorney Cooper says that virtual worlds like Second Life need a form of international arbitration. "If I get ... an Australian operating a business in Second Life, asking me, a U.K. attorney, how he can best protect his business within Second Life, how do I answer him?" he says, citing one query that he has received. But Cooper sees a model in the uniform dispute resolution policy (UDRP) for Internet domain names. Created in 1999 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in cooperation with the World Intellectual Property Organization, the UDRP created an international solution to issues like cybersquatting of domain names that were difficult or impossible to resolve in regional courts.

Cooper, Lieberman and other interested avatars, including the Second Life Bar Association and many non-lawyers, are now working together to formalize online arbitration as a required first step to handle Second Life disputes, without resort to real courts and their costs. Together they are lobbying Linden to include arbitration in its terms of service agreement. Meanwhile, Lieberman's group is introducing its proposed arbitration into the virtual world, hoping that other users will try it out and find it fair and useful.

(Via Second Life Herald.)

01 February 2007

Second Life in a Box: OpenSim

The recent opening up of the Second Life Viewer code was big news, but the thing that everyone is waiting for is for the server-side stuff. Well, that may be a while off - see my interview with Cory Ondrejka for some more background on this. Meanwhile, though, the libsecondlife group has taken under its wing the OpenSim project, which as the home page puts it laconically:

OpenSim is a project to develop an Open Source Simulator.

This is great news, because it means that people can start developing other Second Life-like virtual worlds, completely independently of Linden Lab. It will also mean that people can start to explore some of the thorny issues of multiple, compatible virtual worlds now.

31 January 2007

O Brave New World

It's not every day that a new continent is announced.