Interview with Curious George..........The Genius

There are the ahead of the curve on Second Life, and the very astute and the very Brilliant.
All of these qualities are in abundance in one of Second Life’s most illustrious residents, Curious George. He actually raises the world we are in simply by being so much a part of it. He is one of the driving forces behind The Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) a professional scientific and educational, non-profit organization based in virtual worlds. George is a Professor of Astronomy and a Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at Caltech. I had the great opportunity to sit down recently on StellaNova which is the base of MICA operations on Second Life with the man I call………….The Genius.

Curious George: Please, sit down.

Pooky Amsterdam: Beautiful furniture this is very comfortable.

Curious George: Thanks! That's the idea behind StellaNova, make it a pleasant place for discussions and communication.

Pooky Amsterdam: Yes the ability to 'make one comfortable ‘really on a visual plane helps the mind extend itself.

Curious George: So aside from a few major venues - the amphitheaters, the seminar room - we have several of these discussion circles scattered through the sim.

Pooky Amsterdam: Do you have any other venues which stimulate discussion- the club room is a classic do you have for example a pod in the midst of the galaxy?

Curious George: No, we did not want to do any "space Disneyland" stuff -- plenty of that around. The idea is to have a natural and realistic park-like setting, the groves of academe if you will.

Pooky Amsterdam: Classical in that sense and open air as well. Your goals of having a sim to foster discussion of the kind you just mention are important.

Curious George: Yes, the idea of openness is conveyed throughout - no hidden spaces.

Pooky Amsterdam: Though we do have hidden regions of the mind that thought & of course discussion will illuminate.

Curious George: (smiles) Some of them, anyway.

Pooky Amsterdam: How long have you been open?

Curious George: We opened on Jan. 30, and we are starting to have a full schedule of events including the workshop tomorrow. (For a full schedule of workshops and calendar of events http://mica-vw.org/)But we certainly use the sim for our meetings, and I have seen many visitors come through.

Curious George: We welcome anyone, and the environment is meant to be used for any and all scientific and scholarly interactions, discussions, etc.

Pooky Amsterdam: Did you ever envision that you would be teaching, learning and collaborating on a place or platform such as this?

Curious George: Now I of course see that, but before being introduced to VWs about a year ago, I was skeptical, like most academics, I think.

Pooky Amsterdam: Yes of course- you have achieved a great thing here through your willingness to be open to it and will certainly lead the way. How are people you work with reacting to this.

Curious George: It's fun to be exploring new and unknown territories, and VWs certainly are that. Most academics are oblivious to the change that this technology brings, so it will take a few years.

Pooky Amsterdam: There really is little corollary in real life- lets all go on an overseas voyage & see what we want to discuss about, the universe?

Curious George: Right now, most people assume that this is just some silly video games for adults. But that will change, as the VWs technology becomes more pervasive and people start discovering its utility.

Pooky Amsterdam: Yes but have you been able to bring your colleagues into this- have they been intrigued? You work at one of the nations most prestigious universities in terms of technology. Are you vetting your colleagues before you approach them?

Curious George: Not vetting, I just know who might be interested to try this, and I tell them about it. Some of them have already. We ask people to give MICA seminars and/or public lectures. Some colleagues, yes, but these have been selected as being potentially open to this kind of thing.

Pooky Amsterdam: Great- this was my next question- you are using it both for international collaborations and also to bring events to the more general science community.

Curious George: There is also the obvious use of SL as a collaboration platform, and I have used it for my research group meetings. As for the people we bring in as speakers, some remain active, and some don't. And we are about to start using SL for meetings of an international collaboration we are now starting, with groups at Caltech, in Italy, and in India. Telepresence technology like this makes a lot of travel unnecessary, and it is a very green technology because of that. And on a subjective level, as you know, it works better than the usual video- or teleconferencing setups.


Pooky Amsterdam: Do you find that new people, new scientists are amazed at how they might "extend themselves" into an avatar?

Curious George: Those who really take to it, yes.

Pooky Amsterdam: Do you find it is a love it or don’t get it kind of thing?

Curious George: Not sure, there is probably a spectrum of reactions. The technology is still fairly primitive. It will get a lot better, and then more people will "get it". What I mean is more effective 3-d graphics, and haptic computing to capture motions and facial expressions. And this will happen, for commercial reasons, probably first driven by entertainment, but then becoming ubiquitous in the same was as the web did, and perhaps even more so. Right now we simply transfer the ways we do meetings and lectures in RL into SL. We may yet discover better and new uses.

Pooky Amsterdam: Hmm, how much does facial expression affect a lecture in RL? Will be very interesting to have a motion capture animation for a professor giving a lecture.

Curious George: Yes, body language and facial expressions are crucial parts of our communication, and yet somehow, these cartoony and limited avatars do work better than videoconferencing.

Pooky Amsterdam: We accept their limitations more readily somehow.

Curious George: There is probably some good research to be done on this, by the people who study human perception, vision, etc.

Pooky Amsterdam: Perhaps we are more exacting for "completely realistic." You have opened fairly recently here, what program have you been most excited about and what events are you looking to broaden your calendar with?

Curious George: Well, MICA has been around since last April or May (2008), but StellaNova is new. We have started two new research discussion groups, in collaboration with KIRA, which is Piet Hut's other SL playground.

Pooky Amsterdam: A playground for the mind so to speak

Curious George: One is a group to investigate the use of OpenSim and WVs generally for numerical stellar dynamics. The other is a group called "Relocatable Laboratories in Metaverse", and the name explains it. These have weekly meetings I would like to start a couple more things soon. And another one will be a series of roundtable discussions on topics in computational science and technology.


Pooky Amsterdam: Brilliant & again I would think that would need also graphics or some kind of representation.

Curious George: One group we plan to start would be a research forum on immersive data visualizations.

Pooky Amsterdam: Can you tell me about it what people will be looking forward to on Stella Nova. Do you find people open up that is become more inspired with out the barrier of the physical body? Is this more a purer mind experience- the ideas generate exponentially? What is KIRA?

Curious George: OK, since you have been asking new questions as I have been typing the previous answer, let me rewind and answer the new ones in order: "what is KIRA?”: It is Kira Cafe, a group run by Piet Hut / Pema Pera, and it deals with matters of philosophy, spirituality, etc., and some aspects of science.

Pooky Amsterdam: Fractals are for example, a program which generates images based on a specific kind of randomness , e.g. found in nature when you say you are looking at computations, I think why not use a scripting program to set up the parameters for what you want to see something like that or am I completely off the loop here. Would you use something like this?

Curious George: I really don't understand the question, but let me say what we actually do:
Some of us do modeling of stellar systems, e.g., star clusters, and there is some randomness in that, but it is all rigorously well understood and controlled; and then the output of these simulations needs to be visualized. Another aspect is visualizing highly complex data sets - some of which may appear random, but a goal of science is to discover patterns and structures.

Pooky Amsterdam: Yes of course.

Curious George: I am not sure if that answers your question, but to more on, "what people will be looking forward to on Stella Nova"? Well, several things: We continue our program of popular and technical lectures, We have these new interest groups that I mentioned, and more to come, We will be organizing interdisciplinary meetings to exchange ideas with scientists and scholars in other fields, and the workshop tomorrow is a bit like that. And finally, it is an open and inviting environment for people to come and use for their discussions, and hopefully make new contacts.

Pooky Amsterdam: You “exponentially” broaden your idea group when you do this.

Curious George: Yes. Now, "do you find people open up that is become more inspired without the barrier of the physical body?" I don't know about that, and I kind of doubt it, but there are a couple of effects: First, it is easier to establish contacts and communication with other people here, perhaps because there is no "social cost". Second, perhaps it is easier to focus on the exchange of ideas, since there is no physicality to distract you. But on the other hand, there are distractions peculiar to SL, so... it is complicated. The upshot is, it is somehow easier to communicate with people who were perfect strangers just a few minutes earlier, to establish genuine rapport, and quickly; and in the first place, you would never have met in RL....

Pooky Amsterdam: I find that fascinating & strangely enough builds some measure of trust so it has all the hallmarks of a great laboratory in this sense people accepting that "all in this together" and loosening up.

Curious George: Speaking very generally, facilitating exchange of ideas is one of the most powerful engines of progress - in science, art, politics, and civilization in general. And SL is really good at that as this is all about human interactions. Now, the purpose of MICA is all that, but also something else.

Pooky Amsterdam: Yes indeed I see a kind of renaissance happening because of this.

Curious George: We need to establish such "scientific use cases" in order to bring in more skeptical academics. We need to find out what else is this good for, aside from the human communication aspects; so, for example, effective data visualization is a major scientific need - could this be a really good tool for it?

Pooky Amsterdam: That is my question about scripting, that is can you run a script on this engine to determine patterns.

Curious George: What you may be thinking of is what goes under a generic name of "data mining." And indeed, good data visualization is a key component of discerning patterns in the data.

Pooky Amsterdam: To program a script to actually give interaction maybe more of a regression analysis type of engine.

Curious George: There is even an emergent field of "visual data analytics". Computing within SL is not very efficient - it is not meant for that.

Pooky Amsterdam: Ok I trust you on this one.

Curious George: A more efficient approach is to do the computing on another machine, but visualize and interact in SL (or OpenSim, or some other VW environment).

Pooky Amsterdam: People are more open & more willing to share here- so surely the collaborative aspect is going to "pay off" for lack of a better word.

Curious George: I should point out that MICA is not SL-specific, we use SL as the most convenient platform for now, but we are really interested in a broader issue of the use of VWs for science and scholarship. OpenSim is thus one direction we are exploring.

Pooky Amsterdam: What is the benefit there do you think? & then I will ask what are you most looking forward to in the near term either event or program & where do you see MICA in a year.

Curious George: In SL you are limited by the LL servers in terms of the memory (e.g., the number of prims) etc. With your own machine, you can have as much as you can afford to buy, and use the VR visualization engine to look at it, as it were.

Pooky Amsterdam: Are you planning on using prims for experimentation?

Curious George: Let me illustrate this; let's go to the SE corner of this sim. You may have seen this, an early visualization experiment I did with Desdemona Enield. These are real data in a 6-dimensional parameter space plotted here. But there is only about 1000 data points, one per prim. In the data sets we are dealing with nowadays, there may be a billion data points - or even more. That's a bit too many prims for LL servers. So if we want to visualize a data set with more than a few thousand data points, we need our own server.

Pooky Amsterdam: Yes why though in 3D for a data point? : I can understand if you needed it to explain something or have more than one set of info in it. Why not a flat picture?

Curious George: We can do experiments in SL to see what works, but then do the real production on a custom machine.

Pooky Amsterdam: It’s fabulous looking.

Curious George: Why not a flat picture? Because the need is to visualize data sets in many dimensions, not just 2 or 3.

Pooky Amsterdam: Ah yes to see where it isn’t spiked or peaked in 3D you see that better this way & may I ask what this data is representing?

Curious George: This is a 6-dimensional data set; we know how to encode maybe a dozen dimensions; but the data sets we are exploring in astronomy now may have hundreds or thousands of dimensions. And in biology, there may be data sets in millions of dimensions. So a flat picture just does not work.

Pooky Amsterdam: Do you think there are hundreds of dimensions? As there are many more colors in the spectrum that the human eye can see?

Curious George: These are dimensions of a parameter space, not real space.

Pooky Amsterdam: Are you sure?

Curious George: String theory says there may be 11 dimensions, but that is a completely different story. What I mean here is: You measure a 100 numbers for each of a million objects, say galaxies, or some medical records, or whatever. Then you have a million data points in 100 dimensions. For this one, you can click on the sign to the left, to get a simple explanation card.

Pooky Amsterdam: It’s a much deeper tool for knowledge & of course pattern mining.

Curious George: Anyway, I hope that we can do much more complex data visualization than this. One advantage SL has is that I can interactively examine the data set, along with my collaborators.

Pooky Amsterdam: It’s a start for this and is a fantastic tool indeed. I’m’ in awe……

Curious George: Well, sit down, don't faint... :) Here's another one of our discussion circles, where people can sit down and talk about whatever data visualization is being displayed there.

Pooky Amsterdam: May I ask you finally where you would love to see MICA in a year?

Curious George: That is a good question, so: I'd like to see a broader buy-in by the academic community, getting engaged, experimenting with immersive VR, and how to best use this technology for its purposes; to have MICA as a forum and a catalyst for interdisciplinary exchanges of ideas in this arena; and also, to have it as a real, legally incorporated scientific institution, with its own funding, staff, etc. MICA is an experiment by itself - an experiment that hosts other experiments.

Pooky Amsterdam: Yes it is and hopefully the rest will follow soon.

Curious George: It aims to answer the question: how would you do research in VWs?

Pooky Amsterdam: It makes this question so relevant because you are asking it as well.

Curious George: Including the relatively mundane issues of having a purely virtual, serious scientific organization, how to run it, etc.

Pooky Amsterdam: And of course this is a laboratory for much in this way of discussion. You don’t need to go to a mesa in Arizona, its incredibly cost effective as a retreat.

Curious George: Yes, and cost-effectiveness is very important especially now, with the funding crisis. Already we can save a lot of research dollars if we don't travel, but meet here.

Pooky Amsterdam: That’s immediate plus you don’t have to bring your suit to the cleaners.

Curious George: Yes, it is a green technology - save the money, and the jet fuel.

Pooky Amsterdam: And in the comfort of your own environment you are able to open up to the shared environment maybe SL is less threatening because of this - you are in your safe space in reality & so on this foundation of personal safety can express yourself more.

Curious George: That's not so important to scientists - and there aren't too many of them who are too shy to express their ideas.

Pooky Amsterdam: Wonderful really this has all the hallmarks of great success I would bet on it if I was a gambling woman.

Curious George: Thanks, let's hope so.

Pooky Amsterdam: thank you for the hour as well.

Curious George: And pleasure talking with you, as always.

Pooky Amsterdam: I will join KIRA .

And I did and have been additionally enriched by the series of talks I have attended there as well. If you are interested in broadening your understanding of scientific and educational research and ideas, I urge you to join too.
And please join MICA to learn more as well. We are very fortunate to have this high level of information available to us, which outside of a university setting, you would be hard-pressed to find. IM Paradox Olbers for this.

JWheels Carver interviews Pooky Amsterdam

Pooky Amsterdam is interviewed by JWheels Carver on making machinima and in creating her hit show The 1st Question and in the original Dating Casino. JWheels and Pooky have a great half hour conversation on vision, what audiences want and cook up some great steam behind how to create real entertainment in Second Life. A must listen.

http://thinkerer.org/VoiceVirt/VoiVirPeoWheel.htm

Science Life

I walk the Science beat in Second Life, it is incredibly rich and diverse. It also includes education and technology. I am constantly amazed at the depth of resources, and their availability.

Tonight I am going to Yuri’s night http://slurl.com/secondlife/Avatrian%20Central/123/78/31

which is the celebration of the date of Yuri Gagarin’s successful trip into outer space in 1961, and as the first human being to orbit the Earth. We will be celebrating this great human achievement with slide shows, and more. I even hope to pick up a copy of the space suit he wore.

Yesterday night I worked on fixing the voting board which allows the audience in the StudioDome, where I broadcast my live show, http://www.the1stquestion.com/ to vote in real time from all over the world on which of the panelists’ ideas and / or inventions they most support. The panel this week was made up of a university administrator whose college hosted the Edward R. Murrow Awards, http://www.wsu.edu/murrow/winners.htm for journalism, and where Helen Thomas took the stage in Second Life and in real life. Also on my panel was real life science author Billy Marse, (SL name H3 Turbo) who just wrote a great treatise on Geology and in addition will be a leading light in a few weeks for Earth Week on Second Life, where members of the US House of Representatives will be speaking.

I just received the Astro-news from the head of the Physics Club, Sl name Roger Amdahl, who sends out a weekly update of astronomical happenings. Yesterday morning I attended a lecture on NOAA weather satellites, Thursday morning I was at a lecture called, “Stellar Dynamics in a Virtual Universe,” a weekly workshop on setting up N-body simulations in virtual worlds at the MICA auditorium. MICA stands for Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. I will be submitting an interview I did recently here with the founder of MICA, Dr. George Djorgovski (SL name Curious George)of Caltech University who worked on the World Wide Telescope for MicroSoft, and is pioneering in his vision for and work in the virtual world known as Second Life for science education.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/StellaNova/128/128/2

I also attended Science Friday which is broadcast live over NPR, and which Dr Ira Flatlow hosts in Second Life to a very appreciative crowd.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Science%20Friday/205/250/23

I found out about Science Friday from Troy McLuhan, (Real Life name Dr. Troy McConaghy PHD in AstroDynamics) who runs the science center and moderates the listing of inworld science events. http://science-center-group.wikispaces.com/Science-Related+Places told me about it.

I also saw Troy at a recent talk replete with PowerPoint and great audience discussion and interaction given by Dr. Robert Knop (SL name Prospero Linden & yes he does work for Linden Lab) Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy - “A Snapshot of the Early Universe” here is an abstract of his talk –

In 1998, two teams of astronomers observing supernovae discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. The speaker, Dr. Knop, was on one of the two teams, working with Saul Perlmutter. In this talk, I will describe just how it is that you can measure the expansion history of the Universe by observing distant exploding stars, and what surprising things we saw in our results that indicated to us that the expansion of the Universe was in fact accelerating. At the end, I’ll briefly mention some things about “dark energy,” the mysterious substance that is causing this surprising universal acceleration.

This science talk is intended for the general public. All were welcome. Its part of a series of popular talks called Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy. I learned a lot, might not have understood everything, but for a person with a very active mind, being able to access information like this is unbelievably significant for me.

Dr. Knop, or Pospero as I call him, was also very much present at the MICA Popular Talk - Black Holes, Bright Lights: Quasars as Probes of the Early Universe

I was last week to the International Year of Astronomy 2009 Island

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Astronomy%202009/34/222/2

where a fantastic lecture on"William and Caroline Herschel and the Invention of Modern Astronomy"was simulcasted (beamed live) into an auditorium there, given by Michael Lemonick — Science Journalist & Lecturer, Princeton University. I found out how an experiment William Herschel made with a thermometer, a prism and the rainbow of light it reflected led to the discovery infra red light. Wow!

Attendance in the lecture also meant a chance to win a real life Galileoscope. It is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 by a team of leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators. Someone won the raffle (which will be an ongoing event) and it will be shipped to their real home, so they can watch the sky. If I win, I will donate it to my daughters’ school. If I wasn’t there, I never would have known about it.

Troy just relocated the Science Center http://slurl.com/secondlife/Science%20Friday/33/146/22 to Info Island, http://infoisland.org/ where Loreli Junot (Real Life name Lori Bell), DaisyBlue Heffernan and Abbey Zenith, among others run the magnificently appointed Info Island, which has links and teleports to 43 Library installations and islands. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/112/105/33 Click on the Archipelgao board for more information. Here there are books, audiobooks, training programs, programs, medical library, science fiction portals, a fantasy gallery, events, a movie theater, exhibits, web resources and also the ability to create customized resources for people. The Alliance Liabrary system is magnificent!

The Librarians were one of the first groups to realize the great economies of agglomeration to be found in Second Life.

There are a lot of libraries on Second Life. A great one is being built as this blog is being written. It is being created dutifully, and in minute detail, which will thrill ancient architecture students from all over the world. The texts being accumulated are

the passion of one Nev Loring, who is building in his own time and on his own dime, the Library of Constantinople. http://slurl.com/secondlife/WORLDland%201/235/165/21

He said he had been accumulating so many books over his year on Second Life that he had to give them a home. A friend offered him some land on which to build, and here he is creating it for us, the residents who care about these things. There are a lot of us.

The Smithsonian Latino http://slurl.com/secondlife/Smithsonian%20Latino%20Lobby/140/128/2

has an incredible exhibit on the The Olmec who were an ancient Pre-Columbian people living in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico. There are pictures taken of Matthew Stirling of the Smithsonian Institution who conducted the first detailed scientific excavations of Olmec sites in the 1930s and 1940s. Stirling, along with art historian Miguel Covarrubias, became convinced that the Olmec predated most other known Mesoamerican civilizations. The dig and museum is an incredible learning experience and again I traveled to a part of the world I would never have found if it wasn’t for Second Life. The museum was designed by a woman, SL name Penelope Riggles who had been given a workshop by the person who is in charge of the Exploratorium in San Francisco and who curates and maintains the one here in SL, Patio Plasma.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Exploratorium/147/118/22

He also writes Isaac Asimovs old column.

I have been to exhibitions on Charles Babbage, been introduced to the legendary figure who was Ada Lovelace, and found remarkable adventures in thought, education, science and more. All in the Victorian Island known as Caledon which has an incredibly rich and well resourced community for this important period in the time of the Industrial Revolutuon.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caledon%20Victoria%20City/155/118/23

I have seen the Mars Phoenix land on MARS, in an open air auditorium in The Scilands here with 90 other people who witnessed it live with me from around the world, while we had feedback from the actual control room at NASA. The SciLands are a restricted area in SecondLife devoted to the Sciences and Education. 45 islands now make up this illustrious area. The SciLands are my beat so to speak. I broadcast my weekly show, The 1^st Question from here in The StudioDome, and make it my business to know what is happening around this great part of our metaverse in Second Life.

I take the following from the SciLands wordpress http://scilands.wordpress.com/

site:

The SciLands is a specialized region of Second Life for Science and Technology based organizations, providing:

* Island reservations in a pure Science region, with shared resources and other Science-based organizations, initially centered around the Space Industries and the acclaimed International Spaceflight Museum.

* Shared resources, islands, events and networking for organisations interested in formal and informal science education, innovation, knowledge transfer and research using Second Life.

* Access to our network of experienced Second Life residents and developers who value scientific accuracy and innovation.

* An extended network of organizations interested in all aspects of informal and formal education using Second Life, including University Faculty, Government Agencies, Libraries, Museums, Subject Matter Experts and Educational Technology Researchers.

Here is the SciLands.org URL as well http://www.scilands.org/

The events held in the SciLands of second life are just like watching your favorite shows on the History and Discovery Science channels, except you get to be interactive, ask real questions, in real time, from real experts top in their fields. It doesn’t really get any better than that.

I could go on, but I have to get ready for Yuri’s night, which is also being celebrated all over the world, and celebrated on Second Life. I will meet people from Russia who are attending to celebrate this achievement of this great human being who was one of the first to orbit the moon. And so from all over the globe we come together to realize what we can accomplish together. I just got a book called US Human Spaceflight, which was compiled by SL name Charlie Navarathna for the NASA CoLab Library & Archives. Head Librarian of which is Archivist Llewellyn.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/NASA%20CoLab/96/232/2

It is a great place to be when you want to learn. The only naked I am aware of is The Naked Scientist broadcast which comes out of the BBC live onto the Scilands. It is a great hour of listening to the radio, in fact The Naked Scientists just won a European Podcasting Award. http://www.thenakedscientists.com/ Every Sunday we collectively gather and take part in this great program, they even take our questions from Second Life. It is a thrill to hear ones name called out over the broadcast! http://slurl.com/secondlife/SciLands/102/129/26

For those who are involved in the sciences, education and technology in Second Life, there are untold riches of discovery, learning, collaboration and more. We meet each other with a thirst for knowledge and an offered cup of wisdom which we share gladly and gratefully. I have heard other things go on in Second Life too, happily I keep this beat. Tune in to this channel for more of what’s really happening.

A Christmas Card from Pooky and the 2nd Question team

With Apologies to Shakespeare

To log on or not to log on that is the question-
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the asset server problems,
The n00bs and dramas of outrageous avas
Or to take your hands off the keyboard and by not typing end it.

To log out, to quit SecondLife
No more and by a break to say we end the heart ache and the thousand
virtual shocks that a second life day is heir to
Tis a crash devoutly to be reported.

To log off to sleep (finally!)
To sleep perchance to have Second Dreams- Ay there is the rub
For in that sleep of absence what is your girlfriend really doing
When you have shuffled off of this meta coil.

No Place Like Dome, StudioDome

Lots of movement occurs over the summer, in lots of ways. For the break from school kids get that long period to unwind and in not having to do much but be themselves learn about who they are and how they want to spend their time in leisure. They grow because that unstructured moment lets them explore which they don’t with the more rigorous schedule of real life, school work & exams breathing down their necks. They stay up late and sometimes try what they can’t during times of have to get to sleep early.

And people move as well more in the summer, sure there are vacations and going places, but there is also the big move that happens when one changes a residence. It happened to me this summer. Moving house in real life is never fun, packing a chore, cleaning worse and trudging through boxes an obstacle course at best. Oh to just pack up everything as I could in SecondLife would have been a lifesaver. This would have been my dearest wish. And it would have been worse but something wonderful happened. And so I realized the nature of home.

The 2^nd QuestioN! Has been housed at the SpinDome in the SciLands since its inception. The masses of people and activity that has occurred there made the place well, very busy, and Paradox Olbers, the Guru saw that it was time for the show to have a place of its own. He gifted me with the new venue from where the show is now seen. The StudioDome. My own place! I had tried to raise a site with the name StudioDome for some years hence, and though research, team and talent were there, the technology was not. I was at the time too far ahead of the curve, and then not far enough. I had done hundreds of shows and thousands of events on another virtual world. September of 2002 I did Romeo & Juliet in 6 acts. It took three hours, there were 2 Romeos, they fought in the balcony scene, one Romeo transformed himself into a lemon & lime and danced while Juliet wept. I learned a lot from that.

I had hosted a weekly poetry slam since March of 2003 where thousands of people came & presented their poems, songs and classics. Had a weekly talk show, wrote, produced and directed The ChrimboCarol every year for 5 years. launched the Wizard of Habboz, where people had to follow the yellow doormat road (we didn’t have bricks) to The Emerald City. Had A Brave New World book club, debates on policy, was Sandy in Grease and even hosted Improv and a Friday night Comedy Club. The Shakespeare festivals I produced would have made the Bard proud. And all in text, yes at that time, I was Home in a 2.5D world with no headset.

I guess Home is where you take it, what you make of it, give to it and you can travel the world real or virtual forever in search of beauty, or in search of home but you must carry it with you or you will find it not. Since March of 2008, I have found it here, finally and as so many of us have in a world where we can & do bring our dreams to bear, see the fruit of our many hours of devotion ripen in the unrestricted, summery days of SecondLife.

The StudioDome where my show is broadcast from represents a new beginning and truly the place from where I can make happen, the vision I have of viewer log in entertainment.

In getting my own place, as the song goes from where I shall never wander, I host a show which is the beginning of many a night of live productions. It is a place to grow from home is, and the safer we feel there the more we can grow. As if the soil can nourish a tree that spreads its boughs to become wings. Paradox has given this seed a chance to grow & establish myself in doing so I am unafraid I will have to move. And such is the nature of Dome. No place like it.

Why Watch TV, when you can Star in your Own Cartoon Movie Every Night?

"Why Watch TV when you can Star in your own Cartoon Movie Every night?"

The shift from passive to engaged user created content of an entertainment variety.
Consumerism takes many forms, and encompasses many kinds of products. We tend to define consumption of a product when we purchase it or use it. For example we certainly consume electricity, and this is the basis for our links into the Virtual Worlds we inhabit. We also have been consumers of electricity for a long time in regards to our entertainment patterns. Indeed radio, television and movies are all imported to us with the use of electricity. We take this so for granted, that to state this truth seems rather simplistic. Perhaps it is, and we have been consumers of entertainments in an electrified form for so long, the adaptation to the computer was rather seamless.

Traditional or old media is now having to watch as its audience once held passive in front of so much current, now shifts its paradigm to a more active form for what is being sought for entertainment. Viewership is down across the board for traditional and so is the advertising support that has provided the monetary backbone for production.

People spent more on videogames last year than Hollywood Box office. CBS just announced a $14 Million loss in the last quarter, it's only bright spot was the recently acquired CNET, and in an effort to "not ignore its audience or current trends" has agreed to broadcast its shows on of all places, YouTube.

But the old media giants do not understand, or are reluctant to understand that this shift is not just away from one screen to another. People are not just moving from one dull old toy to a shiny new one, and this represents something of a more fundamental nature. We are moving from passive viewing habits to another much more engaging form of entertainment. To be sure we are defined somewhat by what we consume. Yes, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and indeed the media we consume. When the final drum plays, though we will be judged not by what we consume in this world, but by what we produce.

Part of the appeal of Virtual Worlds, is that the content we create reflects who and what we are and what are interested in. We do not have be dumbed down to accept what is being offered on the networks, or in the movie theaters. We are in many ways reaching up when we create what we do. Surely this activity is part of what makes Virtual Worlds so appealing, and so worthy of return. Perhaps even more so than watching reruns of "Seinfeld" 5 nights a week.
Perhaps because I started on HabboHotel where you are not allowed to create any kind of assets, or to script in any way I began using the text based form of interaction for traditional kinds of entertainment. I hosted weekly poetry slams, and wanted to do more, so I expanded quickly into doing plays. I produced Romeo & Juliet for the first time in September of 2003. I had to use my powers of creation, in a more traditional way. I put on shows, I did many more plays, and found willing participants, who wanted to experience the adrenaline rush of freezing cold fingers while awaiting a cue in what is “live” theater. And It represents a key into why, what I have been prototyping for the past 5 years with the now defunct tinyspaceplayers of Habbo, to that which I do on SecondLife in the StudioDome in the SciLands has so much appeal. It is exciting.

The term artificial reality, coined by Myron Krueger, has been in use since the 1970s but the origin of the term virtual reality can be traced back to the French playwright, poet, actor and director Antonin Artaud. In his seminal book The Theatre and Its Double (1938), Artaud described theatre as "la réalite virtuelle", a virtual reality "in which characters, objects, and images take on the phantasmagoric force of alchemy's visionary internal dramas"
Even though the medium of the tiny screen is electric, as we are acting live and in real time, the analogy is much closer to theater, or the beginning of the television age's live broadcast of shows. And of course with the production element of anything can happen, and this is live, we are in "The Golden Age of the Internet" as far as show production goes.

When we log onto a Virtual World, we are already taking part in a suspension of belief immediately which has been the hallmark of sitting in a dark movie theatre about to watch just about any film, except a documentary. We do not, in general log onto Virtual Worlds to create documentary. We do suspend our belief and take part in the fantastic. Accordingly, in SecondLife we can fly for example, walk underwater, be furry creatures and more. According to the SecondLife traffic report, October was a good month to lose oneself within the narratives of Second Life role play as hundreds of residents joined the ranks of Kingdoms of Sand and Remembrance. We are looking to create our own entertainment and if you will, role play is akin to theater. USG is also what we come here to do. As we already suspend our belief; inhabiting the element of the Virtual World is a prime place to construct theater, theater games and shows.
I am however a child of structured theater, not role play. And I do want others to play with me, learning as they do. Walt Disney famously said " I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained" and education when it encompasses entertainment remains more vivid and is retained longer. (Examples of this are the "conjunction junction" songs and all alphabet kind of songs which most of us utilized in learning and retaining the alphabet)In doing plays, in creating shows that have an element of learning something one did not know before, I engage additionally the participating audience. This happened with the Shakespeare plays, never was the Bard more vivid than when I was inhabiting one of his characters. That held true for all the actors, and when Shakespeare became the hottest ticket on Habbo, I knew I was onto something special.

Now I produce shows that people are thrilled to be a part of. The 2nd QuestioN! has a weekly audience which loves playing along as the show is taped, yes live. They watch it on the video on the site afterwards, and it has become a very popular show. It is the Quiz Show to The Stars! The audience interacts as if they are also the stars, and to be honest, they are. It is a fast paced hour with the audience voting along, and guessing the answers to the questions. Same is true with my new show The Dating Casino which encourages the audience to reveal their preferences to the questions asked as the contestants also answer in real time.

In thinking about how people view video, it pays to think about how people already view video. The experience of watching is certainly not new, and there are loads to understand and appreciate about viewing patterns inherent in the traditional TV audience. The screen has shifted yes, but the same eyes remain firmly in place the species “video on the Internet” is very different from “traditional TV programs” but the species Human has not changed so very much, for example:

The average number of TV channels that people actually watch has only gone from 10 channels in 2005 to almost 16 channels in 2006, despite the number of channels going up from an average of 41 to 104. And people spent an average of less time overall on each stop, mirroring a dwindling attention span. The relevance here is that people have “viewing habits” whether on the Internet or television. People will go back to the same thing again & again if they get something they like there. The Internet caters to people’s tastes and, according to PodTrac, a high percentage of Internet audience members tend to listen or watch the same podcast “station” (for lack of a better word, or “site” if you prefer.) Think of yourself, what number of different actual sites do you go to willingly? Do you tend to visit the same sites over and over again? I think we all do. That’s why we have cookies.

The beauty is there are so many ways to engage the viewer, consumer and Interactive audience. The Virtual World platform is unique. One is generally alone at the computer, doing something that has, needs or wants to get done. When someone is in a Virtual World it is usually because they asked for it and wanted to go there. Here is an opportunity to involve and entertain an audience. People log in and play along, this is viewer log in entertainment. Having a specific show and destination for them to be a part of means they also will return. And they do. Here I build audience or customer loyalty today and encourage them to return and deliver customer value tomorrow. This business model also provides opportunities for advertisers to have a branded form of entertainment on the net, beyond what is just on their site. It is happening live on SecondLife, and people willingly are a part of the show.

Watching videos on the net is rising, according to eMarketeer, in 2006 63% of US households streamed video whether it was content or advertising, by 2011 this is projected to grow to almost 87%. In June of 2007 figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers show that Internet advertising revenues continue to skyrocket. The 2007 first quarter revenues of US$4.9 billion represent a 26 percent increase over Q1 2006 at US$3.8 billion. “The continued growth of online ad revenues clearly illustrates marketers’ increased comfort with the extraordinary vitality and accountability of this medium,” commented IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg. “It reaches consumers with an unprecedented level of efficiency and measurability that provides marketers with actionable data. And the ever-changing landscape of new platforms and technologies that enrich interactive advertising guarantees that this growth trend will continue.”

The eyes are here, the money follows. And Virtual World participation is also very much on the rise. Recently, Philip Rosedale, former CEO of Linden Labs predicted at an Always On conference that within ten years the number of people in Virtual Worlds will overtake the number of web users.

Using this platform means creating more than precious moments, and full scale communities dedicated to learning, enrichment and having fun. The platform is perfect for launching all kinds of traditional and potentially profitable kinds of entertainment as well. According to a 2007 Morgan Stanley report, “longer term monetization should grow faster than usage, which should grow faster than users, recent very recent rapid growth of online video + voice + USG combined with a high probability of innovation bodes well for continued usage growth. Ongoing improvements in monetization are being driven by improved targetability / personalization / usability.” Not just microtransactions within a Virtual World, but also delivering the kind of game shows that have been around for over 20 years. And these will eventually be supported by advertisers as well, seeking to brand original productions with their names and product. I jokingly have said that I would, on the 2nd QuestioN! drink a martini of Bombay Gin and smoke a Camel cigarette. I might be put to the test one day with this.

Brand entertainment and Internet advertising has the ability to reach people fully focused and literally at the edge of their seats. With all eyes on the smaller screen, those in advertising must decide how to parlay active interest into time spent with the product. “Time is the new currency,” as it has been said, after which follows, “Content is King”.

Online shows will create opportunities for branding awareness, think of the old Kraft Mystery theatre but on the internet where you too can log in to participate in a performance, or watch someone you know. The new age also eclipses the old one in many unusual ways. We have idolized gorgeous film stars throughout the history of movies, but needing to look at Brad Pitt is certainly diminished when you can easily look like him, or better, in your avatars skin. And if your partner wants to look like Angelina Joile, well she can. If we worship beauty, and have been trained to want to look at better looking people, the ability to be that better looking person might be the best of all worlds.

Another factor for online production and return on investment is cost. Clearly the cost of putting on any kind of television or cable like programming is not only fraught with barriers to entry, (especially if your Dad is not Michael Eisner), but also that of cost. On a Virtual World platform, all the elements to create your own show, or machinima is there, and very often quite inexpensively. Consider it costs around $20,000 USD just to have a professional writer craft just a one hour episode of The Office, and this without any other costs such as hiring talent or production staff. The ability to create an online original program as I have done for very much less is a huge incentive for doability.

It does take commitment, comfort with being that much ahead of the curve, ability to withstand criticism and a very clear focus to produce, organize, motivate, write and direct. These luckily are my strengths. As far as scripting the voting board, or building the StudioDome, well I have to leave that to people who are far more talented in that regard. And with any great production for entertainment value, no one can write, film, direct, act and build sets. The difference is in a Virtual World there are people who want to do what their natural talents give them the ability to do.

There is opportunity to make this happen, it is low cost, it is immediate and it is available.
Machinima and video is more than a trend; it is a valuable way of connecting with an audience that in the case of the computer is literally and figuratively, at the edge of their seats. The intimate nature of the relationship between someone at the keyboard versus someone holding the power tool is quite different. The body no longer ends at the fingertips, but extends into the medium of the computer. If the fingers extend into the medium, then so does the mind in new ways. That is why entertainment on the web isn’t passive, it’s active. The brain itself is engaged in a completely new, active way. We are meaning seeking creatures, as Jane Goodall said, if we find meaning, we will return. We must keep this in mind in providing programming on the web worth watching.

We have an endless appetite for things to see and for things that will stimulate us; therefore engaging with meaningful video is essential. We have been trained now for over 50 years to respond to a moving image through the television. We are training ourselves as to what to look for with the InterVision we are presented with now on the net.

For those who don’t want to produce shows as I do, there is the opportunity to play within them as a contestant, or a member of the panel. For those who want to watch, there is the excitement of being at a live broadcast, and what is even more fun, the ability to really be a part of the audience interaction. This is why I create the game shows. On the 2nd QuestioN!, although the panel and myself and my co-host are on voice, the audience is not, but their constant chatlog comments is very rich, varied and entertaining. They are participating in the program as it is being filmed. We have left the passive to become active and star in the very real experience of our own cartoon movies every night.

This creates an added bonus for us in terms of entertainment. When you go to the movies, you are passively watching. On the 2nd QuestioN! you are actively engaged, and engaged in trying to guess the questions along with 60 other people all playing in the “room” at the same time.
Even Alec Trebek doesn’t have that with Jeopardy. I will take viewer log in entertainment on the web, for a million.