When I heard that the theme for the Linden Lab Christmas party was going to be steam punk, I knew I had to go as Babbage Linden. Since 2005 my avatar in Second Life has sported a victorian suit from Neverland and a steam arm, originally from a Steambot avatar which I updated to a more recent design from Marcos Fonzerelli after Joe Linden started washing his face in my sink.

I had a suit that was close enough and a bit of riffling through local shops and ebay got me a waistcoat and cravat that were a pretty good match, but I knew the arm was going to need a lot of construction, even if I went for the first version from the Steambot. After some Googling trying to find out how to construct a conical frustum I remembered the export to world project that had converted Second Life objects to paper craft models. So, after checking that Marcos didn’t mind me exporting his geometry from Second Life, I decided to do that.

Installing OGLE proved to be really easy — just dragging the replacement OpenGL DLL and supplied config to the Second Life directory worked fine, but my first few captured scenes were full of unwanted clutter. In the end I found that using the advanced menu to turn off all render types apart from Basic, Volume and Bump and the UI feature allowed me to capture just the steambot arm placed in front of me in Second Life.

After opening the .obj file captured by OGLE in Blender, exporting it as a DXF and opening it in Pepakura Designer it was clear that the model was far too complicated — the cones and spheres created dozens of faces. Going back in to Second Life I broke the steambot arm in to 1 piece for each cardboard part I expected to make, stripped off all of the spheres, made the finger tips in to boxes instead of cones and then used the Second Life preferences to set the object mesh complexity to minimum, which reduced the number of faces on each cylinder to 6.

With these simplifications made the models looked much more managable when opened in Pepakura Designer, but it was still worth playing with open faces to simplify the parts in to quad strips. With these tweaks made I determined the correct scale. I placed my forearm on a couple of sheets of A4 and then adjusted the scale in Pepakura Designer until the steambot arm covered approximately the same amount of paper, then noted down the scale so I could use it when printing each part.

After printing the parts out on A4, I pinned them to some think double ply corrugated card from some old Dell boxes and then cut out the shapes and assembled them with gaffa tape, PVA and paper fasteners. I replaced the spheres with some polystyrene spheres from a craft shop and replaced the shiny with half a dozen coats of copperchrome spray paint.

I had a load of fun and the finished arm is amazingly sturdy, surviving 6 hours of Christmas party relatively unscathed. Who knows, maybe I’ll get another chance to wear it at an SLCC in the future. A full set of pictures with notes is available here.

Was without a doubt the phrase I heard most often yesterday, especially if you include variants like “Not Like Second Life”, “A bit like Second Life” and “Unlike Second Life”. Whatever else it’s achieved, Second Life has definitely become the frame of reference for the small and somewhat myopic crowd that made up the delegates at the sparsely populated Virtual Worlds Conference in London yesterday.

Vastpark is not like Second Life because it works in a web browser. Everyone on the web integration panel seemed to agree that virtual worlds in a browser is the next step, so I was glad to be there to question the TechCrunch consensus. How does having a world in a browser help? What does back and forward mean to a virtual world? What does it mean for presence to have 10 tabs open looking in to different parts of the same virtual world? Why would you want your view further constained by extra web browser widgets? Isn’t 3D in the browser going to be a blood bath for the next few years? Aren’t you really just using the browser as a download path? I suggested that the final question was the real reason that developers are pushing virtual worlds on the web and that the integration that most people want is to be able to use existing web and 2D media while using virtual worlds and use web services as a universal data bus between virtual worlds and other web aware platforms.

MPEG-V is not like Second Life because it’s a standard defined by 35 companies which is much better than the emerging Linden led standard according to Dr. Yesha Sivan in what was the worst talk I’ve heard in a long time. Not only did he make the standardisation process sound like a 3 year political bun-fight by people who didn’t know much about virtual worlds and who might come up with a bad standard, he managed to spell MPEG and Google incorrectly, called Sun’s Darkstar, Blackstar and attributed a Ugotrade quote to Philip Rosedale amongst other clangers. He was roundly rebutted by a large part of the audience including Tara5 Oh who questioned the need for old fashioned standards processes in the web era. Thank goodness for rough consensus and running code.

Most of the virtual worlds talked about in the investment panel were not like Second Life, but were nearly all Club Penguin clones. This copy the big exit attitude was called out by one of the audience as it seemed to be at odds with a lot of the talk about wanting to back the first in a market, but at least one of the panel is still looking for a successful 18+ social world play. The panel ended with a show of hands from people wanting money and people wanting to invest, but the economic climate made the whole affair very muted with lots of the panelists saying that they are slowing down rates of investment as it’s difficult to get existing companies off their books.

As with Virtual Policy 08 and the Virtual Worlds Forum the most valuable parts of the conference were the spaces between sessions. I had another very worthwhile discussion with Adam Frisby of OpenSim about C# script compatibility between OpenSim and Second Life. The straw man design we talked about was to have an idiomatic .NET interface for event handling that can be used by C# scripts and adapted for LSL scripts and a set of static library methods for manipulating the world that would be used directly by LSL scripts and wrapped by user created libraries to provide an idiomatic object oriented interface. Adam was particularly interested in the idea of user created wrapper libraries as it would allow the creation of an OpenSim interface library that could be ported to Second Life and implemented in terms of the ll* static methods. OpenSim could then agree to support the common behaviour of this library in Second Life and OpenSim instead of having to support the gamut of ll* methods some of which don’t map well to OpenSim internals. As well as defining a common set of events and ll* static methods that are supported on both platforms there would need to be a way of extending the interface with new events and library methods. In addition Adam was interested in making the event propogation configurable so that a single script could respond to events on many objects in a scene. This would effectively add a script interest management layer to OpenSim’s scripting interface. Where platforms provide differing interfaces to scripts we would also need to decide how scripts query the available interfaces or how they behave when interfaces are not available.

Overall a worthwhile trip, but not because of the conference. This Friday I’ll be talking at the online head conference about conferencing in Second Life which has the advantage of requiring no travel making marginal conferences like the Virtual Worlds Conference less risky to attend while allowing all of the serendipitous networking opportunities that make real life conferences worthwhile.

Last week I was invited to talk at JAOO Denmark. Originally a Java conference, JAOO is now a very broad software development conference covering everything from agile to language design to distributed systems.

The stand out talk on the first day was Gregor Hohpe‘s Programming the Cloud which enumerated some of the problems with building distributed systems without call stacks, transactions, promises, certainty or ordering constraints and then outlined some approaches to overcome them including looking at real life situations which also have to deal with the lack of distributed transactions. For example at Starbucks your coffee is made concurrently with your payment being taken and then problems are fixed up afterwards if you can’t pay, they can’t make the coffee or they get the order wrong. The throughput gained from optimistic concurrency is greater than the loss of having to fix things up, even if it means that sometimes you end up giving away free coffee.

Unfortunately I missed Lars Bak’s V8 keynote on Tuesday, but was really impressed by Successfully Applying REST by Stefan Tilkov which enumerated REST patterns and anti-patterns shining some light on the subtleties of a technology which initially seems straight forward but turns out to have some pot holes for the unwary.

The highlights on Wednesday were seeing Guy Steele and Dick Gabriel give their 50-in-50 talk again (which is still not available on-line, but one of the highlights is here) and seeing the new WeDo lego robotics platform for kids which will be available next summer. The most relevant talk was Test Driven Development, Take 2 by Erik Doernenburg which got me thinking about how to do dynamic mock objects in C++. My talk on embedding Mono in Second Life went down well and elicited some good questions, although as a fringe topic it wasn’t heavily attended.

Other highlights included Erik Meijer’s keynote on fundamentalist functional programming, Bill Venners talk on Scala, hearing Patrick Linskey conclude that the way to make Java scale is to use Scala or Erlang, James Copland reinventing OO, playing guitar at the jam session and hearing Erik suggest to Lars that we compile LSL to CIL and run it on V8 modified to capture thread state while Erik was spilling half bottles of Champagne over people and Lars was swaying and stumbling around the room.

It was immensely satisfying to see Bruce Sterling commenting on Carbon Goggles in his Beyond The Beyond blog for wired last week, not only because I’m a big admirer of his work, but because his 4 year old Spime neologism came up in the original discussions about Carbon Goggles at EuroFOO 2 years ago.

Sterling’s original description of Spimes make them sound extremely sophisticated and active objects: recording and publishing information about their construction and ownership, usage, possible modifications and alerting owners about the need for maintainence and so on. Our current reality is one of more passive objects which are annotated via the web: despite being able to run web servers, the possibilities for modifying Linksys SLUGs are independently published on the web; the lifecycles of passive books are tracked and determined using services like bookcrossing and bookmooch. Everything is web enabled right now: a subject I gave a talk on at BarCamp Brighton last year.

The current model relies on human identification and administration to grease the wheels of dumb objects. We see a Linksys SLUG and google to find out information about it. We enter the information added to a bookcrossed book to find out about it’s sequence of owners and route around the world. Augmented reality takes a step towards automating the process: objects are still passive, but RFID readers replace humans in the identification of objects, automated processes pull information on the object from external databases and augmented reality overlays display the information over the object in a way that gives us x-ray like abilities. We can see the details of the construction, components, chemistry and recycling options for objects. Able to make visible the invisible, to see the full picture beyond feature lists and prices.

Sterling talks about the “need to document the life cycles of objects” and this was the original plan for Carbon Goggles. Everything from an apple to a supercomputer has an Id in Second Life and so the goal was to compare the carbon footprints of everything over it’s entire lifecycle. The apple is cultivated using machine tools, transported, refrigerated and stored and has a carbon footprint just like an object that actively emits carbon like a motorcycle. In many cases the carbon costs of creating and destroying objects can dwarf the carbon they emit in their use. It can be more carbon efficient to buy a second hand car than to buy a new hybrid, despite the later’s frugal emissions while in use.

Unfortunately collecting data on entire life cycles is incredibly difficult. While people can measure the electricity usage of an appliance and add it to the AMEE wiki, it’s much harder to find out the emissions produced by the entire chain of companies that have built transported and assembled the myriad pieces that produced that object. When I last met Gavin in London he told me that the goal is for AMEE to provide this complete lifecycle picture of everything, but we’re a long way off. Environmental costs have been externalities outside company accounting for a long time. AMEE intends to add this missing accounting, but it’s tantamount to annexing every company’s accounting process and is likely to be just as complex as counting the pounds and pence.

In the future we will be able to automatically see everything there is to know about everything around us and be fully aware of the impacts of our consumption. Right now services like bookmooch, freecycle and bookcrossing allow us to add Spime like intelligence to objects if we’re prepared to do a lot of Spime wranging. Experiments like Carbon Goggles give us a glimpse of what the future in the real world might look like. We’re going to be a lot more aware, which is lucky, because we’re going to need to be.

Second Life has benefited greatly from growing in popularity alongside video sharing services. Many people’s first glimpse of Second Life or a particular Second Life experience is through the lens of a YouTube video. When promoting real world brands in Second Life, videos of the Second Life experience that can be viewed by a wider audience on the web are often an important part of the campaign. Even for experienced residents like me, it’s often a video posted on New World Notes that inspires me to fire up the Second Life viewer to take a look at an amazing new build or experience.

The goal of the Carbon Goggles demo and tutorial videos was to make it clear what Carbon Goggles do and how to use them, but videos are also a great way to make the Carbon Goggles visualisations themselves available to a wider audience on the web. As well as being an ambient augmented reality application that allows Second Life residents to passively learn about real world carbon costs, Carbon Goggles can be used to quickly create images and videos that illustrate real world emissions.

If you annotate new objects with carbon emission data using Carbon Goggles, please consider recording some footage of the newly annotated objects and adding it to the Carbon Goggles vimeo group. I’ve added a vimeo badge to carbongoggles.org to show the newest videos. As well as allowing Carbon Goggles users to share the locations of annotated objects in Second Life, carbongoggles.org now shares visualisations of carbon emissions data to everyone on the web.

2 years ago at Euro FOO 2006 I met a mass of great people and enjoyed a torrent of wonderful conversations, but 2 of them in particular stuck with me. The first was with Gavin Starks who commented that climate change would be much easier to deal with if we could see carbon dioxide. The second was with Claus Dahl who observed that Second Life is a great platform to prototype large scale augmented reality applications as every object in Second Life has an Id and you can give away free augmented reality glasses in the form of heads up displays (HUDs).

A year later I started to experiment with the latter idea with SLateIt, an augmented reality application that can be used to find, tag and rate virtual objects in Second Life. Although I think tagging, rating and recommendation systems have a bright future in navigating the vast quantities of people, places and stuff in Second Life, SLateIt mostly came about as a way to demo augmented virtual reality in Second Life without a large data set to associate with objects in SL.

Finally, last week, the awesome team of Max Williams, Ryan Alexander, Andrew Conway, Simon Willison, Natalie Downe and Chris Waigl helped me bring the two ideas together by mashing up SLateIt, SecondLife and Gavin Starks’ new AMEE emissions data base to create Carbon Goggles. Instead of mapping Second Life object Ids to tags and ratings, Carbon Goggles maps Second Life object Ids to AMEE URLs. The HUD queries carbongoggles.org for emissions data for nearby objects and, if found, overlays a sphere on the object with a volume corresponding to the monthly carbon emissions of the object. In 24 hours we managed to hack together a working system to demo at Mashed and 2 days later added an annotation interface that allows new objects to be annotated with emissions data.

Carbon Goggles has had some great coverage over the last week, but I really hope the story doesn’t end there. The goal is to annotate objects across Second Life to produce a collaborative user generated ambient augmented virtual reality scientific visualisation the size of Denmark. Together we can add an extra layer of information to Second Life allowing people to learn to make more informed decisions in real life while living their Second Life. If you’re part of a group in Second Life that would like to help annotate objects, host Carbon Goggles vendors in world, create videos or images of Carbon Goggles visualisations or would like to help in any other way, please join the Carbon Goggles group in Second Life and get in touch.