Life in the metaverse – 30 days in ActiveWorlds.

Shows us a demo of ActiveWorlds with lots of caveats about the clunkiness of the interface and the cheesiness of the music. He walks around the world and meets people.

The default avatar for people who haven’t paid sucks and people who have paid aren’t very nice to people who haven’t paid.

Everything is self-built so stuff at the centre comes from 1995 and then as you go out bits of land got claimed over time. Now 4.4 times the size of California. In 1999 it was really neat – shall we do a research paper or shall we just go into the virtual world?

People see it as a place where you can say what you want and do what you want. Actually not true they also watch for key phrases and may throw you out (sometimes after a warning) So there are rules. What would happen if we opened up a world without any laws – so he got a licence. A world about the size of Soho, a blank green space. Put in walls and doors and trees and said there’s no laws. His intention was to then watch over what happened.

Day 0 a massive poster 50′ high with pornographic shot hyperlinked to his mother. So he cleared it and put up some welcome signs and then just hoped that people would just be nice.

Day 1 6430 objects placed in the world, the world has structure and users, all text and building is logged. Fascinating to float above and watch people running around and making stuff while chatting and linking with each other. People interested in why it was there.

Wanted a more human face, so put his webcam on and put himself at 0,0. People stayed in there all day, everyone found it fun to claim land and put up their houses with sofas and log fires. About 40 people all seemingly with faith that it was going to stay and people were nice to each other and got on fine.

Day 4 Attack by the ActiveWorlds Terrorist Group – the leader AKA Jero placed 85,000 objects over 5 hours. Server closed. Cleared out his work. Email threats received to close down the world completely. Re-opened the world and logged in – everyone was waiting and cross because they thought that he’d done it deliberately. It does take time to create a new house.

World placed on DefConOne status. Attack reports reach Press Association News site, so contacted ActiveWorlds and traced his IP, contacted his ISP who told them who he was and the 15-year old boy had his computer taken away by his father. He logged in and said “for god’s sake, you told my dad. He’s not pleased” “You’ve upset the wrong person” within half an hour he’d lost all access to his machine as Jero had hacked in through the PWS.

So cleared out, re-opened world. And it just ran – people coming in and chatting. He became completely immeresed in the world. Gave him and others a sense of purpose. Lots of people with health problems or unemployed – it gave them a friendly face. Interesting how quickly people confided personal stuff. He’s god – but he hadn’t thought it all through.

Lady in Holland starts sending pictures of herself in “compromising purpose” Aaah no. Then she was talking about getting on a ferry and coming over for “a chat” Wanted to make a distinction between virtual life and “real” life. She went a bit quiet but it was fine.

A guy built a plinth with webcam on all sides and avatars all around with their hands up and watching him. He then asked Andrew to come to his lounge (a very big one) and ever wall was plastered with pictures of AHS. “So you’re not keen on my lounge then…” Realised he hadn’t thought about the implications – all of his personal details are online. Turned webcam off at this stage. Next day there’d been a call to the office asking for the webcam to be put back on. Went into the world and talked about it, but people couldn’t see his point of view. The line had been crossed.

Christmas came and they typed/sang xmas carols around the tree. The woman from Amsterdam bought him a Porsche.

People build amazing things – why? They built things that in the real world they wanted. A road network, satellite writing, a little town emerged. Lovers Lane for pictures of themselves and partners. Put in a planning application to demolish Lounge Guy’s house. All the pictures now had little hitler moustaches. He also built a church – used for meetings with a real world church.

The month ended – decided to run it for another year. Two people who met in the world wanted to get married, but the groom died before the wedding so they had a virtual funeral.

The structure of documents and the difficulty of representing them in computing. How can electronic documents improve on paper, rather than how simply to imitate it.

The History of computing – three dumb downs and a betrayal, Fire in the Valley, Freiburger especially the last chapter (Citizen Nelson)

The betrayal of Personal Computing – should make things easier and keep track of your stuff. All built on the model of operating systems distilling the 1960s into the unix system with a hierarchical system of files – the simulation of hierarchy and the simulation of paper. Computer systems are hierarchical because techies think it should be. The idea that they’re that way intrinsically is a lie. The challenge is taking how the real universe – Parallel interpenetrating structures and representing it through computing.

Computing is a Rorsach test – peoples descriptions of what computers are tells you much about them and people have also created them in their own image.

GUI => PUI – the PARC User Interface is more than an interface it’s a cosmology. A vertical desktop, the wastebasket, clipboard (the vilest thing on the face of the earth), folders and icons.

WYSIWYG is just a way of selling paper.

Meanwhile Ted was working on links behind text and the back button. Then the Xanadu project (not the bit where they got funding…until 1992) Every quotation should be connected to its original source. You can’t do that on the WWW because it comes from the hierarchy and lump file and the imitation of paper.

Ted shows http://www.xanadu.com.au/transqouter sends an EDL (an edit decision list) ie a bunch of links to the original stuff – go look it up and use it..

Implications – Copyright -> transcopyright you get the right as long as everything is linked back to it’s original source.

Techies say – this is new. Ted says no this isn’t new we’ve had it before it’s called literature.

Nothing I believe in can be done on the web – the next step is transliterature – an entirely new structure. We need something like software X but simpler – as that catches on, it actually gets more ponderous and complex. Hofstadters law – everything takes longer than you think even when you take into account Hostadters law.

We want you to be able to create flying comments on any document. Thousands of comments should be possible. A collaborative system where everyones contribution is clear and rewarded. Pullacross editing. Is it possible? Of course, but it’s not possible within the constraints of the PUI. We should be able to fly documents in 3D space with all the links being shown – the problem then is aggregating and understanding them.

So we have a document structure that is content and clinks – the multitrack view of a document.

Terry Pratchett talks about octarine – can you visualis a completely new colour?

What Ted does for fun. Why are databases rectangular? Theodore Codd at IBM thought it had mathematical properties that would be useful, but under pressure he quit and SQL was a hasty mopping up which got mangled by people trying to make it work. Dirty secret 1 – it may take 10 years to merge two corporate databases. Dirty secret 2 – you have to stop it to modify a field. So Ted’s created ZigZag a multidimensional data structure.

Information is not rectangular though you might wish to give it rectangular properties. Interconnected cells – example the royal families of europe. Take hierarchical structure Dimension 1 is name, Dimension 2 is Title Dimension 3 – marriage Dimension 4 children etc etc etc. The assignment of dimensions is of course not trivial.

Floating world – the commercial version of ZigZag under the transliterature model.

Q: do you see a problem with spam – Yes of course because whatever you do gets gamed.

Q: Issue of binary and handling ambiguity – not to do with binary, it’s about how you come to tolerate ambiguity. What makes the web complicated, standardisation of browser. Acknowledge them not supress them.

Q: to what extent can we separate content and presentation? Imagine that you’re a movie producer going through scripts – no presentation at all except the descriptions within. But the producers are able to see through the script into the movie. You want both – the transliterature view we saw is without presentation but you can put all of this on top.

Q: Are there different types of Clinks? Yes and you can invent your own – it’s just a type and pointer (from: and to:)

Q: Realtime creation from the script – plus re-editing of Star Wars “just for fun” how does this fit with transcopyright and transliterature. They can sell snippets and get new ways in. Record industry allegedly seeing the benefit from this? IP law isn’t going away, Ted is trying to create something honest and within the law that doesn’t violate anything and reusable without negotiation.

Q: what happens to broken links. We promise not to – and there’s no need to because you always leave the original there.

Q: doesn’t it kill differential pricing? Yes, but we don’t have a payments system yet so maybe it will get fixed. The price is attached to it.

At the Science Museum’s Danacentre (nice space)for the Future Wireless event by Cybersalon & OpenSpectrumUK listening to Alexei Blinov and James Stevens talking about Hive Networks putting together a DIY infrastructure – an open backbone (sounds painful)

According to the Hive Networks wiki “Hive Networks” is a cross-disciplinary research and development project into embedded devices and ubiquitous networked computing, defined as ‘multi-faceted transformative devices’ – tools that enable users to manage space, time and the boundaries around the self in new and previously unthinkable ways

So Alexei is now talking about getting ordinary people connected, almost without them knowing, like his mother listening to the radio in the kitchen.

One of his favourite devices is this one which I’d love to understand better, but I’ve got to leave for lunch!

Each device is supposed to run a particular function, to provide a particular service on the network. This box runs lots of services. Trying to weave a network around human behaviour rather than making humans change to interact with the network. Errrr go read the wiki.

I’m at the Channel 4 HQ in Horseferry Road at a cafe style session on education policy. About 50 interesting and vociferous people have gathered to talk about Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, well at least that’s what Channel 4 wants them to talk about – we’ll see how that actually works out.

We’re just going into an Open Space session to pull out what people are really interested in.

As usual, pics and flicks later on.