Second Life
Cisco Visual Networking Index - Betting on the Over-Under for 2012
Submitted by Steve Nelson on Fri, 2008-06-20 13:15. bandwidth | cisco | Internet | predictions | Second Life | Virtual Worlds
Cisco this week released its Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast and Methodology, 2007-2012 [PDF] and companion piece Approaching the Zettabyte Era [PDF], well-considered projections of where we're headed given the impact on the internet of visual networking applications. They're well worth the read.In an act of confident prognostication, they estimate that the annual run rate of IP traffic in 2012 will be 522 exabytes, more than half a zettabyte. This will no doubt be an interesting over-under bet at your favorite sports bar. In this case, I'll bet on the over.
Why? I'm listening to "Stumbling on Happiness", which describes how predictions of the future so often underestimate the mark by extrapolating from the present based on what we know, without much of a factor for the emergence of the "Black Swan", or the things that we can't possible imagine happening in the next few years. We don't know what they'll be, but we should at least assume that something unanticipated will come along.
If I had to pick one of the internals from Cisco's prediction to support my bet on the over, it would be their category of "Internet Gaming", where they lump in “multiplayer virtual world gaming”. There is discussion about underlying factors and assumptions in gaming's use of bandwidth bandwidth, but I think the focus on “gaming” as the primary purpose of virtual environments underestimates the role of this kind of interface in future applications in many areas: business and commerce, education, government, entertainment. And while current bandwidth usage is moderated by how much of the virtual environment is actually created at the user’s computer, using lightweight communications with the virtual world servers, this will change. More integration with real-world data in the simulated world will demand higher real-time bandwidth consumption.
And for those of you wanting to know about exabytes and zettabytes, here’s a quick lesson from Cisco (and we haven’t even started talking about yottabytes yet!)
(Thanks to Christine Kerner for the link to the report, via Facebook)
NBC's "The Office" in Second Life Airs Again Tonight
Submitted by Steve Nelson on Thu, 2008-04-03 08:45. CSI | NBC | Second Life | The Office | tv
This is actually the third run of "Local Ad": 9PM Thursday, April 3. Its first rerun was after the state of the union speech in January.
The Dunder Mifflin group in Second Life, created for the filming of the episode, has grown to over 1000 members based on word of mouth, and Clear Ink will once again open up its backlot on Channing for fans of "The Office" to gather after tonight's episode airs.
In October, the original airing of "Local Ad" followed by a day the premiere of Second Life as a major component of a story in CBS's "CSI:NY". That episode was the first of a two-part story that was to have concluded in February. Due to the WGA strike, the concluding episode did not air until last night, once again the night before "The Office" episode. However a funny thing seemed to have happened on the road to part to of "CSI:NY". For the most part, the Second Life tie-in went away. There was no mention of Second Life or virtual worlds, and the brief scene of the villain in a virtual world was very un-Second-Life-like. This may have been planned all along, or the conclusion was revised. I won't speculate here, but that story will probably be told (link to follow).
If you missed the "Local Ad" episode of "The Office" on April 3, you can always catch it here on hulu.com.
You can also catch part 1 or part 2 of the CSI:NY episodes at cbs.com.
Autodesk's BIGVIZ is an amazing visual record of TED 2008
Submitted by Steve Nelson on Thu, 2008-03-20 12:45. Autodesk | BIGVIZ | Second Life | Sunseed Bardeen | TED | TED 2008 | The Grove 
One of the highlights of TED 2008 for me was watching “visual cartographers” David Sibbet and Kevin Richards capture the essence of the presentations with their amazing illustrations, sketched, posted and shared in real time using Autodesk’s BIGVIZ system. From a practical point of view, a lot of my post-TED blues is trying to sort out all the ideas from my scribbles. BIGVIZ is a perfect transactive memory because it is a clear notation of what I remember from the talks.
Thanks to Autodesk, the BIGVIZ document is available for all to download as a PDF (along with a movie).
I was familiar with David Sibbert’s work through his work as Sunseed Bardeen at “The Grove” in Second Life, where he’s using yet another remarkable canvas for visualization. It’s worth a visit to see what he’s done there, as well.
Theater of Feeling: We Feel Fine in Second Life
Submitted by Steve Nelson on Wed, 2008-03-12 16:56. Kiwini Oe | mashup | Second Life | TED | ted conference | We Feel Fine
One thing leads to another: I came back from the TED Conference inspired to write some software to find connections between the different TED speakers (something I do manually while listening to each speaker). While looking for concordance software, I stumbled upon DMDigest that led me to the We Feel Fine project.
You'll have to check it out, but basically they have scraped millions of blogs, etc. identifying sentences proclaiming feelings: "I feel..." "I am feeling...". They then go to town on the mining and interface of this, and turn it all into playable art. Mashable art, as it turns out, because they have open APIs. Which got me thinking....
And I threw together the "Theater of Feeling" in Second Life and I've installed it on Clear Ink Island. It's a work in progress as I'm also experimenting with the image and color data served up by the wefeelfine.org people. It's easy to use, but addictive. Just go up and chat "/feel" and a feeling. "/feel good" "/feel lousy" "/feel generous" and see 10 excerpts elaborating on those feelings floating above platforms. Click the platform to go to the source. That's it! But it offers both an insight into what people think they need to share with the world for all time, as well as the mashability of Second Life. Come take a look for yourself.
Oh, and I do feel good about this experiment!
Second Skin - Feature-length Documentary about Virtual Worlds
Submitted by Mark Celsor on Fri, 2008-02-15 09:11. Second Life | Virtual Worlds | World of Warcraft
Second Skin is a feature-length documentary about virtual worlds like Second Life, Everquest and World of Warcraft. The film is directed by Juan Carlos Piñeiro and will have its world premier at the South by Southwest Film Festival in the beginning of March. Here's a synopses from the film's press kit: "Second Skin introduces us to the real people who populate online virtual worlds. Couples who have fallen in love without meeting, disabled players whose lives have been given new purpose, those struggling with addiction, Chinese gold-farming sweatshop workers, wealthy entrepreneurs and legendary guild leaders- all living within a world that doesn't quite exist."Here's the trailer:
