Setpoint Originator

In Miami, With Futurists: Blogging the APF Conference

Set down early this afternoon in Miami. Enjoyed several hours of sunbathing and swimming in warm, sparkly, toothpaste-blue water. Ate a large, delicious lunch and lounged in a cool, breezy hammock. Soon there's an open bar at our lush waterfront hotel. Sweet. But enough about Heavenly personal experiences on peninsulas...

Tomorrow morning marks the start of the annual Association of Professional Futurists conference (this year dubbed !Futures Insurrection!). Should be interesting. The APF is, as they will tell you, "a growing community committed to leadership, excellence, and innovation in foresight." Basically trailblazing futures as a defined, creditable field.

Dirt will be posted here as I do my darndest to get to the bottom of what in the world's going on with futures, why exactly it needs an insurrection, and how exactly it should insurrect. Seems like foresight, vision, and change-aware planning and creativity should sell themselves if expressed clearly and critically, but hey what do I know: I'm only an attendee, not a speaker, ha ;-)

Stay tuned.

Second Life Future Salon Update

[Edit 4/18: Click here for the new Second Life Future Salon blog!]

pic from Rivers Run Red

Here's an update with some new info about the upcoming Second Life Future Salon. Please email me to RSVP your attendance or if you have any questions (you can also IM me in Second Life as SNOOPYbrown Zamboni). Check back here for more updates.

What:

The SL Future Salon is a monthly mini-conference held in the 3D online world of Second Life. The Salons will network digital world entrepreneurs, designers, scholars, enthusiasts and otherwise curious parties and encourage foresight about the direction of technology, business and society in and around digital worlds, plus related topics in real world socio-tech.

All are invited! This is a very friendly bunch, and we hope to see you there.

Who:

The Salon is being started by the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit that hosts several real world Future Salons and organizes the annual Accelerating Change Conference at Stanford.

When:

The first Salon will be on Thursday April 28th at 5:30 PM PST (8:30 PM EST)

(Informal prelim meeting in SL on April 21st for those who want to get acquainted with the world or simply say Hey, also at 5:30 PM PST)

Where:

Bedazzle's Chinatown sim! Check it out here!
Jimmy Thompson from the Bedazzle design team is generously allowing us to hold the first Future Salon in this amazingly rendered environment. Thanks, Jimmy!

Confirmed Presenters for the 28th:

Randy Moss from the American Cancer Society's Futuring and Innovation Center (yep, they've got one!) will discuss plans for a fundraising event in SL based on the famous real life Relay for Life events. The team working on this project has some veeerrry innovative ideas that could revolutionize how events are held and monetized in Second Life and incorporated into the wider Web.

3D worlds programmer with a vision, Jim Purbrick, AKA Babbage Linden, will drop some thoughts and projects on us too from his perch in England. More details on his presentation to come.

+1 or 2 more speakers to be announced

Coming up down the road:

Paul Marino from Machinima.org and author of 3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima
and Jamie Hale, founder of Gaming Open Market
have also signed on to be involved in upcoming SL Future Salons.
(Adding them to Future Salon purgatory along with Josh Rubin, Derek Woodgate, Betsy Book, and Peter Ludlow)

Second Life Version 1.6 should be released soon, which will let us stream video for presentations. Very nice.

After the first Salon on a Thursday, it looks like we'll begin holding them on the last Sunday of each month at 11 AM PST. This will make it easier for our European partners to participate.

More news to come!

Wikipedia + Google Maps: Is WikiCity The Map of the Future?

Earlier this month I posted about Google Maps and Jon Udell's amazing screencast (required viewing!) of a GPS-drawn, space-annotated, media file over-layed walking tour of his town.

I've been running all this stuff over and over in my head and I think I popped out a serious, sensible application and a complimentary idea that may also prove valuable: WikiCity and the potential for pinning 3D files to Google Maps.

I'll give you the quick version here, and my friend Garry Golden and I are moving closer to collaborating on a paper about annotated maps that will flesh this out more:

The idea of WikiCities is simple: Google Maps + location-specific user submitted posts + wiki editing and roll-back so vigilant users can garden the posts, keeping what's true and getting rid of vandalism and falsehoods. (Also read as Wikipedia + Google Maps.) Then you have the world's most informative map that can be rigged to incorporate GPS as per Udell's screencast (letting users broadcast their location and have site-specific info pushed on them per request, etc.). You can break WikiCities up into a number of manageable channels like food, movies, music, nightlife, romance, politics, and whatever's most useful and efficient for users to search and access the geospatial content they're looking for.

The second idea about pinning 3D environments to the map is also novel, as far as I know. Just as Udell demonstrates pinning photos and video files to points on the map, interactive 3D files reconstructing real locations can also be attached to Google Maps. Just look at this amazing 3D coffee shop based on a real store that was rendered using Adobe's now defunct Atmosphere software. Unfortunately Adobe Atmosphere just closed shop, as it could have been the app for doing this had it only tried for the spotlight in a year or two. But I'm sure there are other programs that can do the trick. One of my major interests is in user created 3D content in digital worlds like Second Life, so I'm always looking for great cross-over apps like this. WikiCities sounds to me like a powerful driver for standards and interoperability across 3D platforms.

If anyone has any thoughts on these ideas please let me know. I want to put them out there because I think they're so promising and "in the air," so to speak. I don't want to wake up one morning and read about them without at least tyring to get them out there myself :-)

A Future Scenario In Flash: In 2014 Googlezon Defeats Microsoft and The New York Times Goes Offline

Now this is very cool. The Florida Museum of Media History has made a future of media scenario animated in Flash.

Don't want to give too much away because it's worth the watch, but it involves the convergence of Google, Amazon, social software, grid computing, transparency, automated news filtering and on-demand everything vs. Microsoft, The New York Times, and most everything else that's entrenched in 2005.

Futurists are always looking for more visceral ways to present scenarios (well, some are :-) I quite like this. Vivid, plausible (in thrust, if not convincing in detail or timescale), provocative, balance of good and bad. More of this kind of thing could fly.

hat tip to the Kaedrin blog

click below to go to animation

New Issue of Accelerating Times

A new issue of Accelerating Times is out and has stuff on

•The Second Life Future Salon
•The Arlington Institute's upcoming Tools for the Development of Humanity Conference
•Underground imaging systems
•Egocasting
•Personality testing with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
•John Smart's critique of a Technological Forecasting & Social Change journal article about the possible decline of worldwide innovation

and a bunch more goodness. Click here to subscribe to the free bi-monthly-ish newsletter. Click here to view the Accelerating Times archives.

John Smart Gets Out There

John Smart is Founder and President of the Acceleration Studies Foundation. His late-night talk from Accelerating Change 2004, Simulation, Agents, and Accelerating Change: Personality Capture and the Linguistic User Interface, is up for free audio download at IT Conversations.

It's a must-hear for anyone interested in the deep direction of world systems and their social, technological, and business implications. Glad to work with you, John, and very happy to see your many original contributions and bold, critical synthesis getting out there (now finish writing your book! :-)

From the abstract (which doesn't do justice to the range and depth of the talk which explores many facets of accelerating change, developmental evolution, human experience, and coming technological emergences):

"One of the most important accelerating transitions occuring today is the emergence of the Linguistic User Interface or LUI. What will Windows (and the Google Browser) of 2015 look like? It seems clear that it will include sophisticated software simulations of human beings as part of the interface. First-world culture today spends more on video games than movies. These "interactive motion picture" technologies are more compelling and educating, particularly to our youth, the fastest-learning segment of society, than any linear scripts, no matter how professionally produced."

Hear Ye, Hear Ye: The Second Life Future Salon Debuts on April 28th!

[Edit 4/18: Click here for the new Second Life Future Salon blog!]

[Edit 4/3: A further SL Future Salon update on Setpoint posted here]

It's official. The date for the inaugural Second Life Future Salon is set for Thursday, April 28th (and the last Thursday of each month from then on). Speaker line-up for the first Salon remains written in pencil, with some great possibilities on the table. [Edit 3/27: Randy Moss has confirmed he will talk about the American Cancer Society's plans to endorse a fund-raising event that will recreate and extend their traditional Relay for Life event into SL (a project in its early stages that I'm involved in as well)—one or two more speakers still to be announced] [Edit 3/30: w00t! Digital world pogrammer and Linden Labber Jim Purbrick also climbs aboard for the 28th!] More on that posted here within days. You can also see a write-up in the March 24th edition of Accelerating Times (which should be up at or around the time of this post).

Everyone with the Acceleration Studies Foundation is psyched to make this happen as we've been considering ways to extend our nonprofit into SL for a long time. The wheels of innovation are spinning in Second Life, and we want to a.) help others navigate what's going on with digital worlds and b.) get in on it ourselves! Please help spread the word about the Salon, and if anyone wants to find me in Second Life my avatar's name is SNOOPYbrown Zamboni (pic posted below). I'll be in there playing with stages, seats, virtual microphones and screens, and otherwise getting ready for the big show! :-)

Looking ahead a meeting, the May SL Salon is set to feature Josh Rubin from coolhunting.com and Derek Woodgate from the Austin-based Futures-Lab. Betsy Book who oversees Virtual Worlds Review has also promised to hop in when she can to lead a discussion on the opportunities for branding companies in Virtual Worlds. Peter Ludlow, gonzo journalist of Virtual Worlds and founder of the Second Life Herald, has also expressed interest in getting involved. Great stuff.

As the SL Salon develops I'd like to see it taking on a mix of real world and digital world themes. Maybe one speaker working on something in SL or another digital world and one who has nothing to do with digital worlds whatsoever. But we'll have to see what kind of natural shape it takes. Lots of possibilities.

In related news, James Au aka Hamlet Linden aka James Au, embedded journalist in Second Life and author of the face-meltingly interesting New World Notes, will be speaking in the flesh at the Los Angeles Future Salon on the UCLA campus April 15th along with Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, and Lewis Johnson who heads projects on virtual environments for learning at USC. If you'll be in the LA area definitely swing by and check that out. And if you're absolutely *anywhere in the world* with a fast enough computer and a broadband connection, be sure to come into Second Life for our first Salon there on April 28th! (There's a 7 day free trial period and a measely $9.99 will get you in for life!)

Some great resources to get you pumped about getting into Second Life for the Future Salon:

•Changing Realities, paper (PDF) by Cory Ondrejka
•Living the Dream: Business Community and Innovation at the Dawn of Digital Worlds, audio of keynote presentation by Cory Ondrejka at Accelerating Change 2004
•New World Notes, a blog by embedded journalist James Au/Hamlet Linden
•Snapzilla, Second Life's version of Flickr (so cool!)
•SL Universe, popular SL blog
•Gaming Open Market, Second Life's main virtual-to-real-and-back currency exchange market
•SL Exchange, an external market for things built in Second Life
•Bedazzle, a design team making some amazing projects in SL, including a version of the FPS, Unreal Tournament
•Second Life Herald, Peter Ludlow dishes the dirt

SNOOPYbrown Zamboni keeping the future safe for Second Life:

Tech Buzz Game

A posting on Slashdot led me to the Tech Buzz Game by Yahoo! Research Labs and News Futures, announced at the just-finished O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference.

Very fun stuff. You start with 10,000 virtual dollars which you can invest in a large number of markets like video recorders, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, music services, blogs, operating systems, portable media devices, internet telephony, television, and a whole bunch more. Values go up and down depending on their Yahoo! Search frequency over time.

Game leader boards are accessible and the top 3 investors come July 29th will win a prize package from Apple. I just invested all my loot save $7, and so far am up $3,344 and change which ranks me at 246th out of about 1,500 investors who are above water.

See also the Yahoo! Buzz Index which is like the unfortunately under-developed looking Google Zeitgeist.

screenshot from my Tech Buzz investments (partial list; click to enlarge):

Japanese Cell Phone Map App: "I would have killed for this service"

Garry Golden, my good friend from UHCL's futures studies program, just sent me a link to a new Japanese geographical mapping service for cell phones called Navitime (page in Japanese).

According to In-Duce this is:

- The first such service in the world
- The pictures are high-res, low-altitude pictures (rather than satellite)
- Service covers 90% of the population
- Traffic jam information can also be displayed, live, on the map

An enthusiastic commentor on Engadget writes about the service:

"...I would have killed for this service while I was on vacation in Japan last week. It's amazing that they are able to run a country that has a grand total of 16 street name signs within it's borders. =)?

screenshots:

The ReBang Blog

Came across a nice, newish blog that has posts on metaverse/prototyping in digital worlds-y things:

reBang posts come in three flavors: meatspace, virtualspace, and virtual+meat.

Some direction of 3D digital worlds posts that interested me:

•There's Money In Them Thar Virtual Hills
-virtual world sweatshops and labor

•Emerging Creative Amplifiers
-Will Wright's upcoming game, Spore, and procedural content

•Xbox 2
-the next generation console and some of its novel content features and micro-transactions

•A Second Life Outside of Second Life
-prototyping for the real world in digital worlds

•SensAble ClayTools
-tactile, force feedback 3D digital sculpting software

•Live In Your Demo World
-augmented reality projects