Brain-Computer interface for Second Life

Researchers at the Tomita and Ushida Laboratory of Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that allows a person to control a Second Life avatar just by thinking.

“The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle.” (link)

The range of functions supported is still limited, but are planning to support more complex movements and geatures.

The motivation is not to make your couch potato’s life even easier, but to develop the technology to “help people with serious physical impairments communicate and do business in Second Life.”

Here’s a video demonstrating mind control of a Second Life avatar.

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Halting State: a thriller set in the MMORPG industry

Halting State is a new science fiction novel by Hugo-award winner Charles Stross that the author describes as a “a near-future thriller of skullduggery and rules lawyering in the shadowy world of massively multiplayer virtual reality games”.

“In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that’s just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But she soon realizes that the virtual world may have a devastating effect in the real one-and that someone is about to launch an attack upon both…” (link)

If you are intrigued, you can read the first prolog and the three chapters (1, 2, 3) posted on Charlie Stoss’s blog.

Great title, by the way. Amazingly, when I googled for ‘halting state’, all but two of the top 50 results were about the book. So much for automata theory.

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Make Money Fast in Virtual Worlds?

Yesterday, I caught most of an interesting program, The Economies of Virtual Worlds, on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, a magazine format program produced by WAMU in Washington DC.

The program covered several aspects of making money in virtual words and had a good range of discussants, including Cornell business school professor Robert Bloomfield, author Julian Dibbell (”Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot”), Second Lifer Prokofy Neva, and IBM executive Linda Ban.

“It’s an emerging marketplace, worth billions of dollars, and many Americans don’t even know it exists. In virtual worlds like “Second Life” or “World of Warcraft,” members buy and sell everything from clothes to real estate for their online selves. The goods may not be “real” but the money often is. Join Kojo for a tour of virtual economies and explore the debate over whether they should be more tightly regulated.” (link)

You can listen to the show in Real Audio or Windows Media formats.

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Rumors of Second Life on Google Earth

Google Operating System has an intriguing post, A Social Network for Google Earth?, making a case that Google is readying a new application combining social networking, 3D modeling and video games. Now that’s an interesting combination.

The evidence? An un-named company is recruiting Arizona State students to beta-test a new product.

The post speculates that the idea is to base a virtual world on Google earth

“The speculation about a Google Earth Second Life started last year. “The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What’s a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. (…) In Stephenson’s novel, millions of users uploaded customized “avatars,” or virtual personalities, and strolled the street, entering shops and exclusive nightclubs, conversing and trading with the metaverse’s other denizens.” In fact, Snow Crash .” (link)

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New Maryland game company Zenimax Online Studios is hiring

ZeniMax Media (Rockville MD) is setting up a new game development company ZeniMax Online Studios. This will be a new separate game development company devoted to MMO game creations.

“ZeniMax Media Inc., parent company of Bethesda Softworks, announced today the creation of ZeniMax Online Studios. The division will be headed by Matt Firor, a well-known expert in the field of online gaming, and will focus on the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO) market segment.” (link)

Firor was formerly the Executive Producer at Mythic Entertainment

This Wednesday, September 19th, ZeniMax Online Studios will hold a career fair from 11:00am to 8:00pm at the Baltimore Marriott Hunt Valley (245 Shawan Road, Hunt Valley). They are interviewing for all positions, including game designers, programmers, artists, animators, content specialists and producers. See the job listings page for a detailed list of position.

In a recent interview Matt Firor said:

“Right now my number one priority is to assemble the best MMO team possible, and this will take most of my time and energy over the next year. It doesn’t matter how good an idea you have for a game if you don’t have a team that can execute it.” (link)

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Report predicts MMO game market to triple in five years

A new report by Strategy Analytics predicts that the global online game market will triple from it’s current revenue of $4 billion per year over the next five years.

“This report, “Online Games: Global Market Forecast” notes that the rapidly expanding Massively Multiplayer Online Games market, lead by Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft franchise, is blazing the way for electronic sell-through and digital distribution of both PC and console games. … “The main driver for sustained growth in the online games market will be the continued uptake of broadband services around the world”, adds David Mercer, Principal Analyst at Strategy Analytics. “Additionally, the very lucrative revenue opportunity in both the massively multiplayer segment and the electronic sell through market will continue to attract new entrants into the online games market.”" (link)

The report notes that online game revenue, mostly from MMOs, is already larger that the revenue from online music and for online video. Here’s their prediction of the growth.

(spotted on ars technica)

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Game designers test the limits of AI

An article by Scott Kirsner in the Boston Globe, Game designers test the limits of artificial intelligence, talks about research aimed at improving massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

“A lot of the most interesting work in artificial intelligence is being done by game developers,” says Bruce Blumberg, senior scientist at Blue Fang Games in Waltham, and formerly a professor at MIT’s Media Lab. “You have really bright kids who are dealing with problems they don’t realize are insoluble. They’re very motivated.”

In MMOGs, most of the characters are intelligent because that are controlled by people, so the behavior of computer controlled characters compare badly. Another challenge of MMOGs is that the human-controlled characters interact largely through conversations in natural language.

“You can’t talk to characters and expect a response that feels real,” Davis says. “So there are no games that are like detective stories, or romances, which are popular genres in the movies, because you can’t interview suspects or talk to other people.” … One way to get there is by having humans “train” the AI software. That’s the approach that game designer Jeff Orkin, now a grad student at the Media Lab, is taking. With a project called The Restaurant Game, Orkin invites players to assume the role of a restaurant’s wait staff. His plan is to capture their behavior and dialogue, and use it to build more realistic software-driven characters, in the same way that designers sometimes use motion capture cameras to record and replicate human movement.

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A coming World Wide Web of 3D virtual worlds

The Economist’s current quarterly technology report has an interesting article discussing the evolution of MMOGs and virtual worlds.

Online gaming’s Netscape moment?

Video games: Existing virtual worlds are built on closed, proprietary platforms, like early online services. Might they now open up, like the web?

The premise of the article is that virtual world game engines like Multiverse are not only making it easier to create new worlds but will also allow characters and game entities to move from world to world. They liken his to the change that happened as the Internet moved from being a series of “walled gardens” based on proprietary online services like the well, AOL and Prodigy to the Web and its standard languages, protocols and middleware.

“As with the web, the hope is that the emergence of a single, open platform will encourage wider adoption and new uses of the technology. Before the web, companies that wished to establish an online presence had to do so on proprietary platforms. The same is true today. Lots of companies are setting up shop in Second Life, but some might prefer to have their own worlds, not just islands in someone else’s world, just as they have their own websites. Multiverse says that companies are starting to create worlds for training simulations, business collaboration, and modelling disasters.”

(more…)

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Sun’s Project Wonderland is an open-source virtual world manager

Sun’s James Gosling demonstrated their open-sourced Project Wonderland at JavaOne this year.

Project Wonderland is a 3D scene manager for creating collaborative virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and games.

Sun’s goal is to create a multi-user virtual environment that has robust security, scalability, reliability, and functionality, enabling organizations to use it as a place to conduct real business.

“Organizations should be able to use Wonderland to create a virtual presence to better communicate with customers, partners, and employees. Individuals should be able to do their real work within a virtual world, eliminating the need for a separate collaboration tool when they wish to work together with others. Individuals should also be able to tailor portions of the world to adapt to their work needs and to express their personal style. … One important goal of the project is for the environment to be completely extensible. Developers and graphic artists can extend the functionality to create entire new worlds, new features in existing worlds, or new behaviors for objects and avatars.

If you are handy with Java, it might be fun to experiment with this, maybe by prototyping a usecase for a University community.

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