buzzcut

The technology provided by 3dvsystems promises to revolutionize gesture-based videogaming.Like the EyeToy, the 3DV system works by observing the player and using their body motions as the source of input. What’s different about this approach is that they use some technology that can sense motion and depth.

So, in addition to doing a better job of separating the player’s actions from the background, the camera also can provide depth information, things like how far you are standing from the camera, or how far forward or backward your hands are from the screen.

Promising 60 fps depth recognition, the camera sounds pretty cool.

What interests me about this is the potential to use this sort of technology to digitize physical environments in real time.

Think about that, you average consumer still or video camera with embedded GPS and distance calculation software could allow you to do real time 3D interpolation. Or, more simply, look at Photosynth and then think about what it would be like is all that visual data that is encoded everyday came with accurate GPS and point of view data.

Strangely, it looks like this sort of technology is here. It’s only a matter of time until virtual reality is a data set rivaling the real places.

Players of Second Life know about the prim garbage problem. Within a few limits, players can fill up any land they own with objects created with 3D primitives, or prims. Over the years, this has resulted in a boom town jumble of buildings and objects. And a lot of junk.
Tour through the world and it’s not long before you discover empty, windblown projects that appear abandoned to the timeless freeze of computer memory—static snapshots of the last time anyone cared to add, arrange or remove in-world geometry. Sure, in the virtual world this doesn’t attract pests and vermin looking to nest in the mess. And it doesn’t smell. But litter of objects creates a sort of visual clutter of real world garbage that under any other circumstances ought to be cleaned up.
Recently I spoke to a couple of active SL residents about the increase in in-world garbage. They admitted that the problem was continuing to grow as people just lost interest in their property and didn’t bother to tidy things up. And, SL being a pretty libertarian place, you can pretty much store old cars in piles and burn tires in your yard indefinitely, if you want to.

So what to do?

In the real world, this is exactly the sort of thing that urban planners deal with. Urban planning, in a very compressed sense, stems from the public’s interest in private property. So, the government can tell you that you cannot build a 120 foot tower in your backyard and that you can’t, in fact, burn tires in your yard. While the system is set up to recognize your private property rights, it also expresses a public interest in preserving the character of the neighborhood, the property values of the homes around you and keeping burning tire smoke pollution to a minimum.
Take this logic back into SL and you can see the problem. SL has lots of private property, but very little public interest.

You can scan the software world’s Community Standards and you’ll find the full extent of the public interest expressed in terms the given limits to your personal liberty in world:
1. Intolerance

2. Harassment

3. Assault

4. Disclosure

5. Indecency

6. Disturbing the Peace

No mention, of course of garbage. And very little of this actually deals with public interest in private property per se, but rather focuses on individual behavior.

So what to do about the SL garbage problem? The simple answer is to include some sort of public interest in all that virtual world private property.

Impossible? Improbably? Hardly.

In fact, once it’s pointed out, this is exactly how other worlds do it. World of Warcraft, for instance, works as a sort of progressive Marxist state. You can act in the world, and own property, but only as the “state” allows. Blizzard ultimately owns all the property (including, not incidentally, your avatar) and can do as they feel is necessary to manage the world in the best direction, as determined by its governors (or as we like to call them, the developers).

Star Wars Galaxies runs on a property model similar to WOW (you don’t really own anything). It took an interesting step to clear abandoned buildings by adding “urban renewal” to the Star Wars narrative. The developers announced an in-world event where the Empire used TIE Fighters to bomb unused property into a flattened building plots for resettlement of immigrants into the game. The use Star Wars lore suited the tenuous position of property in the game world—that you might squat on a plot of land, but it’s at the pleasure of the Empire. And when they want something, they can take it from you! In a sense, no private property. But lots of public interest.

How could SL handle its garbage problem from an urban planning perspective? There are many solutions, some obvious, some not and more than a few that are just technical (if game objects actually aged, without maintenance they would dissolve and disappear, for instance). But most of the planning intervention available all assumes that there is some public interest.

I’ve heard of covenant controlled communities in SL, and this is a perfect example of expressing a public interest while still allowing for private property. You can buy property in these communities, from the community, but then you have to abide by whatever building rules they set. Cleaning up your junk is one easy one. Linden Labs could zone their grid, requiring different types of building rules and clean up timeframes. A system of litter courts could hear appeals from citizens who think that a landowner should either clean up or pack up, and more.

What I make out of this is that while SL has worked to become a virtual world or community, it’s still more of an anarchists’ gathering. I hear people talking about SL as a year-around Burning Man. But Burning Man has all kinds of public interest. The entire temporary city is based around the notion of community responsibility. So, no, SL is no Burning Man.

But it could be.

SL residents need to address the idea of the public. The world needs to find an expression of that in the Terms of Service, in the Community Standards and even in the code. Until then, it will be a digital low point that continues to collect virtual trash.

I wrote the bulk of this post right after the DiGRA Tokyo event, on the plane ride home. Jet lag and job responsibilities delayed the editing and posting. But, hey, what am I gonna do. For what it’s worth, some reflections on key game research event of the year).

I’m wrapping up my visit to Tokyo and attendance at the Digital Games Research Association International conference. And respecting my tradition of frankly summing up the whole experience after the fact, I’ve sat down to see what I can remember, and what feels like it still matters once it was all over.

I think the best way to tackle this particular conference is to relate a series of contexts and by contexts I mean “stories” that I think will thread or bang together in such a way as to say something useful.

So let me start with talking about the last meal I ate in Tokyo, at the airport.

(more…)

As someone who has played a lot of Second Life in the past, and still uses it from time to time in my architecture and planning courses, I was happy to find this site:

Virtual Suburbia.

I’ll look into it more later. But it’s nice to see someone taking the idea of virtual environments as environments seriously.

Like a lot of people, I spent a lot of my summer in pursuit of leisure. And like a lot of people I visted Las Vegas.

Dipping my toe into that bacchanal of excess, I noticed a display in one of the many opulent bastions of conspicuous consumption that are the Forum Shops at Ceaser’s Palance. A window display inside Dolce & Gabbana featured a towering pile of faux leapord skin purses. Like pyramids of skulls built on battlefields to remind the enemy of your power, your absolute ability to dominate and create a tribute to excessive force and violence. the purse pyramid was a becon of Vegas’ consumerism: See, we have so much crap we can just pile up expensive handbags.

I could leave this as some sort of hand-handed capitalist parable. But what really got me thinking was that, in fact, while this is a very obvious illustration of the excess of Western Capital Culture, it is also a pretty good example of something that’s been bugging me about videogames.

In the virtual world, a pile of purses consumes the same resources as a pile of rocks, or a tower built of Tiffany Crystal. So, videogames have created an inside-out view of materiality.

On one hand, games without a lot of stuff feel empty. For most of us, slaying one monster from hell would be enough for a lifetime of bragging. In games, we have to mow down thousands of Nazis to feel like we have our money’s worth. MMOs have become fashion runways where more is better, and more exotic is best. Game quality can be measured on one axis by the number of textures (read simulated materials) the game has at its disposal.

On the other hand, we have started to loose the sense that things matter. More dead enemies, more options at the local armorer’s shoppe–it’s all a blur. Videogame’s casual treatment of matter bleeds into our real world perceptions until it doesn’t shock us to see a lot of anything. We’re used to it.
The computer’s ability to dematerialize excess and make excessive the material is one of those frontiers where the digital medium and the material world, synthetic places and real spaces, interface. In this liminal space, the real and the virtual coexist, and window display works as well as an advertisement as it does a place in Second Life.