Croquet 2 Play

For folks who don’t want to follow the physics or the money or George Clinton, here’s more “evidence” …

After all, when you’re in Second Life, you’re just looking at computer-animated figures on a screen– how could it possibly matter where they’re sitting, or how long they’re looking into each other’s eyes?
New World Notes: THE SPACES BETWEEN US

The researchers being referenced concluded that …

… many patterns of physical interaction in the real world carry over into the virtual world. In other words, our insistence on embodiment in virtual environments structures social interactions in these worlds in ways that we may not consciously be aware of. On the other hand, this implies that virtual worlds may be useful platforms for studying things even as visceral as the rules of physical interaction.

Terra Nova: The Prison of Embodiment

The post also mentions a book coming out this fall which says:

Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

One can shrink the distance between the music and the technology even further by examining the relationship between the Dead and Funkadelic, and more significantly the influence jazz had on those two particular bands and counterculture movement in general. Read more

Actually I should say real in another way since the atoms that make up the bits of data stored and displayed by a computer are very real.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which oversees such well-known hotel brands as Sheraton, St. Regis and Westin, will launch its newest chain, Aloft, in the online society “Second Life” in September.In the brick-and-mortar realm, the plan is for the first Aloft inn to open sometime in 2008, catering to active, urban 30- to 50-year-olds. But the real-world lodge will be preceded by a 3D cyberversion designed to prompt feedback from virtual guests and help guide the earthbound endeavor.
“We think the SL world is a specific community of early adopters, of tech-savvy people who like to voice their opinions,” said Brian McGuinness, vice president of the Aloft Hotels brand.

Aloft will be the first hotel for “Second Life,” which has already incorporated businesses from Wells Fargo to Major League Baseball. Marc Schiller, CEO and founder of ElectricArtists 2.0, a marketing services company, approached Starwood two months ago with the idea of a virtual debut for Aloft. Starwood then purchased an island in “Second Life,” and construction began on the hotel a month ago.

Second Lifers get first look at new hotel chain | CNET News.com

There are several nice screenshots of Aloft.

The song Paradigm on George Clinton’s recent CD How Late Do U Have 2 B B 4 U R Absent? closes with the statement “The virtual is real”.

As hard as this may be to believe, there is real money changing hands among the players in these games, Bowen reports. An estimated $1 billion worldwide is spent by users buying and selling virtual goods, such as furniture for virtual houses and clothing for their avatars. But it’s paid for with real-world credit cards — at Second Life alone, $6 million a month.Is Virtual Life Better Than Reality?, Living Online — With Dream House, Job, Friends — May Be Preferable For Some - CBS News

It shouldn’t be so surprising that people are making money in virtual economies. People buy things that are outside the human sense of touch all the time. People pay for MRIs and satellite radio signals and Wall Street is a virtual world where people trade in “financial instruments“. All of these have the same real existence as goods in virtual worlds - bits on a disk. Physics agrees with this. A bit on a disk is as physical as your fingers, it’s made up of the same atoms bound together with the same laws of subatomic physics. As the song says - “let the shakin begin”.

Future Boy: Google moves into virtual worlds - May. 12, 2006
Online virtual worlds are a hot topic, as gamers spend more and more time playing online and virtual real estate turns into a real market. Now Google (Research) is getting into the business — and if its plans come to fruition, the virtual world will never be the same. In fact, it may look more like the world we know than futurists ever imagined.

“I would expect to see someone using Google Earth as a virtual social space by the end of the year,” says Jerry Paffendorf, research director of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a futurist organization.

…Google Earth is the most likely candidate to become a metaverse. Just add avatars, they say, and the possibilities are endless. …
There are, in short, many more opportunities in a virtual version of the real world than in an entirely fantastical world like Second Life — or indeed Stephenson’s original vision of the metaverse.

Take a look at this video of a live jazz event. It takes place at a place called Clyde in Second Life. In it you’ll see people in the audience dancing - you don’t dance at web sites …

Soon after logging in, I realized that Second Life could be a venue for live music performance, and my career in Second Life, as musician Astrin Few, took off. I have been performing twice a week in Second Life ever since, playing acoustic guitar/vocal jazz on Tuesday nights and jazz/pop/rock at hired gigs on Sunday nights. In February, a sax player in Miami named Brian Tervo (”Flaming Moe” in Second Life) and I performed a duo concert in Second Life - I send my guitar/vocal stream to him, to which he adds his sax before sending it out to the public. You can view a video and download the CD from that concert or read a review of the show. Many other musicians have begun to perform live in Second Life in recent months.

Note that these collaborative technologies have nothing to do with the Web. As our friend Preston Austin of Clotho Advanced Media summarized recently at an Accelerate Madison presentation describing an exciting new 3D collaborative technology called Croquet: “the Web sucks”.

Internet Collaboration & Application Development, Chicago, IL
Back in October, says Flaming Moe, “I searched Events for ‘jazz’ one day… and found ‘Astrin Few, Live at Clementina’. I had to check it out to see if it was some sort of joke or the real deal. Sure enough, he was streaming live at the park and sounded great. He even took requests!”

Moe and Few shared notes, honed their chops, and two Sundays ago, debuted an in-world first, from a forest-shrouded stage in Clive*: a live combo performance, with Astrin in the Midwest, Moe on the East Coast, and their sound engineer Catja LaFollette in Canada. The show was attended by a capacity crowd dressed in their night life finest. A striking redhead named Nethermind Bliss whirled alone for awhile on the dance floor, but was quickly joined there by some dozen jazz enthusiasts, including a green-eyed panther in a tuxedo.

MOE, FEW AND THEIR CONTINENTAL JAZZ COMBO

This kind of event happens regularly in Second Life but like the early web browsers it’s just scratching the surface of what people will ultimately do with Croquet.

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Wow: 3D operating system, Open Croquet
We’re getting a demo of Croquet from Julian Lombardi and David Smith of Open Croquet, which is a 3D world. Something like Second Life, but runs P2P.

We have just seen a new world.

Real diplomacy from the virtual world | CNET News.com
Eric Brown and Asi Burak think a strategy game, of all things, could help forge a new level of understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Their game, known as “Peacemaker,” is all about tearing down decades-old walls of mistrust between the two peoples, all the while turning one of the best-understood video game dynamics on its head. In the game, players assume leadership responsibilities on both sides of the conflict as they face real-life issues, such as diplomatic negotiations and military attacks, that divide the camps.

“The public often sees press on all the negative aspects of games. This is a fight, in a way, for better games.”
–Jean Miller, project manager, Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds competition

“It’s a strategy game that’s typical in form,” said Eric Brown, a graduate student in interactive educational design at Carnegie-Mellon University, “except we inverted the model, so it’s not a war game. The point is to make peace with the other side.”

What Croquet’s model brings to this conversation is the possibility that individuals and small groups can choose to establish and pursue world changing agendas independently of large entities - be they governments or corporations. Instead of a handful of huge IPO’s emerging from this wave Imagine instead hundreds of OpenIPOs and thousands of very prosperous privately held entities that choose to evolve more self-sustaining and wholistic community ecosystems.

CNN.com - Senators to push for $100 gas rebate checks - Apr 27, 2006
Senators to push for $100 gas rebate checks
Under proposal, every U.S. taxpayer would get one

Do they really think people will think everything’s ok just because they get a few refills? Eventually,  When live simulation/holodeck environments like Croquet are the norm, we’ll be able to have truely informed citizens. Folks will be able to ask questions like “Where are the calculations that led to the $100 figure?” and “How many hours did the Senators and their staffs bill us for in the process?(please include the spreadsheet and 3D graph)” RSS has had a huge social and financial impact, Croquet, Second Life et al will amplify that.