Thanks OneWare (http://www.oneware.com) for the notes sponsorship.

Thanks to Eric Hackathorn for an awesome meeting.

JZ
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group
Minutes of the 13 March 2007 meeting, "Second Life: First World"

About 35 people attended tonight's meeting. Josh Zapin facilitated and
Jeremy Kohler recorded the minutes.

----------
MEETING SPONSORS

Microstaff (www.microstaff.com) provides refreshments, Copy Diva
(www.copydiva.com) provides the audio-visual equipment, NCAR
(www.ncar.ucar.edu) provides the facility, and ONEWARE
(www.oneware.com) sponsors these minutes.

The next RMIUG meeting will be on May 8, about Ruby on Rails. It's a
little techy, and interesting.

---------------
ANNOUNCEMENTS

Josh welcomes suggestions for topics for future meetings, please email
Josh with your ideas.

There is a Bar Camp movement, which provides a wide open learning
environment, where you can make your own conferences. There is one
here in Boulder on March 30-31. Just google "barcampboulder." We need
a location and a couple of meeting rooms. Bar camps have been
happening all over the world for a couple of years now.

Consider attending a Second Life meet-up workshop. Bring your laptop
and experience Second Life.

The Denver cold fusion users group will be talking about Adobe Cold
Fusion 8 to be released in April. Contact Gene Lewis at
www.denvercfug.org for info.

---------------
INTRODUCTION (Josh Zapin)

Second Life is a virtual 3-D world built and maintained entirely by
its 4 million residents, with over a million users in the last 60
days. It's pretty new. A libertarian dream, it's completely controlled
by the marketplace. And it has evolved in ways the creators probably
never imagined. The business world has gotten involved, along with
technology CEOs, millionaires, and people looking to do business.

- Dell Computers opened up its on Island in November offering
residents the ability to purchase PCs for their Second Life and
"first-life" selves

- Sam Palmisano, IBM's Chief Executive Officer, held a town hall
meeting in Beijing and Second Life (he has his own avatar) to announce
a $100 Million investment in real- and virtual-world initiatives.

- Starwood Hotel tested a new loft-style hotel in Second Life and got
lots of feedback from visitors

- Anshe Chung, one of Second Life's virtual land real estate brokers
(her real name is Ailin Graef), has become a millionare (that's in
REAL US dollars).

----------------------
ABOUT THE SPEAKER

ERIC HACKATHORN (eric.j.hackathorn@...) started with his first
computer before he learned to ride a bicycle. His father was kind
enough to allocate him 100 KB of the family's 10 MB hard drive: one of
the first commercially available of its kind. Since that time, he has
dabbled in all things computer. After graduating from high school, he
started working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration_(NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado. At the same time, he
attended the University of Colorado, majoring in electrical and
computer engineering. He continues his work at NOAA today as an IT
specialist. Recently Eric has taken a back seat to his much handsomer
counterpart, Hackshaven Harford. Hackshaven is Eric's avatar (a
virtual representation of himself) and exists only in the virtual
world known as Second Life. Together they have been busy designing a
public 3-D space to highlight the research NOAA performs.

---------------------
LINKS

NOAA/ESRL's Virtual Education Demonstration: www.esrl.noaa.gov/outreach/sl
Second Life: www.secondlife.com

------------------------
ERIC HACKATHORN

I'm the Chief Architect of NOAA's island in Second Life.

My Second Life name is hackshaven (which is meant as "hack's haven").
That's my father's hunting lodge. I'm here to describe NOAA's
adventure in Second Life:

OVERVIEW: WHAT ARE VIRTUAL WORLDS?

A virtual world or "metaverse" is an extension of the traditional 2-D
web. Businesses set up an "island" where you can walk into a store and
buy stuff for your avatar or get a discount on real mail-order. Dell,
Toyota, and other big names are using this world as a next level in
marketing because it gives you a much deeper experience than a website.

A company called Linden Lab created Second Life, now the most
well-known metaverse. Everything about Second Life is growing
exponentially. People buy "land" in the environment to create their
own presences, and it's growing by 20 percent per month, with 4.6
million served. It is 100 percent user-generated content. Unlike other
virtual worlds, you maintain ownership of your island or land area.

Linden Lab will soon be putting up a rack of servers every week, and
they are going to need outside help very soon.

Let's watch a little movie now [showing movie]: Here is someone (an
avatar) building up themselves and their island. Buildings, roads,
clothing, etc. It takes 30 minutes to an hour investment just to get
oriented in Second Life, so there is a little bit of an entrance barrier.

Second Life client hardware requires a "gaming" computer, at least a
1.6 GHz pentium and a screaming video card. It can take a little while
to load, and crowded or badly-built places can be very slow. There are
tricks to learn about building lean to minimize the size of your
graphics, just like with 2D web pages.

The client is cross platform, and has recently been open sourced. So
soon there will be other ways to connect, such as via browsers, cell
phones, etc. They open-sourced their client at the top of their game,
which is unusual--it's a protection strategy against people who are
trying to capitalize and kill.

Accounts are free. 30,000 people online at a time typically.
Estimating more than 50,000 simultaneous users within six months.

When visiting Second Life, your first task is to create your avatar, a
character for yourself. You can adjust your appearance in quite a few
ways such as height, weight, etc. There's a great deal of fascination
in looking however you want, changing your gender around, weird
clothes, whatever. Part of the economics of Second Life is that you
can give stuff away for free like a nice custom jacket for your avatar.

You can walk around and fly, look in all directions.

SLURL (www.slurl.com) is a specially formatted URL that teleports a
visitor to your area.

NOAA'S VIRTUAL ISLAND

Let's visit NOAA's virtual island. It has 16 virtual acres, which is
equivalent to one computer node. Here on NOAA's island, it's Disney
World meets science education. It runs simulations (tsunami, sea level
rise, glaciers melting, hurricane hunter flights). NOAA pays for the
land (just like you might pay for ISP disk space and access). NOAA got
an educational discount: paid only $1000 and $150 per month for
maintenance. Not very expensive compared to what companies often pay
for a web presence. We dropped another $15,000 for all the outside
development by Aimee Weber Studios.

You have lots of neighbors on adjacent land masses. Some people have
private islands, others are sharing land masses. An island gives you
more control over your content and visitors. People are buying land
and developing it. Planning communities, homeowners associations, etc.
People can buy and sell virtual real estate to make money.

When someone visits your land or island, you can go look at them. You
interact with your visitors. Chatting is done mostly through text
bubbles. Soon Second Life will include audio as dynamic talk channels,
stereo spatial sound too. This is much more powerful than telephones
and there is a potential for teleconferencing here.

You can right-click on anyone to see their info. You can buy a
translator to talk to foreigners live. The level of interaction you
have with people from all over the world is truly amazing. You can
have a conversation with a guy from Brazil who only speaks Portuguese,
and for fun make it rain on him. You can make "friends" and then keep
track of when they are logged in or out.

You can include video--called machinima--if, for example, you want to
have an introductory video play for your visitors.

Currently you use an installed client (local) program to access Second
Life. It extends experiences to people that would not otherwise have
access to them. For example, in Second Life you can ride a weather
balloon, fly into a hurricane on an Orion P3 hurricane hunter
aircraft. This is where people can learn about what we do at NOAA.
Swim around a hydrothermal vent, visit a glacier. You can create it
all yourself or get stuff for your space from someone else (who might
give it away or sell it to you). The client includes a simplified CAD
development tool that allows you to create shapes, apply textures, etc.

Second Life is unusual in that the client is very dumb.

Making objects is free. The land is what costs. You can't yet import
objects from other programs, but that is being worked on. You just put
building blocks together and apply textures. We spent $15,000 hiring
people to build our airplanes and buildings and everything else.

We use the glacier to promote discussion on global warming--but this
is a much more immersive and memorable experience than you'd have by
reading about glaciers in a book.

While we still have a six-foot sphere with science on it (see
http://sos.noaa.gov/), we also have a virtual sphere on our island and
we're sending it all over the world.

Toyota has an island dealership with a race track. You can go there
and build your dream car, then go drive it around. If you decide to
buy the virtual version of the car, you also get a discount on the
real thing.

I got a book called "Designing Disney" to help me see how to design a
virtual world. A lot of companies don't realize that you don't want
your virtual space to look like and work like the real world.

Users can make their own weather, and this affects the local
ecosystem. Our next project is to recreate Hawaii and overlay it with
real current weather conditions. Built into Second Life is a
programming language similar to javascript that allows you to do
things like http calls to grab data, like from the National Weather
Service, and then run a script to apply it to your land map. The
script is called LSL and it runs on the server. Google LSL wiki and
you'll see all about it.

Here on NOAA's island we are projecting live data onto a US weather
map. We'd like to do the whole globe someday. Imagine combining
technologies like Google Earth--Google Earth is not a shared
experience, but it could be. There's a real potential for tying the
real world into Second Life to create a more immersive experience.

You can do a virtual tour of the solar system, go for a walk on Mars.

VISITOR FEEDBACK

How do you know if you're reaching your audience? In the 2-D web,
there's Google Analytics to analyze all your site traffic. And that's
pretty important information. But in 3D worlds like Second Life, there
is no analog (yet) to Google analytics. So instead we created a little
virtual feedback form for people to fill out voluntarily. Quite
strikingly, 40 percent of visitors are filling out our
questionnaire--this is huge compared to traditional websites that
typically get 1 percent. It's because this medium is so much more
interactive that we get this level of feedback. We also created a neat
sensor grid to record all visits, even when they don't submit feedback.

The average age of our visitor is upper 30's, which is higher than
you'd think.

35 percent of visitors didn't know about NOAA before visiting our
island, so we are now reaching customers we otherwise wouldn't reach.

Traditional media is not what gets people to visit our island. It's
mostly friends and web searches. Social networks are really driving
the visitors to our site.

DEFINING TRAFFIC FUNNELS AND GOALS
You can track where people went on your island. Did they go for a
hurricane ride? Did they go and look in a store, buy a virtual product?

SPOT TRAFFIC ANALYSIS
This shows where all the avatars were standing. Here can see that even
though everyone can fly, most people take the stairs. No one spends
any time sitting in our lobby. Now here's someone standing on the dock
but not getting in the water--maybe we need signage to tell him to
check out the undersea environment. You can also use this technology
to design a virtual store and see what people do, letting you work out
the kinks before building the real thing.

Traffic and metrics are important, and more people will be building
sensor grids like ours.

WHAT'S NEXT?
We'll be able to create customized avatar experiences, like
rearranging your products for individuals (kind of the way Amazon.com
does it).

I think conferences will be important too.

Some new clients are being created, like DTV: a camera that an avatar
holds and beams video out to the web. So you can make a webcast of a
virtual place.

Museums are setting up virtual tours now.

SECURITY
There are still security issues. You can allow visitors to make
objects that expire, and people can put graffiti on your stuff if
you're not careful.

Can you get in trouble in Second Life? There is limited damage that
people can do to you. People can do sort of denial of service attacks
against you and prevent you from doing your job. There are phishing
scams going around, but it's pretty minor. You can't really get mugged.

Copybot: a devious thing that lets you copy intellectual property
(objects) and steal them. Linden had to respond to address this and
similar threats. But this is the price of doing business on the web.
Music has the same problem. Some of the secret lies in finding a
business model that work within this environment.

ECONOMICS
You can sell your objects, or invite visitors to create objects on
your island for you. Permissions can be set to allow visitors access
to objects of yours that they buy.

You get a certain number of free shapes depending on the size of your
land area.

And yes, you can buy and sell the land.

You can also move your island for a fee, which can be useful if you
want to organize collaborations.

You have an inventory pocket and can go drop gifts on visitors (or
sell them). We use gifts for viral marketing. Objects can teleport
people into your space.

Currency to buy stuff: Lindens = game currency. 260 Lindens to the
dollar right now, tracked by the Lindex. It's a real currency, even
with people playing the Linden market. This is a wake-up call. There
are legal implications. Is it money earned in a foreign country? Do
you pay taxes on it?

People are investing in companies that are creating virtual worlds.

SEARCHING
It sucks. Instead you can go to www.slexchange.com and
www.slboutique.com and use a 2D search to find stuff. The 3D search is
really bad right now because there is not yet any equivalent of a web
crawler.

PHYSICS
There is a limit to how many avatars can occupy a space at one time.
There is a built-in physics engine (at version 1) and it needs work.


SOUND
We created a tour guide that shows text and speaks as you tour. You
can upload 10-second chunks to play on the fly, also listen to live
radio and video streams coming into the virtual world.

PARENTAL CONTROL
There is adult content in Second Life, and there is an adult world for
18 and up. There is also a teen grid where adults aren't allowed so I
can't advertise to them directly. But we can give out stuff to kids
and let them do viral marketing to attract visitors. It's not
foolproof, just like controls on the web aren't foolproof.

RESOURCES
There is a Boulder meet-up group for Second Life. Visit
secondlife.meetup.com/9/ to join.