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MobileLab Ideas

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Mind Map as Social Platform

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The Mind Map is an intrapsychic, context-sensitive, predictive, personality/preference schematic rendered as a digital logic device.  A Mind Map could be alternately described as a “mental avatar” or psychological representation of a person.  The Mind Map takes as input an individual’s tastes, skills, or preferences, a range of emotional states, and contexts (roles and locations).  The Mind Map then, based on relationships between preferences, emotions, and contexts, calculates shifts in context, preference, and emotional state.  Sources of input can also be drawn from the outputs of other Mind Maps.

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For “intrapsychic constellations”, see Suler

(http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html)

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Mind Map as Communication Device

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If one could examine individual Mind Maps in a network or view an aggregate summary, this might enhance voice or SMS communication.  Before calling someone you might get a preview of how they might respond based on the state of their Mind Map.

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Reverse Recommender / Collaboration Tool

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Mind Maps could be used to suggest widgets or events the users of a network might create based on common or compatible tastes, preferences, or skills.  This stands in contrast to the standard online product recommender in which existing related products are simply pushed to users.  Beyond a brainstorming tool, the RR might be able to create certain widgets from simpler elemental features purely based on aggregate Mind Map preferences.  As a social brainstormer, the RR might find activities (existent or non-existent) that network members might create or participate in.

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Mind Maps for Running Context Sensitive Networks

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In an ad hoc network, a Mind Map could be used to specify a user’s location, mood, or context and based on that data decide what information an application (twitter) should send or receive to others in the network..

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Insanity/Survival Game

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A social game using networked Mind Maps.  The players must keep every Mind Map above a certain happiness/satisfaction threshold.  Because the Mind Maps are networked, the failure of one map affects those of the other players.

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Mind Maps as Social Terrain Mapper

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Mind Maps could also be used to chart or suggest aggregate tastes in a particular population.  Mind Map networks spreading such information might be used to correct misperceptions or alleviate ignorance of the psychological states of others.  Of course, this is predicated on the degree of correlation between the internal state of the individual and that suggested by their Mind Map.

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Mind Maps as Music Delivery Manager

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Based on a Mind Map’s context, the user’s location, and emotional state, the user will receive a certain song or type of song from a pre-existing or spontaneously generated playlist.

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Mem City

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An update of the old idea of the Memory Palace or visualization scheme for memorizing and organizing large numbers of items or facts.

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In this new version, the user will be allowed to create a fictional city for use as a Memory Place, Mind Map, or admixture of the two.  This is intended to a be a new storage/filing metaphor, different from the “desktop metaphor” common to PCs.

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As a straightforward Memory Palace, Mem City could be used to store pictures and other files, along with names, dates, and addresses.  “Houses” or “neighborhoods” could be generated on the fly and associated with whatever information the user sees fit.

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As a Mind Map, the districts and neighborhoods of a Mem City may have relationships as established by the user preferences.  The City will grow and change as inputs (context or location) shift.  Thus, if “UTD” appears in the Mem City and is used for storing any information having to do with academics or school life, this part of the City will shrink in size and importance as the user either physically moves away from UTD or moves away contextually (The context/role shifts “student” to “parent”).  The areas of the City most strongly associated with the current context or location will then become more prominent. 

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In either conceptualization, Mem City will be something like a living world which ages over time.  As time-sensitive events pass, the neighborhoods or buildings containing them will begin to decline and become “ruins” unless maintained by the user.

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Basic functionality would include several pre-generated cityscapes for the user to select from and/or modify, along with the ability to annotate or archive “historical” past events (ruined buildings).  There should also be a means for planning the construction of future “buildings” for upcoming or considered events.

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C3 Visit

4/7/2008

The Center for Creative Connections is an experimental learning environment that provides interactive encounters with works of art and artists. It is designed to stimulate curiosity, inquiry, and reflection in visitors of all ages and learning styles. The Center will serve as a bridge between our everyday experiences of looking and the transformational experiences of seeing, creating, and connecting deeply with works of art.

A goal is to create skills in the C3 patrons that transfer to the rest of the museum.

Description: Golden wreath.

Supplementary Features: Book of Gold—A book containing information about the history of meaning of gold.

(1) Book of Tales: Potentially a meta-narrative that could tie many aspects of the exhibit together if the patron chooses such a route. If the Book of Gold contains stories (perhaps myths) about how various cultures have thought about gold, then each story could be converted into a module where the individual patron is challenged to reinterpret the module-story as a myth or fairytale involving material(s) other than gold. In this process they create a “culture” from which their own story emerges. The written story is archived via computers in the Enhanced Learning Space or Tech Lab and posted to the C3 Website. The patron then can move to the Materials Bar to design a physical artifact from their story and/or can use a design kit on the C3 Second Life (SL) island to do something similar. Any virtual objects designed in SL can printed out as cut-and-fold pieces allowing the users to assemble and/or enhance in the Materials Bar and take home (See Export to World). When the user visits C3 again (or possibly visits only online) they will be given a new module from the Book of Gold to tackle, assembling their own Book of Tales.

(2) Book of Tales (Collaborative): The Book of Tales narrative can be experienced collaboratively. If two or more patrons reinterpret the same module and want their respective “cultures” to exist in the same world, they need only specify this feature when they upload their stories to the C3 web archive. Each patron’s choice of materials is weighted (given a score). When each user’s culture is compared to others, a result is calculated which indicates the level of conflict between each culture behind the constructed stories. This automatically generates the next module for the patrons—completely separate from the master Book of Gold. Cultures composed of more dissimilar materials will come into conflict, each patron having to create new myths and tales to explain this conflict. Cultures using more similar materials will have less conflict and patrons will be tasked with explaining why their cultures get along so well.

For example, the C3 system may calculate that two cultures of Stone/Earth/Paint will have a hostile attitude towards the Earth/New Materials/Ceramic culture. The patrons will have to generate a story explaining each level of conflict they face that session (Friendship, Neutrality, Hostility). The experience then becomes something like a play-by-mail or play-by-email game, where each patron submits their stories from C3 or home and this generates further play. Also influencing the intercultural interactions are points awarded to each patron for the quality of the explanatory stories they generate. Other patrons will be asked to vote every session (weekly?) for the most compelling tales. Awarded points will influence the robustness or popularity of the culture in question. For example, a popular Earth/Stone culture may be calculated to have had some influence on similar Earth/Stone cultures. The influenced culture is now tasked with composing a story explaining this.

Description: Nebulous felt sculpture.

Supplementary Features: Audio guided deep-looking exercise

Ideas for Expansion:

Description: African fetish doll made of wood, nails, and other materials.

Supplementary Features: Interactive touch screen version of the doll which gives patrons additional information.

(1) Build-a-Hero: Once a patron understands what each material represents in the doll, allow users to build all-new fetish dolls composed of materials not in the original fetish and assign their own meanings to the new dolls.

(2) Allow patrons to create their own fetish dolls from Second Life design kits and print out cut-and-fold assembly packages they can use to build their own fetish dolls from cardboard paper to decorate further if they choose.

(3) Book of Heroes: Build-a-Hero could be used in a way similar to the Book of Tales idea, allowing users to reinterpret heroes from history, fiction, or myth as beings of composite materials forming an ongoing narrative.

Purpose/Features:

Scrapbooks for feedback???

Workstations with links to additional information about exhibit pieces.

Touch-Tell Game - A tactile-based material guessing game.

Books pertaining to the exhibit pieces.

Ideas for Expansion:

Purpose/Features:

Materials Timeline - Patrons are shown how to distinguish between different materials (stone, metal, earth, paint, new materials, ceramics, etc).

Could be used for storytelling.

Response Wall - Patrons can leave Post-it Notes. Contains magnetic poetry???

(1) The Materials Timeline can feed interest in the narratives generated in the Book of Tales and/or Book of Heroes experiences.

(2) Magnetic Storylab: Instead of having patrons move around letters on a magnetic surface, give them physical or digital (on a workstation) “beats” or plot elements, various representational interpretations of materials, and other relevant items and let them move the pieces around in an effort to explore possible narratives, maybe to write up in The Book of Tales.

Purpose/Features:

Patrons build their own art objects from materials on hand.

(1) Could be closely linked to the Book of Tales and Book of Heroes experiences.

Purpose/Features:

Rubbing Area - Patrons can make rubbings of stones and other textured surfaces.

Ideas for Expansion:

Purpose/Features:

Hold classes.

Ideas for Expansion:

Purpose/Features:

For very young learners and adults.

Soft sculptures

Ideas for Expansion:

Purpose/Features:

Research: ARTstor (contains material relevant to a broad range of disciplines such as Anthropology, History, Theater and Dance, and many more).

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Explore/Respond to the 7 works of art in the exhibit-tagging and microblogging

Tech Lab contains 24 laptops, workstations, scanners, drawing tablets, iPods, and voice recorders.

(1) Primary location for designing/building/accessing Second Life avatars and objects connected to Book of Heroes, Book of Tales, or other design endeavors. Most Export to World efforts are also centered here. Along with allowing patrons to leave free form responses, patrons can also leave advice for or appeals to players of Book of Tales or Book of Heroes.

Purpose/Features:

Theater for viewing.

Ideas for Expansion:

The I/O Question and Collective Intelligence

What follows is an exploration of dynamism as manifested by External Input (ExI) applications, which I define as an application which uses data from outside its world. On the literal end are games like Torrent Raiders which use the dynamic network of BitTorrent file transfers to generate gameplay or Audiosurf, which draws on the user’s own digital music to create the environment of the game. On the metaphorical end is any system which relies wholly or in part on a collection of users to power any emergent qualities of the system.

ExI Games - Games that use dynamic events as the core gameplay mechanic. Examples: Torrent Raiders, Packet Garden, Sharkrunners, Audiosurf, and the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) which uses the web browsing habits of the user base to drive the game.

Looking Glass Applications - “Mixed Reality” systems that allow a user to interact with or communicate with reality, virtually (Augmented Reality), or with a virtual world only. The user and their agency (and dynamism), is on one side of the interaction with the virtual component on the other. Examples: Chojo (Augmented Reality), Twitter Second Life Fountain, SMS Second Life Blog, and the Avatar Traps exhibit.

Location Capture/Location Based Applications - Systems that create artificial memory or awareness for a user regarding his or her surroundings. Location-based apps allow the user to record and compile external dynamic data—images, video, and annotations (Lifeblogging)—or alerts the user to the proximity of friends carrying a similar mobile application. Such applications could be used to engage in Passive Mobile Gaming (SEE Passive Gaming). Examples: Nokia LifeBlog, Patholog, MyLifeBits, and Speck.

Collaborative Enterprise Platforms - Systems that allow users to collectively edit textual and/or spatial data often drawn from the real world. Examples: Wikipedia, Google Maps, CityTagz, Google Earth, and Second Life.

Torrent Raiders

“Torrent Raiders, the thesis project of MFA student Aaron Meyers, is an application which serves two functions: it is both a graphically stunning BitTorrent visualization program and a tongue-in-cheek game of counter-piracy.

BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer protocol for file sharing, changed the way large data passes through networks by allowing multiple users across the globe to share the burden of individual file uploads and downloads. One of the interesting by-products of this is that any given computer using BitTorrent may be dowloading and uploading a vast array of information from sources all over the world at any given moment; the data passing through a single computer is a microcosm of global internet traffic.”

Packet Garden

“Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore. To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.”

Sharkrunners

“Sharkrunners, designed for Discovery Channel’s 20th Anniversary Shark Week, is a persistent game of oceanic exploration and high stakes shark research. Players take on the role of marine biologists who seek to learn as much as possible about sharks through advanced observation techniques.

In the game, players control their ships, but the sharks are controlled by real-world white sharks with GPS units attached to their fins. Real-world telemetry data provides the position and movement of actual great white sharks in the game, so every shark that players encounter corresponds to a real shark in the real world.”

Audiosurf

“Audiosurf is a music game that works with any song you choose. Music that gives you an adrenaline rush are converted into wild roller coaster rides full of color and motion. Tunes that calm you down appear as cool colors against a relaxing sky. In Audiosurf, you race down a futuristic and colorful highway. The highway, the traffic patterns, and the scenery are all synchronized to the music you have chosen from your own collection. You earn points for clustering together cars of the same color on the highway, and can compete with others on the internet for the high score on your favorite songs. Audiosurf builds a highway for any music CD, MP3, iTunes M4A, WMA, or OGG song you choose, so the experience that you have is totally up to you.”

Passively Multiplayer Online Games

“Funded by a grant from the BBC, Justin Hall’s thesis project, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, is a vast social meta-game that can be played simply by surfing the Web. PMOG provides a framework for understanding our online existence and allows us to rate and categorize our internet proficiencies.

As the players go about their usual web browsing, PMOG will gather information about their browsing habits and the websites they frequently visit. This information will be used to help define the user’s profile, and also to give the player ‘experience.’ Simply by surfing the web, the players can ‘level up’ their character.

In addition, the player can go on ‘quests’ by visiting sites linked by a common theme. These quests form the social backbone of the game: by participating in the quests, or by creating a quest for others, users can find and categorize new and interesting web content. Enterprising questers can even leave behind unique PMOG items that other players can find on their web travels.”

Passive Gaming can best be described by the following excerpt:

“In our modern lives, we spend much of our time performing tasks, experiencing content, or communicating with others through the internet. Our online interactions, the sites we use and our habits while using them, have the opportunity to say volumes about us as individuals, and about our culture as a whole. PMOG (the first Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is an attempt to catalogue our internet activity and use this information in a personal, interesting way.”

Merci Hammon goes describes the context of Passive Gaming. From her description, I think the concept could be given a mobile twist. I suppose the problem with her example is confirmation of completed tasks. Perhaps confirmation could be handled by passing through certain spatial landmarks or keeping to certain routes.

The excerpt:

“The idea is that we should be receiving points and progress markers for normal, everyday activities. Walking to the mailbox? 15 points. Choosing yogurt instead of a cinnamon roll? 30 points. These points values, once assigned, can be used to create any number of games and goals. Take the latter example: Weight Watchers is a prime instance of passive gaming. Through their system, each food is assigned a certain amount of points and each player is assigned a certain number of daily points. Each food eaten deducts a predetermined amount of points from a player’s total. The game is to feel fed on your assigned number of points. A somewhat similar example is Rachel Ray’s show “$40 a day” in which she attempts to subsist on $40 a day in various cities throughout the U.S. (I know, real tough… but she has to support her cocaine habit on that same daily $40.. no easy feat!).”

Chôjô

“Chôjô is a research project that investigates the possibilities of collaborative, persistent, location-specific experiences that layer 3D virtual worlds over the physical world. This research has led to a Chôjô game in which the USC campus is the playfield. In the game, players use Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) coupled with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to ‘see’ on the PDA screen where they are in the 3D virtual world. With their GPS equipped PDAs, players walk through the USC campus, leaving behind a trail of virtual flora, represented as colorful, blossoming 3D shapes. These flora are mapped using the GPS coordinates of the player, to the corresponding space in the ‘virtual’ USC campus. The virtual flora are persistent - over time, they continue to grow and take over space in the virtual world.”

Twitter Fountain

“The random thoughts of Internet users around the world bubble up into Second Life— here including, if I’m not mistaken, the words of blogging legend Dave Winer.”

Microblogging Guestbook

Bobby Frye’s mod of Steve Petterborg’s email script which allows “anyone can message this object and create a post on a blog.”

Avatar Traps

An exhibit at the Chiellerie gallery in Amsterdam. Avatar Traps is an installation allowing visitors to operate Second Life objects with their mobile phone.

“The blog entry is all about creating links between the real world and the virtual world, so that sensor data and other information can be visualized in Second Life on a real-time basis. In the screenshot above, “The blue balls with white designs represent active Bluetooth devices. The pyramids scattered about the floor represent other people working, with the color designating things like physical presence or telepresence,” according to UgoTrade. This is just one kind of application that could start to make Second Life a much more useful place. I’d love to see entities and conditions being tracked around SL in real time. Why? Because there’s a ton of information to be extracted from a digital environment, which can then be applied to real-world problems from logistics to marketing to sociology, you name it.” 

More Detail

Lifeblog

Lifeblogging can be summarized by the description of Nokia’s LifeBlog application…

“Nokia Lifeblog is a Multimedia diary that automatically collects all the photos, videos, and sound clips that the user creates on the mobile phone, Short message service and Multimedia Messaging System messages that were sent and received. It also allows the user to create text and audio notes. It organizes all the contents in a Timeline and renders the diary searchable via its contents and via automatically and manually created metadata, including time, location, tags, descriptions, filenames, sender and recipient information.”

Patholog

“This project defines a course research aimed at developing a location-aware mobile-weblogging system. Through use of the Patholog system, users are able to engage in a form of personal storytelling through space based on the paths they have traveled, as well as contribute to a larger community narrative virtually layered upon a physical space.

Speck

“Speck is a smart presence device that allows users to connect with friends and share information. Using a combination of Active RFID and Bluetooth wireless technologies, Speck will be able to alert you when others are near, and exchange information with other people, both on command and automatically. Users will be able to set custom alerts and data exchange functionality via a computer or wireless Bluetooth-enabled device.”

MyLifeBits

Paper

“MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of VannevarBush including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.”

Citytagz neatly summarizes the entire area of Collaborative Enterprise Applications. The Metaverse Roadmap forecasting people would call apps like Citytagz, Google Earth, and Google Maps, “Mirror Worlds” or…

“Mirror worlds are informationally-enhanced virtual models or “reflections” of the physical world. Their construction involves sophisticated virtual mapping, modeling, and annotation tools, geospatial and other sensors, and location-aware and other lifelogging (history recording) technologies.”

Citytagz

“The relationship between geography, history and culture in the vast urban region of Los Angeles is explored through a practical, acessible, and expandable chrono-spatial visualization of its landmarks. CityTagz provides a means for residents of various ages to annotate and define their own communities through the identification of nearby resources. By uploading original media, proividing spatial data, and contributing descriptive tags, participants provide a multidimensional dataset that can be queried and rearranged however they see fit.”

With all the talk of user-generated content and Web 2.0, it seems to be primarily, if not exclusively, focused on entertainment—viewing amusing videos, music sharing, meeting friends, or playing user-created games. In other words, real-world problems are generally ignored. I believe that a potential new frontier in web usage may come in the form of applications that solve collective, yet user-specific, problems. Of course, Web 3.0 (The Semantic Web) application will be able to understand your natural-language queries and return only relevant data, but that is not what I mean. Wikipedia comes to mind as an system which contains more serious applications, yet its encyclopedic mission is only one of many problems that could be addressed. Dating services like eHarmony attack the problem of romantic compatibility, but the complexity of the problem likely explains why the site hasn’t put itself out of business. Of a user base of 19 million, there have only been 10,000 eHarmony-coordinated marriages since 2001, so you have less than a 1/10 of 1% chance of finding a marriage partner through eHarmony. Suffice it to say, eHarmony has plenty of room for improvement.

The SETI program has a desktop application called SETI@home that networks the PCs of enthusiasts to crunch data, yet the user has no control over the collaborative enterprise. The creators of the Serious Game, Darfur is Dying can only use the game for creating awareness about the genocidal events in Sudan—the game itself cannot propose any solutions. What if it could? What if social networking could be combined with targeted simulations to answer difficult questions proposed by the user base?

The malware-oriented Storm Worm Botnet had “zombified” up to 50 million networked PCs worldwide to engage in denial-of-service attacks. In one article the Storm Worm Botnet is calculated to be more powerful than any supercomputer:

“‘In terms of power, [the botnet] utterly blows the supercomputers away,’ said Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, in an interview. ‘If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It’s very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there’s not much we can do about it.’”

What if that power (computational and creative) could be harnessed to solve personal conflict? International conflict? Propose and estimate the aggregate effects of new social contracts? All of these questions require external input from the real world for them to be of any use. How can that be facilitated. Alternate Reality game designer Jane McGonigal has similar concerns about that state of problem-solving in the world. This is an excerpt from Jane McGonigal speech at GDC 2008, “Reality is Broken”:

“My rant is about the fact that reality is fundamentally broken, and we have a responsibility as game designers to fix it, with better algorithms and better missions and better feedback and better stories and better community and everything else we know how to make. We have a responsibility as the smartest people in the world, the people who understand how to make systems that make people feel engaged, successful, happy, and completely alive, and we have the knowledge and the power to invent systems that make reality work better. We have the responsibility to take what we’ve learned as an industry over the past 30 years and start making everyday life more like our games.”

McGonigal has some ideas as to what problems should be addressed by such reality games. She has talked about “Happiness Hacking” or using alternate reality games to increase people’s sense of well-being. She has examined how to engage collective intelligence with game design and participated in a game project called World Without Oil, which simulated a global oil shortage. She has a stated ambition to have a game designer win a Nobel Prize by the year 2032 and has talked about the idea of “Massively Multiplayer Science.” The following description is taken from her blog:

“In a nutshell: Wrapping serious scientific work in an alternate reality game framework to engage interdisciplinary researchers, knowledgable amauters, and even the general public in massively collaborative scientific research. I can’t explain this idea any better than I did in my talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) earlier this year. The best part: IFTF is letting me push this idea forward with an alternate reality game for scientists. It’s called the X2 Project Game, and it is a great, crazy idea that is getting oversight from the National Academy of Sciences. More on that in 2008!”

As for business applications, a company called Seriosity has used gaming concepts (earned virtual currency) as a way to fix email overload by prioritizing emails according to the value of the currency attached to it.

Personally, I would like to take things a step further and put the power in the hands of the users. What sorts of user-specified problems could such a massive distributed supercomputer solve if used for altruistic purposes. One can imagine some users designing simulation games to study how best to peacefully resist an oppressive government, others creating simulations considering how best to deal with bullying in their school, while others focused on dating games—analyzing in much greater detail who is most likely to date whom and why. What if users, both passively and actively, played a browser-based game like Travian (www.travian.com) — a massively multiplayer real-time strategy game simulating Roman-era Gaul (modern-day France) and Germany? Could such a simulation, driven by tens of thousands of users, be of use to anthropologists in explaining the societal evolution and patterns of human settlement in Gaul in the First Century BCE? Here is an opportunity for Social Simulation to facilitate research.

In their book Growing Artificial Societies, Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell demonstrate the useful applications of social simulation as a means of understand the emergent evolution of more complex systems (societies) from simpler ones. They attempt this by rendering a “sugarscape” or 2-dimensional world (cellular automata) where primitive agents go about eating “sugar”, reproducing, and dying according to the rules of the world. A distributed user base could participate in such an experiment by contributing “DNA” to agents—a string of ones and zeros defining preferences, culture, and other agent features.

What if the ancient overlay was dispensed altogether and the subject matter of the simulation to the user-base. What sims might users develop? The neighborhood itself—an extenion of Citytagz? In such game/simulation, the users could collaborate to experiment with possible solutions to community problems like traffic or a lack of community. People may feel more comfortable interacting with their neighbors in such a game (due to Suler’s Online Disinhibition Effect) than in real life. A microculture may evolve that helps the citizen to create a community that otherwise would not exist.

In the mobile space we all know that mobile phones are computing devices as well. Further, there are more mobile phones (over 3 billion as of 2006) than PCs (near 1 billion). Could mobile devices be linked in a similar fashion to BitTorrent or the Storm Worm Botnet? The Botnet has at most 50 million machines. Even though a PC is generally more powerful than a mobile phone, if even 1 or 2 billion mobiles were linked into a computer network, what could we achieve with that?

What social problems could mobile distributed supercomputers examine?

What follows is a survey of web-based Collective Decision Making Systems (CDMS) by Jennifer Watkins and Marko Rodriguez, some of which might be expanded upon by integrating them with Social Simulation games to solve pernicious problems.

Document ranking (PageRank aggregation)

Folksonomy (collaborative tagging aggregation)

Recommender system (collaborative filtering aggregation)

Voting system (plurality aggregation)

Open source software (collaborative development aggregation)

Wiki (collaborative editing aggregation)

Prediction market (market scoring rule aggregation)

Does combining Social Simulation games and CDMS systems add value? Is it useful?

We could define social physics as the alteration of an environment according to the aggregate behavior of the actors in a virtual or mixed reality world. Two examples of games that tie character physics to a social outcome are the USC MFA games, “Dyadin” and “Clownerstrike.” Dyadin finds 2 players trapped in alternate, parallel worlds, who must work together to solve a physical puzzle game. Clownerstrike is a multiplayer team game, where the team must compete by performing circus tricks for “laugh points.” So, it loosely conforms to social physics in that the physical stunts drive gameplay.

Dyadin

Clownerstrike

Export to World

Export to World is an experiment in taking objects from Second Life and creating paper constructs of them in the real world. Perhaps creating cutouts of custom objects users create in world could be an additional revenue stream.

The Real, the Web, and the Virtual

This is an attempt to compile our discussions into a research framework. Many parts of this argument need to be validated (or invalidated). What is written here may be better stated somewhere else. The gist of it is the question, “What should a cultural institution’s [or any entity’s] online and virtual presences be?” As we move from the Real World, to the Web, to the Virtual realm, we move from the tangible to the abstract and from the possible to the impossible. As I see it, an entity’s online presence should increasingly make the abstract tangible and the impossible possible.

Dan has mentioned that many of islands we have visited in Second Life are deserted. These can be termed “ghost worlds.” Why do ghost towns develop in the real world? Often, because a mine ceases to be lucrative, a rail-line moves or becomes obsolete, or economic opportunity migrates elsewhere. When speaking of the web or the virtual, a place is abandoned when there is nothing of particular interest going on there, or the place is static or behind the times overall. In Geographic Information Systems, out of date GIS information lacks “Currency.” In a similar sense, such dead spaces are behind the curve of current user interest. The antidote to a lack of currency seems to be changefulness (Dynamism) and agency (Interactivity). Sites like Wikipedia get repeat use because there are always new articles and modifications to existing articles. As a user-created living library, Wikipedia is simultaneously dynamic and interactive. One could argue that an institution’s online presence should offer the user information or an experience that they find relevant (Wikipedia displays current, if not always correct, information on a wide variety of topics) and the experience should be as interactive and dynamic as possible. In such a way the entity can capture the attention of three, possibly overlapping, audiences—those that simply want information on a rare or one-time-only time scale, those that will visit the site again and again because of its changing nature, and those that wish to actively contribute by changing the content themselves.

What else has been said about the topics of Dynamism and Interactivity? Has someone else made a better, more complete, design argument?

What are other examples of dynamic and interactive online locations?

A kind of meta-Dynamism might be achieved by linking the real world and the online world in a feedback loop or ecosystem of interactions. The tangible content from the real world should be carried forward into a web and virtual realms. Interconnectivity should direct users from the web and the virtual spaces back to expanded content in the real world. This, in turn, allows the process to start all over again. Interconnectivity might expand upon the changefulness already on display in blogs, news aggregators, and Wikipedia. World-bridging or multimodal interaction technologies like Augmented Reality (like going through the Looking Glass…) would be useful in facilitating Interconnectivity. Henry Jenkins’ notion of Transmedia storytelling is only a rough approximation of Interconnectivity because the circle is incomplete. Only the author’s story has primacy. The phenomena of fan fiction has no legitimacy compared to the authorial or corporate interest.

What else has been said about Interconnectivity? Has someone else made a better argument?

A side benefit of an emergent ecosystem of realities may be the “Crucible Experience” as described by Dr. Elaine Raybourn of Sandia Labs. Raybourn designed a virtual environment for training Special Forces personnel to think adaptively in ambiguous, non-kinetic (non-violent) and complex intercultural communication situations (http://www.sandia.gov/adaptive-training-systems/papers/Raybourn%20I-ITSEC%202672%2011-17-%202006_citation.pdf).

In a virtual world, trainees can make mistakes without life-altering consequences while simultaneously building a personalized repertoire of problem-solving skills to use in situations may not have a perfect answer, simply better or worse ones. If a Special Forces soldier encounters an Afghan who speaks to him in rude manner, is this simply culturally appropriate behavior, is the Afghan having a bad day, is he afraid of the soldier, is he allied with the Taliban insurgency, or some combination thereof? What approaches might the soldier use to find out what truth he can without creating a negative outcome? The problem is interactive, continuous (not either-or), and demands a similarly complex teaching methodology. Raybourn’s approach was to pose scenarios that would create a Crucible Experience, or “a defining moment that unleashes abilities, forces crucial choices, and sharpens focus. It teaches the person who he or she is.” Raybourn’s simulation design framework proposed a looping support lattice for the Crucible Experience composed of Interaction, Narrative, Place, and an Emergent Culture (What Jenkins might classify as Hypersociability or the encouraged involvement of media consumers in a story through ordinary social interaction) which then feeds Interaction. I see this loop as an example of Interconnectivity. If the Crucible Experience can be transferred to other areas, it may prove an effective way of teaching challenging topics or those commonly thought of as dry or uninteresting.

What topics can one most effectively teach with the Crucible Experience?

What follows is a layout describing prospective goals, needs, and innovations that should be taken into consideration when a cultural institution (in this case the Dallas Museum of Art) defines itself online. Let us say that the current visiting exhibit is Mayan in nature.

What are the issues of the modern museum that might be alleviated through online and virtual presences?

When a patron enters the Mayan exhibit they are offered an iPod-like audio tour device that plays commentary as they walk through the stages of the exhibit—Origins, City Life, Kingship, the Underworld, the Gods, and the Mayan Apocalypse. Using GPS or accelerometer technology, track each audio tour device through the stages of the exhibit, showing how long each person spends at each stage. Route this information in real-time to the DMA website and display it in a GIS similar to Digg Labs Swarm application (http://labs.digg.com/swarm/).

Users or potential patrons visiting the website will be able to see where the live patrons are gathering and what the flow is like. The more live patrons gather in a particular stage, the application will place a stage-specific overlay on the patron data. In other words, the more people gather in the City Life stage, the more the Mayan GIS will chart their progress as though they are running errands through a 2D map of a Mayan city. If many patrons pause in the Kingship section, they are presented as a lineage or kings (the patrons first in line are past kings with others following through time). Another overlay could show an overuse of environmental resources leading to the end of Maya civilization. Users can click on individual patrons to get more detailed information about their role in the overlay scheme. Web users are encouraged to come to the DMA and see the exhibition in person in order to add their data to the scheme (they will be able to replay crowd flow and see their own progress through an access number printed on their ticket). So, elements of the real-world exhibit are used to give users a view of the process they never would have had otherwise. Patrons may even visit the exhibit more than once or in large groups to see how they altered 2D GIS feed.

How are museums and other entities currently positioned web-wise? How important is this dimension to their mission?

Are there privacy issues with charting a person’s progress through the stages of an exhibit with an audio tour guide device? How should the additional functionality be explained to patrons? Are there more passive ways to collect the same data?

What are the development time-scale issues and costs associated with creating the Mayan GIS system?

Mayan Hyperreal is an expansion of the Mayan GIS application. Users in Second Life (or some other virtual platform) are free to participate in the exhibit as well. In SL would be a Mayan city. Perhaps live data from the Mayan GIS could be used to populate the city with script-driven agents that move through it as the real life patrons move through the exhibit. Users with Looking Glass applications (through a web browser) could interact with the SL environment similar to the 3D Mailbox (http://www.3dmailbox.com/) which shows user’s incoming email as planes landing in a 3D environment or as guests at a beach resort. In other words, in one possible implementation, a web-based user could use one browser window to view a live feed from SL and another to send an email which, depending on the email address, appears in SL as kindly or evil spirit with disrupts the flow of life or changes entire nature of the world. Users accessing the world through a mobile-based Looking Glass application will have a different way of affecting the world. Users that have been to the exhibit (identified through a number on their ticket) and enter SL will have a special role to play, a special level of agency in-world.

Notions of “Social Physics” can come into play. If most avatars move to a particular part of the environment (the Temple of the Maize God), the city will become more vibrant as a reflection of the favor of the god or simply an increased investment in agriculture. If most avatars congregate in the Underworld portion of the environment, the city will become overgrown by jungle flora and become like a ruin as a demonstration of a depopulated city or inattention to practical resource management. A battle between crowds of avatars in this way is also an opportunity to create a Crucible Experience. The Maya had gods that were non-dualistic (they had both positive and negative qualities), so this is a chance for users investigate for themselves the complex interactions between religion, politics, and the natural world.

The web-based presence encourages users to become patrons and visit the exhibit and the virtual DMA presence also sends users back to the real world, but in several ways. First, it should be said that the DMA would have an opportunity to connect to a large, young, tech-savy demographic on their own turf. When a user makes a donation to the museum in virtual currency (Linden Dollars), a change occurs in world (more resources are added to the environment to extend the life of Mayan civilization). Memberships can be sold to users on an extended use basis (“You will have access to all DMA virtual exhibits for the next 2 years.”), an exhibit-to-exhibit basis, a pay-for-use model, or a pay-for-feature system where users who sign up for a membership (real or virtual) or make a donation of a certain amount have unique abilities or appearance (an ornate headdress) in the virtual space. Finally, Interconnectivity can be demonstrated when users are driven back to the real world to study Mayan history, culture, and religion to use in their efforts to get control of the virtual Mayan city and extend the viability of Mayan civilization.

How are museums and other entities currently positioned in virtual worlds? How important is this dimension to their mission?

What level of interaction can a user have with Second Life or another virtual world through a web-browser or mobile phone?

How large is the online demographic and what are they willing to pay for a virtual experience?

What are the spatial issues around large numbers of virtual users in an environment? Warner Bros developed a game in Second Life based on the film I Am Legend. Large parts of Manhattan are modeled. Did they face any such issues?

(http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/10/15/i-am-legend-gameplay-in-depth/)

(http://iamlegendsurvival.warnerbros.com/)

What are the development time-scale issues and costs associated with creating a virtual exhibit?

What are other virtual-based revenue streams for museums?

What kinds of topics can Crucible Experiences be used to teach?

How practical is dynamic world-spanning scripting in Second Life?

Can semantic aggregation be manifested environmentally in Second Life?

How practical are Social Physics implementations in Second Life?

Virtual Worlds and Second Life Ideas

A paper examining the potential of Semantic Social Networks (Euzenat & Jung, 2007) detailed how one might engage in Social Network Analysis to infer non-explicit relationships between the people from information within the network, thus revealing potentially useful collaborators for members of the network. In their experiment they tasked users with annotating photographs using the ontology (description schema or taxonomy) of their choice. The result was then subjected to analysis on 3 layers-Social (Jim does not know Jane), Ontological (Jim used FOAF and Jane used Exif), and Conceptual (Jim’s metadata tags vs. Jane’s metadata tags). It was found that social relationships could be inferred from the users’ choice of ontology and the connections between the concepts within those ontologies. Conversely, conceptual relationships could be revealed from connections on the social layer and so on.

Ontological data can also be mapped via applications like Spectacle (Fluit, et. al, 2002). Such Cluster Maps display the objects in an ontology in a hierarchy and group similar objects into clusters. In a cluster map of job vacancies displayed by job category information is displayed qualitatively and quantitatively. Both the number of jobs in each cluster and the relationships between cluster categories are shown to the user via visual cues such as size, geometric closeness, overlapping clusters (overlapping job categories), and arrows. Furthermore, completely new maps can be generated by changing the ontology from job vacancies based on job category to vacancies based on geographic location.

It may be possible to construct a Second Life application that takes as input the appearance of an avatar, the avatar’s spatial location, past travels, or user preferences, to an ontology which maps to a particular style or genre of art. If a certain group of avatars gather in a designated space in a particular configuration they would constitute an aggregate painting (procedurally-generated from source images). Through experimenting with coordinating their movements in the space, users might learn about the range of aggregate paintings they can generate based on their avatars, histories, and preferences. Users/students might be tasked with learning how to control the aggregator to produce a style of painting (more abstract to less abstract, ancient to modern, 2D to Photorealistic, etc) with a specific emotional content. Another means of learning about art would have users altering or extending the underlying mapping ontology to suit the individual tastes of the group.

If semantic cluster mapping could be applied in Second Life in a way similar to Google’s Zeitgeist feature, which keeps statistics on popular searches, an extended application could be developed. Instead of merely collecting information on popular searches, each SL user would have a Zeitgeist application where he could enter various pieces of information on any conceivable topic agreed upon. Each user’s entry data comprises is his Mind Map. Mind Maps could be composed of visited locations, user preferences, avatar type, and annotations. All Mind Maps are used to create a semantic cluster map that refers to actual spatial locations (real or virtual).

Once users have decided to participate, the topic/theme has been set, Mind Maps uploaded, and the first semantic cluster map is generated, users would be teleported to the SL region/island where they fit on the map. Perhaps they wind up with other people who like Modern art, who possess human-like avatars, were born in South Texas, who identified themselves as being mostly happy in the last 2 weeks, or some combination thereof. If users dislike their locations and feel they more appropriately belong elsewhere on the semantic map, they could alter their Mind Map or take the brute force approach of teleporting, flying, or walking to the destination of their choice. However, every time a new Zeitgeist semantic map is generated, traveling users may find themselves teleported right back to where they started or to some other locale and be compelled to move again. Thus, the changing shape of the semantic map affects the nature of movement. If one is in the “Dark Depressed Netherworld” island/region of the semantic map and wish to move to the “Happy Joyful Paradise” region, one must be aware of how the ontology works such that the destination desired is actually “there” when the next map is generated. After a pre-arranged number of rounds of semantic map generation, the play session ends. Logging out of the application at any time ceases play. If the movement-by-aggregate map system proves to be too oppressive, its effect can be reduced. Perhaps once play begins and a Zeitgeist map is generated, teleportation cannot completely return a user to some destination.

Ideas, strategies, or potential problems could be tested in Second Life for later use in the mobile phone version of the Zeitgeist application. In the mobile version, the spatial locations could be represented in the real world (UTD campus), Second Life, or in a completely different virtual space. Movement could be rendered purely through modifying a Mind Map, some degree of physical movement, or some combination thereof.

Towards Semantic Social Networks (2007)

Jason J. Jung and Jerome Euzenat

Ontology-based Information Visualisation (2002)

Christian Fluit, Marta Sabou, Frank van Harmelen

Giant Global Graph

From Tim Berners-Lee (Originator of the Semantic Web):

Well, it has been a long time since my last post here. So many topics, so little time. Some talks, a couple of Design Issues articles, but no blog posts. To dissipate the worry of expectation of quality, I resolve to lower the bar. More about what I had for breakfast.

So The Graph word has been creeping in. BradFitz talks of the Social Graph as does Alex Iskold, who discusses social graphs and network theory in general, points out that users want to own their own social graphs. He alo points out that examples of graphs are the Internet and the Web. So what’s with the Graph word?

 article

Augmented reality in the cemetery

From MIT’s Technology Review
(http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/wo/wo_delio021505.asp); the web article includes a 9 image slideshow featuring the Voices of Oakland project and DART

Augmented Reality: Another (Virtual) Brick in the Wall

Michelle Delio
February 15, 2005

Imagine wandering through a southern Victorian-era cemetery shaded by ancient oaks dripping with Spanish moss, seeing images of the people who are buried under the crumbling stones appear and listening as they tell you their stories.

Georgia Institute of Technology’s Augmented Environments Lab has developed an “Augmented Reality” tour that allows visitors to do just that at Atlanta’s Oakland cemetery.

During a recent trial run, users carried small laptops in backpacks and used game console controllers to navigate through the cemetery. As they approached specific graves they listened to the “voices” of the first person buried in Oakland, a child who lived through the Battle of Atlanta during the Civil War, and a local historian who died in 2000. The audio, with information culled from personal documents, was piped in via a wireless network.

The Georgia Institute of Technology team is working on adding the appropriate ghostly images to the tour, which users will view through a head-mounted display unit. The ghosts’ appearances will probably be activated by RFID tags on the graves.

Article

My Location Feature

Google made a new beta version of its Mobile Maps available to certain smartphones today. The biggest improvement of the application comes with its My Location feature, which uses cell tower information—and not on-board GPS—to determine user location.

Article 1

Interview  

Mobile Semantic Platform

Sorry for hogging all the blog space and the bad grammar (this was last minute).

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The Mobile Semantic Platform is for creating collaborative, social-networking, and semantically-enabled applications for mobile phones that can take advantage of ad-hoc networks.

Other potential names:

Ciphergrapher, Geocipher, MobileCipher, Crypteiacon, EnDecrypter, Glyphic, Semantia, Psychographer, OMG (Omnipedic Mobile Geography system), Three in One or 3n1 or M3 (Mobile Meaning Mapper), HTM (Human Terrain Mapper), Vault (Variable Ad-hoc UniversaL Topology), Summa (Semantic Mobile Mapper).

String Generation - The mechanical process is that of string generation. Users are tasked with creating strings of tagged Objects according to an overriding grammar or structure. The string(s) will be the final output of the process.

ArtMicro allows users to collaborate in the production (via aggregation) of a unique “micro genre” of art and/or music, which is manifested as a slideshow (string) at the end of the process, showing the genre’s evolution.

(1) Mechanical Process - String Generation.

(2) Structure/Grammar - Oppositional Dialectic.

(3) Features - Conventional GUI, Semantic Search.

(4) Object/Tag Definition - Objects are art (video or visual) and tags are genres. Folksonomy.

(5) Style of Play - Collaborative.

Allows users to construct “words” (strings) composed of Objects and tags. The structure/grammar is decided by the community of users. As in the game Scrabble, the longest meaningful words are the most valued. A language for speedy semantic blogging may emerge from this application.

(1) Mechanical Process - String Generation.

(2) Structure/Grammar - Relational/Kinship.

(3) Features - Conventional GUI, Semantic Search.

(4) Object/Tag Definition - Objects are anything and tags are descriptive. Folksonomy.

(5) Style of Play - Individual or Collaborative.

Allows users to submit questions or answer them (Q/A strings are archived) collectively. Because of the potentially large database of questions and answers, the Locative Memory feature is enabled. This application is similar to the following:

Yahoo! Answers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Answers)

Knowledge In (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_in)

KERA’s Anything You Ever Wanted to Know (http://www.kera.org/radio/anything/)

(1) Mechanical Process - String Generation.

(2) Structure/Grammar - Compositional Dialectic

(3) Features - Semantic Search, Locative Memory GUI

(4) Object/Tag Definition - Objects are questions or Answers and tags are descriptive. Tags are generated by Folksonomy.

(5) Style of Play - Collective.

In this application users can collectively train one or more AI agents (pets, chatbots, etc) in a wide range of behaviors. Users enter information for the agent to use (map coordinates) and/or issues commands. These are the string elements. Users can drop in or out of the process at will. Because of the potentially large database of commands and answers, the Locative Memory feature is enabled. This application is similar to the following:

Personality Forge (collection of chatbots) (http://www.personalityforge.com/)

Digital Pet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_pets)

(1) Mechanical Process - String Generation.

(2) Structure/Grammar - Compositional Dialectic, Oppositional Dialectic, Sequence-Relation, Relational/Kinship.

(3) Features - Semantic Search, Locative Memory GUI

(4) Object/Tag Definition - Objects are commands or information and tags are descriptive. Objects are Pre-defined while tags are defined by Folksonomy.

(5) Style of Play - Collective or Collaborative.

Subway Love Story

Okay, so here’s my belated example of Collective Intelligence. It’s also an interesting example of psychology of choice. A guy sees a girl on the subway, misses out on talking to her (What would you say?), so launches a website to find her. Calls and messages pour in from the collective and the object of his infatuation is found in short order.

Link to the Full Story

I’d like to know what happens after the first date (friendship, probably). Also of note is how the story has attracted interest (including my own). It’s quite a meme, but why? One, because we would like to believe that connection is possible with certain desirable strangers (Isn’t that in a ton of films?) and we would like to believe that someone would value us so highly as to seek us out come hell or high water (Isn’t that in a ton of films?). However, when people do hit on us, we are often indifferent or revolted (risk-taking is punished more than rewarded). Therein lies a paradox. If everyone desires that everyone else take the lion’s share of the risk, not much risk gets taken and so our lives remain relatively well-controlled and mundane, and our dreams are only realized in fiction and the occasional amusing story. We all know this intuitively. In any case, I see a missing ethical component to this problem. Perhaps the right collective intelligence system can resolve the paradox. Currently, dating sites often encourage unrealistic fantasies, zero-sum thinking, or stereotypes that simply exacerbate the paradox.