How a Fake Internet Friend Helped Write a Real Novel

And interesting read by Richard Cox posted in the Weeklings: Hello, This is Veronika Richard Cox Wednesday, November 21, 2012 DURING THE COURSE of writing my latest novel, I became acquainted with a young woman named Veronika, who makes a brief appearance in its pages. Thomas World is the story of an everyman who begins to suspect his life isn’t real, and may in fact be a game or simulation in which he’s the main character. The novel documents Thomas’ journey through madness as he searches for answers to existential questions, and ends with a world-bending confrontation in Berkeley, California with a Creator who may or may not be Philip K. Dick—himself a well-known science fiction author who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia and turned his own madness into solipsistic thrillers about artificial reality. I first crossed paths with Veronika on MySpace in 2007, back when it still reigned supreme over Facebook (remember that?). By the time she found me, I had been blogging on the site for eighteen months, and had acquired thousands of readers. New visitors were common, and I knew from experience that not all of them were who they claimed to be. The nature of MySpace made it the perfect breeding ground for aliases and fake identities. Veronika was presumably a 21 year-old blonde bombshell from Sweden, and her detailed online profile lent unusual credibility to her claim: hundreds of pictures, scores of friends, including her boyfriend Shane, her cousin Elin (a former police officer in Sweden who served in the army and trained as a military law enforcement specialist in the Livgardet), a roommate, classmates from her university, etc. Her profile also told the story of her arrival in theUnited States, of recent great tragedy (her mother’s death), and featured a voice recording of Veronika reciting her favorite quote: “Hello, this is Veronika. Welcome to my MySpace page! Remember, in the words of Ernest Hemingway: The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places!” Even considering the staggering amount of detail on her profile, however, I was highly skeptical of her identity from the beginning. The comments she left on my blog seemed to indicate a vast amount of life experience and wisdom not normally found in such a young adult…to say nothing for her Playboy bunny exterior, which, stereotypically speaking, doesn’t match well with the intellectual type. These suspicions, however, fueled a burning curiosity in me. The effort to create a profile with so many pictures and details would consume hours. Days, really. In addition, the person would be forced to create the fictional profiles of Veronika’s boyfriend, cousin, friends, etc., and then go to the trouble of occasionally signing into MySpace as these characters and leaving comments on her fictional page. In retrospect these suspicions and my subsequent investigation are similar to the plot of Catfish, though my experience occurred three years before that film was released. In any case, whoever Veronika really was, why had she (or he) contacted me? read the essay HERE.

Editing Our Online Selves

Now if they just substituted Goldfish Crackers for the Cheetos this would be dead-on:

Vocaloid Holograph Anime Pop Singer Miku Hatsune

Voice is electronically generated (hence the vocaloid), performance is mix of extremely sophisticated holographic imagery and a slamming live band. The technology is pretty amazing; I've watched a couple of times just to watch how the necktie tracks or how they step out of the spotlight or in front of each other. Some comments here and there are grumbling about preferring music made by humans, but really, it's all made by humans; it's not like the hologram wrote her own stuff! The possibilities reel the mind. I find the anime body incarnate troubling. Still, age of wonders...






Check out the instant costume changes in this medley:

Japan Anime Fetishes: Love In 2D

NYT MAG

July 26, 2009
Phenomenon
Love in 2-D
By LISA KATAYAMA

Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter — at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo — was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver’s license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west — to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends’ couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. “She has really changed my life.”

Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a stuffed pillowcase — a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric. In the game, which is less a game than an interactive visual novel about a schoolyard romance, Nemu is the loudmouthed little sister of the main character, whom she calls nisan, or “big brother,” a nickname Nisan adopted as his own when he met Nemu. When I joined the couple for lunch at their favorite all-you-can-eat salad bar in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, he insisted on being called only by this new nickname, addressing his body-pillow girlfriend using the suffix “tan” to show how much he adored her. Nemutan is 10, maybe 12 years old and wears a little blue bikini and gold ribbons in her hair. Nisan knows she’s not real, but that hasn’t stopped him from loving her just the same. “Of course she’s my girlfriend,” he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. “I have real feelings for her.”

At 37, Nisan is already balding, and his remaining hair has gone gray. “I can’t eat meat because of my diabetes,” he said, chomping on a forkful of lettuce and okra. “I’m just an unlucky guy.” As Nisan and I talked, Nemutan stared demurely at her pumpkin soup. It was a national holiday, and the restaurant was packed with young families. Several mothers gave Nemutan inquisitive looks, but the majority seemed not to notice her.

Nisan told me that not long ago he had a real girlfriend, but that she dumped him. He carries Nemutan almost everywhere he goes, though he is more self-conscious about it than he may seem at first. “Some people don’t find this funny,” he said, “and it also takes up a lot of room.” He treats her the way any decent man would treat a girlfriend — he takes her out on the weekends to sing karaoke or take purikura, photo-booth pictures imprinted on a sheet of tiny stickers. In the few hours we spent together, I watched him position her gently in the restaurant booth and later in the back seat of his car, making sure to keep her upright and not to touch her private parts. He doesn’t take her to work, but he has a backup body pillow with the same Nemutan cover inside his desk drawer in case he has to work late at his tech-support job. “She’s great for falling asleep with on an office chair.” Nisan has seven Nemutan covers in total — he buys them at Internet auctions and at fan conventions whenever he finds a good deal (he paid $70 for the original). If one gets too faded and dirty from overuse, he layers a new one over it. On the day that I first met Nisan and Nemutan, Nisan was carrying a new Nemutan cover in his bag in case she needed to look fresh for a photograph. He knows it’s weird for a grown man to be so obsessed with a video-game character, but he just can’t imagine life without Nemutan. “When I die, I want to be buried with her in my arms.”

Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade. It’s impossible to say exactly what portion of otaku are 2-D lovers, because the distinction between the two can be blurry. Like most otaku, the majority of 2-D lovers go to work, pay rent, hang out with friends (some are even married). Unlike most otaku, though, they have real romantic feelings for their toys. The less extreme might have a hidden collection of figurines based on anime characters that they go on “dates” with during off hours. A more serious 2-D lover, like Nisan, actually believes that a lumpy pillow with a drawing of a prepubescent anime character on it is his girlfriend.

According to many who study the phenomenon, the rise of 2-D love can be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. According to a government survey, more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex. One of the biggest best sellers in the country last year was “Health and Physical Education for Over Thirty,” a six-chapter, manga-illustrated guidebook that holds the reader’s hand from the first meeting to sex to marriage.

Most 2-D lovers prefer a different kind of self-help. The guru of the 2-D love movement, Toru Honda, a 40-year-old man with a boyishly round face and puppy-dog eyes, has written half a dozen books advocating the 2-D lifestyle. A few years ago, Honda, a college dropout who worked a succession of jobs at video-game companies, began to use the Internet to urge otaku to stand with pride against good-looking men and women. His site generated enough buzz to earn him a publishing contract, and in 2005 he released a book condemning what he calls “romantic capitalism.” Honda argues that romance was marketed so excessively through B-movies, soap operas and novels during Japan’s economic bubble of the ’80s that it has become a commodity and its true value has been lost; romance is so tainted with social constructs that it can be bought by only good looks and money. According to Honda, somewhere along the way, decent men like himself lost interest in the notion entirely and turned to 2-D. “Pure love is completely gone in the real world,” Honda wrote. “As long as you train your imagination, a 2-D relationship is much more passionate than a 3-D one.” Honda insists that he’s advocating not prurience but a whole new kind of romance. If, as some researchers suggest, romantic love can be broken down into electrical impulses in the brain, then why not train the mind to simulate those signals while looking at an inanimate character?

Honda’s fans took his message to heart. When he admitted to watching human porn at a panel discussion in Tokyo in 2005, several hundred hard-core 2-D lovers in the audience booed with shock that their dear leader had nostalgia for the 3-D world. Later, in an interview with a Japanese newspaper, Honda clarified his position, saying that he was worried 2-D love was becoming an easy way out for young otaku, who might still have a shot at success in the real world. “I’m not saying that everyone should throw away hopes of real romance right away. I am simply saying that guys like me who have gotten to a point of no return can be happy living in 2-D.”

In Japan the fetishistic love for two-dimensional characters is enough of a phenomenon to have earned its own slang word, moe, homonymous with the Japanese words for “burning” or “budding.” In an ideal moe relationship, a man frees himself from the expectations of an ordinary human relationship and expresses his passion for a chosen character, without fear of being judged or rejected.

“It’s enlightenment training,” Takuro Morinaga, one of Japan’s leading behavioral economists, told me. “It’s like becoming a Buddha.” According to Morinaga, every male otaku can be classified on a moe scale. “On one end, you have the normal guy, who has no interest in anime characters and only likes human women,” he explained. “The opposite end, of course, is the hard-core 2-D lover.” Morinaga, a self-described otaku, didn’t have much luck with women until he became a well-regarded economist. Now he has a wife and a private office in a fancy apartment building near ritzy Tokyo Bay. “I’m a 2 — I still like human women better,” he said, a wide grin forming. “But there are many men who are on the opposite side of the scale. I understand their feelings completely. These guys don’t want to push ahead in society; they just want to create their own little flower-bed world and live there peacefully.”

For Nisan, who would probably score an 8 or a 9 on Morinaga’s moe scale, 2-D love is a substitute for real, monogamous romance. For others, just as fanatic as he, it can be a way of having more than one girlfriend at a time. Whatever a particular 2-D lover’s bent, there is a product made for him. Moe subculture has spawned a substantial market of goods centered on the desire to live in 2-D, from virtual girlfriends to body pillows to busty desktop-size figurines to cafes with waitresses dressed up as video-game characters. Every day, 2-D lovers come from all over Japan to Tokyo’s Akihabara district just to scour specialty shops and attend fan events in search of new character girlfriends to add to their collections.

I first met Ken Okayama one brisk and unusually windy Sunday morning in February, in front of a towering business hotel adjacent to Akihabara station. A tall and rather good-looking 38-year-old man, Okayama lives with relatives and works at a rural paint-application company in western Japan. He flies to Tokyo two to three times a year for the newest anime-related paraphernalia. “We don’t get a lot of anime in the boonies,” he said as he led me through a maze of nearly identical, unnamed side streets to the Gee! Store, sandwiched between a nondescript apartment building and a row of coin-operated lockers in a narrow alley. The walls were covered with kitschy posters, pillows and paraphernalia featuring wide-eyed, multicolor-haired anime girls in frilly panties and bikini tops. “There are two things you should be mindful of when buying a body pillow,” Okayama whispered as we combed the aisles, trying not to disturb the handful of other men perusing the merchandise. “First, there’s image quality. And then you have to choose one that feels good on the skin.” Polyester, for example, is less desirable than smooth knit.

Okayama was an early adopter of 2-D. He discovered anime about two decades ago when he was new to the work force and feeling suicidal. “I was having a lot of trouble,” he told me over coffee, making a slicing gesture with his hand by his neck. That’s when he encountered Sasami, a blue-haired, 10-year-old cartoon character from the anime “Tenchi Muyo!”

She lifted him right out of his misery. “It’s hard to explain in words, but it’s a feeling similar to romance. Sasami gave me the will to keep going.” Since then, Okayama has turned to 2-D for all his emotional needs — the desire to buy new anime helped him get through a period of unemployment in 2003, and his body-pillow girlfriends, whom he dates two or three at a time, consoled him when his first real-life girlfriend dumped him in 2007.

“I was steps away from getting married,” he explained earnestly when prodded about his experience. “You have to make sure you don’t hurt a real person; you have to watch what you say, and you have to keep your room clean. In Japan, it’s not O.K. to like another person if you’re already with somebody else. With an anime character, you can like one character one day and a different character the next.”

Okayama’s flings were unconsummated, but for others 2-D love is a full-fledged alternative sexual lifestyle. Several hours after parting with Okayama in Akihabara, I met Momo at a fan convention. Momo, who makes X-rated body-pillow covers and sells them through his one-man club, Youkouro, which translates roughly as Furnace of Child Love, was there on business. The convention was being held inside a stuffy warehouse filled with boxes of 8-by-10, pamphlet-style, home-brewed manga and swarmed with thousands of anime fetishists, mostly men. Many 2-D lovers are unsatisfied with what the market has to offer, so they custom-make their own fantasy goods and come to conventions to barter and socialize with the like-minded. We left the warehouse and made our way to a fancy shopping mall, where we sat down on a bench. Momo began to flip through a catalog of more than a dozen prints of prepubescent anime characters with giant doe eyes in erotic poses. I flinched when a 5-year-old girl and her father plopped down behind us, but if Momo felt uneasy, he didn’t show it. On the contrary, he seemed giddy from the great sales he’d made. “I sold four pillow covers today,” he said proudly.

Momo, whose real name is Toru Taima, has more than 150 body-pillow covers at home. His current favorite is Karada-chan, a copper-haired sixth grader from the anime “A Direction in the Day After Tomorrow.” She’s fully clothed in the cartoon, but in Momo’s imagination and thus on his pillow cover, she appears naked, her cheeks flushed, her prepubescent nipples hidden by her forearms, her white panties rolled down to her ankles. A translucent square etched onto the pillow cover censors her hairless vagina.

Every night, Karada-chan and at least two other animated preteens, drawn with large pink nipples and exaggerated labia, share a mattress with Momo, one on each side and another on top. “They’re so cute, I can’t stand it,” he said shyly. “It’s like my favorite girl comes to marry me every night. I just can’t stop thinking about them.” When Momo talks about Karada-chan, his mousy face lights up like a kid opening Christmas presents. “Her existence to me is like daughter, younger sister and bride all put into one.” Does he have sex with her? “Yes.” Is he interested in real women? “It’s not like I’m completely uninterested. But the last girl I really liked was when I was 12 years old.”

Momo told me he never looks at child porn. He lives with his sister and his 3-year-old niece, whom he insists he has no sexual feelings for. “I am not doing anything to harm anybody,” he said adamantly. “To me, these are works of art. They’re cute girls that live in my imagination.”

Momo says he hopes that one day soon, there will be a 3-D version of Karada-chan. In March, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology unveiled a 5-foot-2, 95-pound girl robot made “for entertainment purposes,” with an anime face and human proportions. The robot girl walked, batted her eyelashes and spoke basic Japanese. Momo is hopeful and confident that, in the very near future, this technology will be marketed. “I don’t care if people understand or not,” Momo said. “I just want them to leave me alone. I don’t have any nostalgia for reality. I’m happy living in the 2-D world.”

But not all 2-D lovers, as Toru Honda recognized, are ready to cast reality aside entirely. I couldn’t help remembering what Nisan told me, Nemutan held tightly in his left arm, as we walked out of the restaurant to the parking lot. “Of course I want to get married,” he said as we drove back to West Hachioji station listening to his favorite Eurobeat CD. “But look at me. How can someone who carries this around get married? People are probably wondering what psychiatric ward I escaped from. I would think the same thing if I saw me.” He widened his eyes in self-ridicule, then, the next moment, his expression became somber. “I’m pretty conflicted inside. People say there are some otaku who don’t want to get married, but that’s not true. Some have so little confidence that they’ve just given up, but deep inside their souls, they want it just as much as anybody else.”

If he ever does find true three-dimensional love, Nisan said, he hopes that his wife will accept Nemutan for who she is: “She is my life’s work. I would be devastated if that was taken away from me.”

Lisa Katayama is the author of “Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks From Japan” and blogs about Japanese pop culture at TokyoMango.com.

Researchers teach 'Second Life' avatar to think

AP/Yahoo
Researchers teach 'Second Life' avatar to think

By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press WriterSun May 18, 2:33 PM ET

Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in "Second Life." A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier in AI research because it's a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

"It's a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now," said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries.

But first, a virtual reality check.

Edd is not running rampant through the cyber streets of "Second Life." He goes only where Bringsjord and his graduate students place him for tests. He can answer questions like "Where are you from?" but understands only English that has previously been translated into mathematical logic.

"Second Life" is attractive to researchers in part because virtual reality is less messy than plain-old reality. Researchers don't have to worry about wind, rain or coffee spills.

And virtual worlds can push along AI research without forcing scientists to solve the most difficult problems — like, say, creating a virtual human — right away, said Michael Mateas, a computer science professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Researching in virtual realities has become increasingly popular the past couple years, said Mateas, leader of the school's Expressive Intelligence Studio for AI and gaming.

"It's a fantastic sweet spot — not too simple, not too complicated, high cultural value," he said.

Bringsjord is careful to point out that the computations for Edd's mental feats have been done on workstations and are not sapping "Second Life" servers. The calculations will soon be performed on a supercomputer at Rensselaer with support from research co-sponsor IBM Corp.

Operators of "Second Life" don't seem concerned about synthetic agents lurking in their world. John Lester, Boston operations manager for Linden Lab, said the San Francisco-based company sees a "fascinating" opportunity for AI to evolve.

"I think the real future for this is when people take these AI-controlled avatars and let them free in 'Second Life,'" Lester said, " ... let them randomly walk the grid."

That is years off by most experts' estimations. Edd's most sophisticated cognitive feat so far — played out in "Second Life" and posted on the Web — involves him witnessing a gun being switched from one briefcase to another. Edd was able to infer that another "Second Life" character who left the room during the switch would incorrectly think the gun was still in the first suitcase.

This ability to make inferences about the thoughts of others is significant for an AI agent, though it puts Edd on par with a 4-year-old — and the calculus required "under the hood" to achieve this feat is mind-numbingly complex.

A computer program smart enough to fool someone into thinking they're interacting with another person — the traditional Holy Grail for AI researchers — has been elusive. One huge problem is getting computers to understand concepts imparted in language, said Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

AI agents do best in tightly controlled environments: Think of automated phone programs that recognize your responses when you say "operator" or "repair."

Bringsjord sees "Second Life" as a way station. He eventually wants to create other environments where more sophisticated creations could display courage or deceive people, which would be the first step in developing technology to detect deception.

The avatars could be projected at RPI's $145 million Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, opening in October, which will include spaces for holographic projections. Officials call them "holodecks" in homage to the virtual reality room on the "Star Trek" television series.

That sort of visual fidelity is many years down the line, just like complex AI. John Kolb, RPI's chief information officer, said the best three-dimensional effects still require viewers to wear special light-polarizing glasses.

"If you want to do texture mapping on a wall for instance, that's easy. We can do that today," Kolb said. "If you want to start to build cognitive abilities into avatars, well, that's going to take a bit more work."

Musicians in Second Life

CNN.com
March 25, 2008
Music and technology
Posted: 02:59 PM ET


Why a musician starts an SL career? First of all he has to trust in his music and he must think to share something new with his audience. This is the story of Swina Allen, whose gig I attended last week at the Gold Club. In his music you can find some bluesy roots, but actually it is affected also by some rock influences(Carlos Santana and Weather Report above all) and even some innovative jazz (Joe Zawinul,Waine Shorter e Jaco Pastorius):the result is an original sound, a kind of smooth jazz and chillout.

As soon as Swina started his second life he opened a club, the Italian Mood(yudasin22.99,45), suddenly it became a sort of musical workshop hosting many live musicians gigs of different genres. But Swina felt to be mainly a musician and so he decided to get in the game! He started playing all around in SL gathering a nice crowd of fans.

After the gig I asked some question to the artist, and he kindly answered me:first of all I asked him what he feels in performing in SL and he said “ well,it depends on what do you expect:I guess that the main thing is not not the music in itself, but first of all the feelings you get across, keeping the people with you till the gig ends it’s the strongest emotion and sometimes it’s not necessary to be technically perfect: in sl you may get an immediate feedback and it is well shown by the generous tips of the avatars attending your performance!”

When I asked Swina how does he create his songs he told me that usually he starts with a drums pattern and after he adds some new parts(pads,synths)using only some virtual instruments(VLS);sometimes he edits the tracks with a little of quantization but only for the attack putting together some sampled chorus and voices.

Finallly he adds also keyboards and then he refines the whole with the acoustic guitar. I asked him what does he expect from SL:”The great advantage in SL is that it may put you in contact with many other musicians from all over in the world:you may listen easily to their music and maybe it will be possible starting a collaboration sharing experiences.

Technology seems to be such important for this artist and so I asked him what he thinks of:”Technology may help:today a musician may have his own studio without any huge investments; digital music did this revolution: it helps the autonomy both for creation and production. Of course promotion is not so easy even with web 2.0,social network and web radios. And of course SL itsef are able to spread music all around.
Submitted by Simona Dawes

A Virtual Art Tatum concert

Play it again, Art
Digital technology will enable jazz pianist Art Tatum, who died in 1956, to 'perform' at the Shrine again.

September 22, 2007

Jazz pianist Art Tatum will return to the Shrine Auditorium on Sunday to perform the nine songs he recorded there in 1949, seven years before he died.

It won't be Tatum in the flesh, of course. But it's not him on Memorex either. Instead, a virtual Tatum will be on stage inside a computer the size of a dictionary, sending electronic instructions that will move the keys and pedals of a robotic, 9-foot-long Yamaha concert grand piano. Think of it as a player piano for the digital era, powered by software instead of paper rolls.

The point is to re-create one of Tatum's long-playing masterworks, "Piano Starts Here," which features the Shrine recordings and four tracks from his first studio sessions in 1933. Sony BMG (the record company that owns the copyrights) could have modified the original tapes digitally to remove the maddening hiss and simulate stereo sound. But it turned to Zenph Studios, the North Carolina start-up, for an exponentially more difficult solution. Zenph's software engineers analyzed the recording to determine not just the notes Tatum played -- no mean feat, given that his hands flew across the keys like a flock of birds spooked out of a tree -- but also how he played them. There are lots of different ways to strike a piano key: You can lean into it, jab it, tap it, caress it like a piece of fabric or pound it like a nail. Taking advantage of the Yamaha's extensively programmable robotics, Zenph's algorithms try to replicate what, exactly, Tatum's fingers did, and how his feet worked the pedals. The result, if all goes right, will be a new CD that replicates the original performance, in stereo and higher fidelity.

Zenph, which also revived pianist Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, has ambitions that stretch beyond re-performed piano works. The company's co-founder, John Q. Walker, says the technology will eventually be extended to other instruments -- and voices. And once enough data are gathered about a performer, living or dead, that person's distinctive playing or singing style could be applied to material he or she never recorded. Imagine adding Eddie van Halen's guitar pyrotechnics to your band's sound, without needing him in the studio. Or paying him.

This is heady stuff, and frankly a little creepy. It also suggests a battle to come over who, if anyone, owns a playing style. Lawmakers didn't anticipate technologies such as Zenph's when they wrote the statutes governing copyrights and other intellectual property, so it's not clear how the courts might rule. Nor do we know how these technologies will develop and be used. The only sure thing is that because of Zenph, we have a lot more useful knowledge about how Art Tatum played the piano -- knowledge that could conceivably lead to a panoply of new creative works. As a result, Tatum's signature cascades of sound will reverberate out of the Shrine Auditorium long after his computerized self has left the building.

Real orchestra performs in Virtual Venue

NYT
September 18, 2007
Music
Watching a Cyber Audience Watch a Real Orchestra Perform in a Virtual World
By ANNE MIDGETTE

People really dress for concerts around here. One man sports a bright purple suit, with a hat and roller skates to match. A woman wears a gown that appears to be made of peacock feathers, and a large blue butterfly flaps gently in circles around her.

We’re not in Kansas anymore, or even in Liverpool, England, where the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic opened its season on Friday night. For the occasion the orchestra went to the unusual extreme of building a new hall: a virtual environment in the online world Second Life. In a virtual replica of the Art Deco hall, an audience of animated figures, known as avatars, watched the orchestra perform live in a choppy video streamed over the Internet on a screen at the front of the room.

Call it the future, call it a stunt, Second Life is attracting more and more attention, and classical music is starting to get in on the act. Universal Classics has built an online island where visitors can inspect a replica of the exhibition of artifacts associated with the legendary mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran that is now touring Europe to promote Cecilia Bartoli’s next Malibran-themed album.

In May the pianist Lang Lang, in the form of an avatar, gave a live concert. And the Liverpool was the third orchestra to give a live concert on Second Life this year, after Sinfonia Leeds, an amateur group in England, and Red {an orchestra}, a chamber ensemble in Cleveland.

There are technical and conceptual hurdles in watching animations play live music in a virtual world. A YouTube video of a Dutch pianist playing Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata on Second Life illustrates some of the issues: the performance is fine, but the figure’s fingers keep disappearing into the keys.

“It’s an odd medium,” said John Shibley, the director of organizational learning at the consulting company EmcArts, which helped manage Red’s performance. “It’s sort of like listening to the radio and watching a puppet show, and the puppet show is not synched to the radio.”

Each of the three orchestras to perform so far has taken a different approach. Leeds offered live streaming audio, with a small orchestra of miming avatars. Red created the equivalent of a television broadcast. Liverpool opted for a cheaper solution: a single static camera.

This approach, though inelegant, may have been the most workable. Red’s chief executive, John Farina, estimated that had the orchestra not received many services pro bono, its event would have cost around $200,000. The orchestra was left with a professional-quality broadcast tape, which, because of restrictions in its contract with its musicians, it cannot broadcast again.

Liverpool, by contrast, paid only $16,000 or so, $6,000 of which went to buying the “sims” on which the concert hall was built. (A sim is the unit of land on Second Life.) The orchestra also has the advantage of a new contract with its musicians that involved buying their potential share in broadcast rights.

“We can use any material in any way we like,” said Millicent Jones, the orchestra’s executive director of marketing and communications, who is already looking into future Second Life performances.

There are certainly limitations to the Second Life concert experience. A sim can hold only 50 to 70 avatars without crashing, so even though Liverpool built its hall over two sims and broadcast the concert to other Second Life locations, it had a relatively small audience.

And as with any streamed Internet broadcast, transmission quality depends on your Internet connection. On my computer the sound was so distorted that a preconcert lecture was utterly unintelligible; the soprano, Kate Royal, sounded as if she were singing a duet with herself in Ravel’s “Shéhérazade.” It was impossible to assess the music, which included world premieres by Kenneth Hesketh and John McCabe.

Other listeners said their connections were fine. And afterward the audience, congregating in the bar for virtual drinks and a question-and-answer session with the conductor, Vasily Petrenko, seemed to have loved the whole thing — perhaps as much for the experience as for the music.

“Classical music is not very accessible where I am, so I really appreciated it,” said a user whose Second Life name was Nobody Fugazi.

Despite predictions that virtual worlds will become increasingly prevalent, the technology of Second Life is in its infancy. Both within classical music and outside it, there is debate about whether the place represents a brave new world or simply a curiosity.

“It’s still kind of in the stunt phase,” said the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, though he personally knows the people at Linden Labs who invented the site and is a fan of the novel “Snow Crash,” by Neal Stephenson, which inspired it. He and Linden Labs, he said, are “talking in friendly stages about something we might do.”

Jonathan Gruber, the vice president for new media of Universal Music Group, said: “We’re not 100 percent sold on it. It’s experimental. We are interested in making sure that if there are opportunities for us to reach people through a medium like Second Life, we’re there for it.”

The medium may be cutting-edge, but tastes remain rather conservative. Some listeners reacted in horror to the exuberant loudness of Mr. Hesketh’s piece, and one called it “just noise.”

Dave Schwartz, the founder of Music Academy Online, where he conducts small listening sessions, dreams of bringing classical music to a wider audience by creating a “Disney World of classical music” on Second Life.

But Mr. Schwartz is also trying to bring newer music to this environment. .

“You haven’t heard ‘Poème Électronique,’ ” he said, referring to a piece by Edgard Varèse, “till you’ve heard it streamed over the Internet in a virtual world.”

Virtual jihad in Second Life?

From The Sunday Times
August 5, 2007
Virtual jihad hits Second Life website
Chris Gourlay and Abul Taher

Islamic militants are suspected of using Second Life, the internet virtual world, to hunt for recruits and mimic real-life terrorism.

Police and the intelligence services are concerned that it may have been infiltrated by extremists to proselytise, communicate and transfer money to one another. Radicals may also be responsible for “virtual” terrorist attacks in which buildings depicted on the website are blown up.

Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian government’s High Tech Crime Centre, said jihadists may also be using the virtual reality world to master skills such as reconnaissance and surveillance. “We need to start thinking about living, working and protecting two worlds and two realities,” he told a security industry conference in Sydney.

The concerns are shared by Europol, the pan-European police agency, which believes that Second Life provides a means to transfer money across borders in a way that is more difficult for the authorities to monitor. It has recruited security consultants to advise on the use of Second Life for fraud and terrorism.

Of particular concern is the anonymity of Second Life members who can use false names for their digital personas, known as avatars, to disguise their real identity and provide false contact details in the real world.

Intelligence sources said that although communications traffic through Second Life could in theory be monitored, often the only means of tracking an individual is by tracing the user’s IP address - the physical location of a computer in the real world - but even this can be faked. Monitoring complex money movements in the virtual world presents law enforcement agencies with further surveillance challenges.

Second Life, which has a global membership of more than 8.5m, uses three-dimensional graphics technology to create a virtual world. Anyone can become a member or “resident” for free and roam the virtual world after creating an avatar. They then meet and interact with other users’ avatars, visiting shops, theatres and sports events, trading goods and services and having sex.

So popular has Second Life become that companies such as Sony, BMW and Reebok have bought “land” and opened premises there. Some governments, including that of Sweden, have opened virtual embassies in Second Life.

Recently, inhabitants of the virtual world have experienced a more sinister phenomenon - virtual terrorist attacks against buildings and avatars. A recent attack took place at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Second Life base. A number of these attacks, known as “griefings”, have been launched by what industry insiders say are “geeky teenagers” giving themselves names such as the Second Life Liberation Army.

Some experts, however, believe the “virtual atrocities” may have been committed by real Islamic radicals. Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore, said that for the past three months he had monitored about 12 jihadists who have assumed identities in Second Life. He said they were mostly based in America and Europe.

Some radicals, he said, had given themselves “innocuous” titles, while others had provocative jihadist names such as Irhabi007 (Arabic for Terrorist007). Gunaratna acknowledged that not all Islamists had any intention of carrying out terrorist attacks in real life, but said that they were using Second Life to build a community of extremists.

“Even in the training camps of Afghanistan, less than 1% returned and committed terrorist acts,” said Gunaratna.

Second Life has its own currency, the Linden dollar, named after the company behind the virtual reality world. About 250 Linden dollars are equivalent to one US dollar and residents can buy the currency from the company to trade in Second Life.

Linden Lab said that about $1m (£490,000) a day was exchanged in Second Life.

Linden, which has a team monitoring financial transactions in Second Life, said it was not aware of any money being exchanged by jihadists, but could not rule out the possibility.

Europol and the British Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) are concerned that Second Life provides an ideal facility for criminals to launder money through in-world enterprises such as casinos. There are fears that terrorists could also take advantage of difficulties in policing Linden dollar movements to transfer funds between operatives around the world.

A Soca source said the agency was looking at ways to address illicit financial activity in the virtual world.

The source added that policing the movement of money in Second Life presents challenges, as funds may be transferred across borders.

Mark Johnson, chairman of Risk Management Group, a British agency that advises Europol on fraud and terrorism in Second Life, said: “The critical issue with terrorist funding cases is trying to detect money movements prior to the commission of the crime. So if you can move money around in secret in an environment where there is little surveillance, it is a very sensitive point.”

John Zdanowski, chief financial officer at Linden, said the company strictly monitored the exchange of money in Second Life. So far, he added, there had not been any suspicious transaction where the company had called in the police or the FBI.

Linden also said that it was unaware of any extremists using Second Life.

Device that spices up virtual sex in 'Second Life' spawns lawsuit

Device that spices up virtual sex in 'Second Life' spawns lawsuit

By Phil Davis
ASSOCIATED PRESS

8:44 a.m. August 10, 2007

Associated Press

Associated Press
Stroker Serpentine, the "Second Life" avatar of Kevin Alderman, is shown on his computer.

TAMPA, Fla. – Kevin Alderman didn't bring sex to “Second Life.” He just made it better.

The 46-year-old entrepreneur recognized four years ago that people would pay to equip their online selves – which start out with the smooth anatomy of a Barbie or Ken doll – with realistic genitalia and even more to add some sexy moves.

Business at Eros LLC has been brisk. One of his creations, the SexGen Platinum, has gotten so popular that he's now had to hire lawyers to track down the flesh-and-blood person behind the online identity, or avatar, that he says illegally copied and sold it.

The $45 SexGen animates amorous avatars in erotic positions. It is software code, written in the scripting language of “Second Life” and placed in virtual furniture and other objects. Avatars click on the object and choose from a menu of animated sex acts.

Alderman filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Fla., last month alleging an avatar named “Volkov Catteneo” broke the program's copy protection and sold unauthorized copies. Alderman, who runs his business from home in a Tampa suburb, allows users to transfer his products, but prohibits copying.

“We confronted him about it and his basic response was, 'What are you going to do? Sue me?'” Alderman said. “I guess the mentality is that because you're an avatar ... that you are untouchable. The purpose of this suit is not only to protect our income and our product, but also to show, yes, you can be prosecuted and brought to justice.”

Catherine Smith, director of marketing for “Second Life” creator Linden Lab, said she knew of no other real-world legal fight between two avatars.

However, Linden Labs itself has been sued more than once by subscribers over seizures of virtual property. In 2005, Japanese media reported that a Chinese exchange student was arrested for stealing virtual items from other players in an online game, “Lineage II.”

“Second Life” isn't a game. There are no dragons to slay or other traditional game objectives. San Francisco-based Linden Lab describes it as “an online digital world imagined, created & owned by its residents.”

Linden Lab provides a free basic avatar, a 3-D virtual representation of the user in male or female form. Everything else costs real money. A 16-acre virtual island costs $1,675 plus monthly maintenance fees of $295. Virtual money, called Lindens, can be exchanged with real dollars at an average rate of about 270 Lindens per $1.

Avatars can be equipped with flowing gowns and tiny tattoos, and users with programming and Photoshop skills can reshape themselves into a virtual Greta Garbo or just about any shape imaginable. With a little cash, users can also have people like Alderman transform the avatars for them.

At Alderman's “Second Life” shop, shoppers can try out a dragon bed powered by one of his SexGen engines. Along with programmers and designers, he employs a sales staff who hang around the shop like real salespeople to pitch the perfect sex toys. He is investing in a $25,000 motion-capture suit, a low-end version of one used to create digital characters in movies, to create more realistic sex moves for “Second Life” avatars.

As customers demand more real life in their “Second Life,” though, these virtual creations can collide with reality.

“Virtually every aspect of real life is getting duplicated, and all the laws that can be applied to the real world are being applied in 'Second Life,'” said Jorge Contreras Jr., an intellectual-property attorney in Washington, D.C.

Last year, “Second Life” was rocked by a scandal over users who had modified their avatars to look like children and simulated pedophilia. Last month, Linden Lab shut down gambling in “Second Life” after concerns arose that virtual games of chance might violate U.S. gambling laws when members cashed in Lindens for real money.

Now comes Alderman's SexGen suit, which was filed July 3 and seeks unspecified damages. It accuses the unknown owner of the Catteneo avatar of violating copyright and trademark protections by copying, distributing and selling copies of Alderman's software.

Alderman's attorney, Francis X. Taney Jr. of Philadelphia, said the lawsuit has gotten a lot of attention because it involves sex, but is fundamentally about long-established law.

“It's a piece of software and software is copyrightable,” Taney said. “It's also expressed in graphics, which also are copyrightable. There is some sizzle. People like to say it's really far out there, but at the end of the day I equate it to basic intellectual property principles.”

Unlike many popular online worlds, such as “World of Warcraft,” Linden Lab grants its users broad rights to create and sell content with few restrictions. Users can install copy protection and seek U.S. copyright and trademark protections, all of which Alderman did for the SexGen software.

“Whenever you create a situation where people are buying and selling things and potentially misappropriating them from their rightful owners, it is only a matter of time before the legal system gets called in,” said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “This seems like a relatively straightforward case. It sounds like there is a real copyright issue.”

Taney believes he knows who Catteneo is in real life, but is confirming it through subpoenas of records of eBay Inc.'s PayPal payment service as well as chat logs and trade history in “Second Life.” He said Linden Lab and PayPal turned over their records, and he is preparing another round of subpoenas.

“We're proceeding carefully,” Taney said. “This guy has claimed the information he gave to Linden was bogus. We are looking for ways to cross check and corroborate the information.”

Catteneo, who did not respond to several interview requests sent through the “Second Life” messaging system, will likely have a hard time hiding.

“There is a whole lot less anonymity online than people think,” von Lohmann said. “There are over 20,000 people who have been sued for downloading music. They may have felt anonymous, but they're weren't.”

Alderman is unlikely to be the last to drag an avatar into court as the designers in “Second Life” try to protect their creations in the same way clothing designers such as Gucci try to eliminate realistic knockoffs

In recognition of the growing legal issues “Second Life” is likely to generate, the country of Portugal recently set up an arbitration center in the virtual world, though it has no power to enforce its decisions.

The legal issues may be similar offline and online, but von Lohmann said the trials could be a lot more interesting.

“In a virtual world, you have the ability to gather evidence you don't have in the real world,” he said. “Everything that happens in 'Second Life' is reflected on computer servers. Depending on how long they keep the records, you could actually replay the event as it happens.”

Home Design in Second Life

NYT: Home & Garden
August 9, 2007
A House That’s Just Unreal
By SETH KUGEL

FROM the roof deck of Sherman Ochs’s Mexican-style villa atop a breezy bluff, the entire island of Jalisco, population about 20, spreads out below. It is a picturesque place of palm trees, lush lawns and near-cloudless skies. And, of course, there are the perfect sands around the lagoon, where residents grind their perfect bodies together in an N.C.L., or Naked Conga Line. It is not exactly real, of course: Mr. Ochs is Don Ainsworth, a 57-year-old retired music teacher who lives in Ventura, Calif., and Jalisco is a sim (for simulator), a plot of land in Second Life, the virtual world introduced in 2003 by Linden Lab, a San Francisco company.

But it is not entirely fake, either. Life on Jalisco, where neighborly visits are frequent, resembles that in a real-world community. And many of the residents know who their neighbors are in real life, and sometimes converse with them over Internet telephone connections as they operate their avatars.

Second Life’s hundreds of thousands of users can teleport at will, transform into dragons and radically change their appearances with a few clicks. They have built cities, created clothing lines and programmed their avatars — the characters that represent them in the three-dimensional space of Second Life — to ride horses, dance and have sex. But in a land where residents can do nearly anything, many seem to be craving more mundane pursuits. After a few months of dancing the night away in clubs, sowing their virtual seed and role-playing as creatures from “The Lord of the Rings,” they are settling down: building virtual houses, planting gardens, shopping for furniture and electronics and decorating. They are getting serious about creating make-believe homes.

Linden Lab does not keep track of how many houses have been built across the more than 12,000 sims of Second Life, or how many of its regular users own and live in the houses, but the number is certainly in the thousands, according to Catherine Smith, a company spokeswoman. (It’s hard to know exactly how many users there are over all, since they can have multiple accounts, but Linden Lab records show that 8.6 million accounts have been created, of which 1.6 million have been active over the past two months, and that 20,000 to 50,000 users are online at any one time.) “Putting roots down is really important to a lot of people in Second Life,” Ms. Smith said.

For some, these online houses are Architectural Digest-style fantasies. In fact, Second Life (secondlife.com) has its own home design magazine, Prim Perfect, published by a member, which showcases some of the highest-end residences in the virtual world. But for many others, like most of the residents of Jalisco (which is named for the Mexican state), a home is above all a place to relax, entertain friends and experiment with décor.

It was June when Mr. Ainsworth’s affable avatar, who has shaggy blond hair and chest hair popping out of his permanently unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, decided to buy a “house” after months of hanging out. “I was just gallivanting around Second Life,” he said in an interview on his virtual roof in Jalisco with DonCamilo Rodenberger, this reporter’s avatar, who identified himself in interviews as a writer for The New York Times. “A place to call home didn’t really matter. But after a while, it seemed like a nice idea.”

Second Life offers all kinds of regions from which to chose, including the A’ksha Caves sim, a stark desert area with luxury housing owned by the megadeveloper Anshe Chung (the avatar of Ailin Graef, a Chinese-born businesswoman celebrated for making $1 million in real-life money from Second Life deals) and the Venice sim, based loosely on the real city, where a quick escape to rural Tuscany is just one geographically inaccurate sim away. (Islands like Jalisco comprise more than 9,000 sims, and thousands more sims are on a few mammoth continents.)

But Jalisco was the place for Mr. Ainsworth. He had long been friends with its developer, an often scantily dressed avatar named Rooby Begonia. “The community and the friends were the major selling points to me,” said Mr. Ainsworth, who said in the virtual chat that he spends four hours a night in Second Life instead of watching television. “It is friendly, classy people,” he added. “Most Second Life properties are real stale cookie-cutter. This place has style.”

In part, that’s because of strict zoning laws in the island’s “covenant,” which require that the Mexican theme be maintained in all building designs; in part it’s the personal attention lavished on the sim and its residents by Rooby, or rather her creator, Brenda Beach. Ms. Beach, 46, is an empty-nest homemaker from Issaquah, Wash., who spends four to eight hours a day in Second Life. In addition to developing the island — she paid Linden Lab $1,200 for control of it — she acts as its mayor and cruise director, enforcing the rules and corralling the locals into socializing. In many cases, she helps them build and decorate their houses, at no charge.

“I think the urge to have a home goes hand in hand with the desire for partnership and friendship,” Ms. Beach said. “We informally take turns at different people’s homes.”

It costs about 55,000 Linden dollars, or Lindens, the equivalent of $200, to buy the rights to a piece of land on Jalisco from Ms. Beach, and then the equivalent of something like $25 to $40 a month in Second Life’s version of maintenance fees, which help Ms. Beach pay her dues on the land to Linden Lab. (Lindens can be traded with United States dollars through online exchanges and even ATMs in Second Life; the rate, which fluctuates according to market forces, is currently around 275 Lindens to the dollar.)

In a telephone interview, Ms. Beach attributed part of the island’s pleasant ambience to its high prices. (A lot on another virtual island, Cheops, for example, costs less than $20 to buy and the same amount each month to maintain, and an apartment in Venice rents for the equivalent of about $2 a week.) The cost encourages people to participate in the community they’re paying for, she reasoned, and “keeps out people that don’t want to play the way we play.”


Luke Tchalenko for The New York Times
GARDEN OF DELIGHTS Hannah Hails, left, has a perpetually blooming garden as the avatar Mercedes Georgette, right.

Houses, on the other hand, are cheap, as are furnishings — a table, for example, might cost a real-world dollar or two, a rug a dime or a quarter. Mr. Ainsworth’s house, a prefabricated model that came with the land and was bought by Ms. Beach from Fisher Construction, a Second Life “building company,” cost only about 1,400 Lindens, a bit more than $5, to buy, and about $20 to furnish.

Mr. Ainsworth’s living room is spotless, decorated with Mission-style furniture from Town & Country Furnishings, a store in the largely commercial Doesburg sim; Mr. Ainsworth “built” the adobe fireplace himself, he said, in about an hour. (His real house in Ventura, he said, is decorated with “brass-and-glass stuff from the late ’80s.”)

But the most impressive part of the house is its outdoor space: three terraces, with a hot tub and a dance floor and bar. Like most dance floors in Second Life, Mr. Ainsworth’s has “dance balls,” floating orbs that users can click to make their avatars dance. There are no bad dancers in Second Life.

Some in Second Life choose to build homes and furniture from scratch, but it can be frustrating: users must spend hours practicing, and often take Second Life classes to master the skills needed to manipulate so-called primitive objects, or “prims” — the virtual world’s basic building blocks, which come in shapes like spheres, cones and cubes — into more complicated shapes, which they then combine into useful objects.

Although many people do learn those skills, the growing interest in Second Life has created a market for prefab houses like Mr. Ainsworth’s, built by virtual architects and developers. (There are dozens of groups of Second Life architects, with names like Real Life Architects in Second Life and the Society for Virtual Architecture.)

It has also given rise to a number of philosophical questions: since you don’t eat in Second Life, do you need a kitchen? Is a bathroom really necessary? Since you can teleport, do you need stairs? Since you don’t sleep, do you need a bedroom? Answers vary, but most opt for at least a bedroom (although not for sleeping).

For anyone with a modicum of taste, though, decorating a home is a breeze. Furniture, electronics, art and gardening stores abound, like the Mission Home store in the Tiltir sim, with its Craftsman-style furniture, and Classic Creations by Isabella, a showroom in the Caprera sim that carries rugs and living room sets. And shoppers are spared the inconvenience of driving and parking, since they can teleport to and from any store in a matter of seconds.

Once a resident is home, it’s easy to move furniture around and hang art on the walls. Other advantages of nesting in a virtual world: you can plant both tropical flowers and Arctic vegetation in your garden, and neither will die. And if you’re a hoarder, you can store an unlimited number of virtual beanbags, old movie posters, oak trees and pet ferrets, which take up no visible space when your inventory folder is closed.

Second Life homes do have at least one downside: the number of prims is limited. Every sim has a maximum of 15,000 manipulatable shapes, because of space constraints on the Linden Lab servers, so designing (or buying) furniture with the fewest prims possible — or with the ability to appear when residents enter a room and disappear once they leave, so that only one room is furnished at a time — becomes a priority.

Mr. Ainsworth’s house is still a work in progress — the bedroom walls are bare except for a single wall hanging — but his neighbors Earl Semaphore and Candy Flanagan (the avatars of Richard Lucas, a 54-year-old probation officer from Scotland, and Carmen Clasen, a 22-year-old college student from Blairsville, Ga., who lives in Germany) are well settled in theirs.

The two, who are married to other people in real life, met in a Second Life club, hit it off and were married six weeks later in a Second Life ceremony — a more or less common occurrence (as are Second Life marital spats and Second Life divorce) that often occurs with the knowledge and consent of real-life spouses. Ms. Clasen designed their house in what she calls Old Mexico style; it has a stable for two horses and an orange tree that drops cute-as-a-button fruit that rolls along the ground.

It is striking how often a Second Life process mirrors real life. Case in point: a couple trying to decide which of their old furniture to keep after being married. Mr. Lucas’s avatar, Earl, had lived in a small skybox — a floating house — 50 meters above the ground in the Hyaonmoo sim, and Ms. Clasen’s avatar, Candy, had lived on 5,000 square meters in the Sugulite sim.

“We just emptied our inventories onto the lawn” of the new house, Ms. Clasen said in an instant message. “Then I took all the pieces and put them together here.” Two wedding gifts — gauzy abstract paintings by Second Life artists — hang on either side of the door in the living room. The room is also furnished with stained-glass lamps, a couch programmed to allow the couple to snuggle and a music box that plays their song (“Freebird”).

Their real homes don’t even come close to their Second Life home, Mr. Lucas and Ms. Clasen both said. Mr. Lucas’s “typical Scottish house,” which he shares with his real wife, is “small by U.S. standards,” he said. Ms. Clasen and her husband live in an apartment building. “I like having a house of my own in Second Life,” she said. “My resources are practically unlimited, and I am able to build what I please and redecorate however I like.”

Perhaps because of the ease of redecorating in Second Life, interior designers are much harder to find than home builders or real estate developers.

“Not many people hire someone,” said Pauline Wooley, a part-time administrator at Oxford University, who publishes a Second Life design blog and magazine (both called Prim Perfect and accessible at primperfect.net), under the name of her avatar, Saffia Widdershins. “Most just think bed, chair, and go out and get what they can.”

Still, many Second Life furniture designers also dabble in decorating. A recent issue of Prim Perfect featured the Odaesan House, a grand mansion with an Arts-and-Crafts-style interior attributed to Troy Vogel, the avatar behind the Mission Home store. The issue also showed an elegant Venice apartment with a deep red sofa, zebra cushions and intricate wood paneling by Isabella Lazarno, of Classic Creations by Isabella.

Real-life designers, too, have found their way into Second Life. Thomas Wang, a Hawaii interior designer, began using it in 2004 as a place to build models for real-world projects, but has gone on to design many virtual projects through his avatar, Bill Stirling. His elaborately appointed cruise ship, the Galaxy, takes up three entire sims, and he is now designing the studios for S.L.C.N., the Second Life Cable Network.

Hannah Hails, a 31-year-old sales executive from Guildford, England, who is hoping to make a go of it as a Second Life interior designer, has posted classified advertisements for the decorating services of her avatar, Mercedes Georgette. “It’s something I have been interested in in real life,” she said. “But I’ve never had the opportunity to put it into full practice.”

For now, she’s working on her own 12-sided house, purchased from Creative Excellence, a prefab-house maker, and situated on 16,000 square meters in the Enchanted Paradise sim. A lone bedroom takes up its entire second floor, and most of the third floor is given over to a Moroccan-theme roof deck.

Much of her art — which, like much of her furniture, comes from the Second Life showrooms of Ramos Designs, a company that sells items as varied as houses, jewelry and a bar that doubles as an aquarium — hangs in a broad gallerylike hallway. In the kitchen, a board of cheese and crackers is more or less permanently on display on the center island. “I love cheese,” she said.

Her garden is really the highlight, with black-eyed Susans and foxgloves bought at the Heart Garden Center (which Ms. Hails said has “the best plants in the whole of Second Life”), and two cherry trees in perpetual bloom. There are also a pond with waterlilies, working swings, apple trees that lend themselves to climbing and a campfire area.

Her zeal for virtual home improvement is not matched in the real world. Soon, she and her husband will be painting their apartment. “I like the visualizing of it, but the physical undertaking of it is something I absolutely loathe,” she said. “On Second Life, it can happen in an instant.”

According to Ms. Wooley, the publisher of Prim Perfect, there is often little obvious relation between a person’s real and virtual homes, and the main real-world function of a Second Life house is as a tool for fantasy — albeit, in many cases, fantasy that doesn’t stray too far from reality.

“You have people who go for the castles, palaces, the fantastic,” she said. “But many, many people buy the rather nice suburban house that they can’t afford to live in in real life.”

Others look for other things. Of all the houses in Jalisco, Ms. Beach’s is probably the least fantastic, furnished with just a few chairs and a bed. She calls it “our hovel.”

Although her real-life husband, Prodipto Roy, is a tester of video games, he does not spend much time with her in the virtual realm. He tried out Second Life for a while, she said, but the nesting urge never got to him. “He didn’t enjoy it because there’s nothing to kill,” she said.

Instead, she shares her Jalisco home with Seth Schlegal, the avatar of Richard Siegel, a systems engineer in Auburn, Calif., who is her second Second Life husband. They met while she was still with her first Second Life husband and became fast friends, then married shortly after her “divorce.”

Their house is full of virtual raccoons, arising from a wifely practical joke. One night, when Ms. Beach was talking to Mr. Siegel by Internet phone while they were in Second Life, he complained that there were raccoons outside his real-life door. So later, she found a raccoon design at a popular Second Life business, Textures R Us, and infested the house, from the patio to the bedroom. “When he found them I thought he was going to die laughing,” she said.

For his part, Mr. Roy, like many real-life spouses of virtual bigamists, seems unworried by his wife’s extramarital marriages. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” he said. “You are a completely fictional person in Second Life.”

Does Virtual Reality Need a Sheriff?

Does Virtual Reality Need a Sheriff?
Reach of Law Enforcement Is Tested When Online Fantasy Games Turn Sordid

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 2, 2007; A01

Earlier this year, one animated character in Second Life, a popular online fantasy world, allegedly raped another character.

Some Internet bloggers dismissed the simulated attack as nothing more than digital fiction. But police in Belgium, according to newspapers there, opened an investigation into whether a crime had been committed. No one has yet been charged.

Then last month, authorities in Germany announced that they were looking into a separate incident involving virtual abuse in Second Life after receiving pictures of an animated child character engaging in simulated sex with an animated adult figure. Though both characters were created by adults, the activity could run afoul of German laws against child pornography, prosecutors said.

As recent advances in Internet technology have spurred millions of users to build and explore new digital worlds, the creations have imported not only their users' dreams but also their vices. These alternative realms are testing the long-held notions of what is criminal and whether law enforcement should patrol the digital frontier.

"People have an interest in their property and the integrity of their person. But in virtual reality, these interests are not tangible but built from intangible data and software," said Greg Lastowka, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law at Camden in New Jersey.

Some virtual activities clearly violate the law, like trafficking in stolen credit card numbers, he said. Others, like virtual muggings and sex crimes, are harder to define, though they may cause real-life anguish for users.

Simulated violence and thievery have long been a part of virtual reality, especially in the computer games that pioneered online digital role-playing. At times, however, this conduct has crossed the lines of what even seasoned game players consider acceptable.

In World of Warcraft, the most popular online game, with an estimated 8 million participants worldwide, some regions of this fantasy domain have grown so lawless that players said they fear to brave them alone. Gangs of animated characters have repeatedly preyed upon lone travelers, killing them and making off with their virtual belongings.

Two years ago, Japanese authorities arrested a man for carrying out a series of virtual muggings in another popular game, Lineage II, by using software to beat up and rob characters in the game and then sell the virtual loot for real money.

Julian Dibbell, a prominent commentator on digital culture, chronicled the first known case of sexual assault in cyberspace in 1993, when virtual reality was still in its infancy. A participant in LambdaMOO, a community of users who congregated in a virtual California house, had used a computer program called a "voodoo doll" to force another player's character to act out being raped. Though this virtual world was rudimentary and the assault simulated, Dibbell recounted that the trauma was jarringly real. The woman whose character was attacked later wept -- "post-traumatic tears were streaming down her face" -- as she vented her outrage and demand for revenge in an online posting, he wrote.

Since then, advances in high-speed Internet, user interfaces and graphic design have rendered virtual reality more real, allowing users to endow their characters with greater humanity and identify ever more closely with their creations.

Nowhere is this truer than in Second Life, where more than 6 million people have registered to create characters called avatars, cartoon human figures that respond to keyboard commands and socialize with others' characters. The breadth of creativity and interaction in Second Life is greater than on nearly any other virtual-reality Web site because there is no game or other objective; it is just an open-ended, lifelike digital environment.

Moreover, Linden Labs, which operates Second Life, has given users the software tools to design their characters and online setting as they see fit; some avatars look like their real-life alter egos, while others are fantastical creations.

This virtual frontier has attracted a stunning array of immigrants. Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has opened a virtual campaign headquarters. Reuters and other news agencies have set up virtual bureaus. IBM has developed office space for employee avatars. On May 22, Maldives became the first country to open an embassy in Second Life, with Sweden following this week.

Second Life is intended only for adults, and about 15 percent of the properties on the site -- in essence, space on computer servers that appear as parcels of land -- have been voluntarily flagged by their residents as having mature material. Though some is relatively innocent, in some locations avatars act out drug use, child abuse, rape and various forms of sadomasochism.

"This is the double-edged sword of the wonderful creativity in Second Life," Dibbell said in an interview.

One user found herself the unwilling neighbor of an especially sordid underage sex club. "Tons of men would drop in looking for sex with little girls and boys. I abhorred the club," wrote the user on a Second Life blog under the avatar name Anna Valeeva. She even tried to evict the club by buying their land, she wrote.

The question of what is criminal in virtual reality is complicated by disagreements among countries over what is legal even in real life. For example, virtual renderings of child abuse are not a crime in the United States but are considered illegal pornography in some European countries, including Germany.

After German authorities began their investigation, Linden Labs issued a statement on its official blog condemning the virtual depictions of child pornography. Linden Labs said it was cooperating with law enforcement and had banned two participants in the incident, a 54-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman, from Second Life.

Some Second Life users objected on the blog that Linden Labs had gone too far.

"Excuse me. You banned two residents, both mature, who did a little role-playing? No children, I repeat no children, were harmed or even involved in that act," protested another user on the Second Life blog. "Since when is fantasy against the fricking law?"

Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Labs, said in an interview that Second Life activities should be governed by real-life laws for the time being. He recounted, for example, that his company has called in the FBI several times, most recently this spring to ensure that Second Life's virtual casinos complied with U.S. law. Federal investigators created their own avatars and toured the site, he said.

In coming months, his company plans to disperse tens of thousands of computer servers from California and Texas to countries around the world in order to improve the site's performance. Also, he said, this will make activities on those servers subject to laws of the host countries.

Rosedale said he hopes participants in Second Life eventually develop their own virtual legal code and justice system.

"In the ideal case, the people who are in Second Life should think of themselves as citizens of this new place and not citizens of their countries," he said.

Is this the age of the online avatar?

Christian Science Monitor
from the March 16, 2007 edition -
Is this the age of the online avatar?
As Internet communities grow, virtual alter-egos are becoming mainstream.
By Clayton Collins | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

SECOND LIFE

Eloise from Britain suggests that I slip into a new skin, something more refined, so I won't look like "such a newbie." But around the corner a bearded German clearly takes me to be a walking Rough Guide, asking where he can teleport to watch soccer.

I must have gained some credibility since my straight-out-of-Wonderland exchange on Orientation Island. That's where blob-bodied Chatmaster Phrett told me to invoke the word "hexahedron" and placate the volcano goddess.

It's just another day online in Second Life, the widely discussed virtual social world that's been called "MySpace meets 'The Matrix.' " More than 4.5 million people worldwide have registered to create avatars, electronic alter egos that range from idealized humanoids to the winged and way (way) out.

As fantastic as they are, avatars keep taking steps toward the kind of virtual reality experts have promised for decades. On March 7, Linden Labs, the California firm whose massive servers have hosted Second Life for three years, announced the beta testing of an integrated voice function that could substitute, as desired, for typed exchanges that appear on screen.

"We know where other [avatars] are in your audible range," says Joe Miller, a Linden vice president. New software mimics the human ear so that voices come from "wherever they are."

That move and others go toward creating what Mr. Miller calls a "persistent space." He predicts a near future in which far-flung family members circle a virtual campfire, in photo-realistic avatar form, on a regular basis.

So is this the dawning of the Age of the Avatar?

Some experts in online communities see technologies and behaviors converging fast – the all-ages online-social-networking boom meets advanced desktop systems that play like life for the potent-PC set. Others doubt that avatars will become Web users' regular representatives online – tools as ubiquitous as AIM – despite advances on that front by firms such as imvu.com, which already offers avatar-to-avatar chat.

But most agree that avatars have gone mainstream.

"I did hundreds of talks in the '90s about avatars," says Bruce Damer, the renowned avatar guru from northern California and CEO of DigitalSpace.com, an Internet-content firm that creates 3D imaging for its clients. "There were all kinds of projects then," Mr. Damer says, including Worlds Chat and AlphaWorld. "But it's just [now] reached some kind of tipping point."

A dozen years ago, avatars were best known to avid readers of Wired and cultish young players of "massively multiplayer" online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft. Now Second Life 30-somethings look for cyber jobs selling intellectual property for Linden dollars.

It's not just people with too much time on their first-life hands (and $10 a month for a premium membership). Businesses both real and virtual thrive in-world. Reuters recently established a Second Life news bureau. Presidential candidates have built campaign headquarters. Major League Baseball has a presence. Some 70 colleges and universities, including Harvard, now teach classes inside Second Life.

It's far from perfect. Graphics aren't always fluid, though Linden continues to hone them (it has no plans yet to add a tactile component, Miller says). A fair amount of Second Life discourse evokes the base banter of early AOL chat rooms; cybersex and gambling are very popular here.

Damer, who bought the rights to an advanced multi-user, real-time Web-chat platform called Traveler in 2001, points to the enormous time investment required of users to learn the ropes. Despite costume options that he says remind him of the performance-art festival Burning Man, Damer is put off by the emphasis on dance moves – writhing avatars pack virtual clubs – and by the relative uniformity of body type among its avatars.

"It becomes a kind of vanity fair," he says. "And I think it's pulling not just from a social-network thing but also from a primping network."

Technological issues exist too. Assuming the arrival of a superfunded player like Google, Damer says, and a standard could emerge.

"[But] I'm not sure that any 3-D platform, no matter how richly endowed and how open, has the capacity to become a broadly based open 'metaverse' that satisfies most people's needs and is around for 25 or 30 years," he says.

Another hurdle to broad participation in avatar worlds: Fantasy playgrounds actually don't work particularly well as social networks, says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate at Berkeley and fellow at USC's Annenberg Center who was dubbed the "high priestess of Internet friendship" last year by the Financial Times.

"[Successful] social-network sites like MySpace ... are primarily places where you actually model your social network on the people you see all day long," in simple representations closely tied to offline identities, Ms. Boyd says.

"We want our site to be real," says Jerry Kaplan, who runs Winster.com, where "mainly older women" meet and network. Some exchange photos, he writes in an e-mail. "[But this isn't about fantasy lives, avatars, or other masks."

Immersive 3-D fantasy games require immobility and a major investment in screen time. "More time at the computer," Boyd says, "is not what most people are seeking out."

Still, immersion has its whole-hearted backers. Sarah Robbins, an English instructor at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., sees Second Life and its avatars as both tools and object of study.

"We talk about how to 'unpack' certain types of messages," says Ms. Robbins, who teaches as Intelligirl, an extreme version of herself.

"The students read avatars as you would read a text," says Robbins. "We see it as a form of composition."

And marketers now study what some see as an interesting inside-out effect: Real-world firms that model designs and products and gauge how avatars interact with them, drawing lessons for real-world applications.

"Aloft, the hotel chain, was doing exactly that [last fall]," says Mike Cucka, an analyst with Group 1066, a marketing consultancy in New York.

Ultimately, individual avatars are about trying on masks. Second Life lets adults engage in the kind of social experimentation that used to be the province of teens, says Robbins.

"You get to continue to play with identity, take on new forms, new lifestyles, social skills, and there are no repercussions," she says. "You're not going lose your livelihood if you lose your Second Life job."

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