LawArk

Posts Tagged ‘Virtual Worlds’

By Gary L. Cole AIA, Esq.

          Online virtual worlds, also called metaverses, have been around for some time now, all the while growing in complexity and sophistication, first in gaming and then as online 3D social networking sites.  But the majority of these are fantasy worlds – like the well-known role-playing game World of Warcraft  for sword-swinging gamers, and Second Life  (SL) – a metaverse where social interaction between avatars, not troll bashing, is the primary objective.  

          Freed of annoyances like structural engineering and material specifications, building and zoning codes, weather and oh, yes – gravity – anyone willing to shell out a few Second Life Lindens (SL’s virtual currency), can purchase virtual real estate on Second Life and build a house, a commercial building, a Harvard lecture hall, a floating museum – just about anything.  And businesses are taking note as quite a few corporations and educational institutions have opened virtual operations in Second Life and extended their marketing to the virtual world.

          But as imaginative constructs, fantasy virtual worlds will probably be limited to pretty much what they are now – fun, a little business and education maybe, but mostly a pleasant distraction.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

          Enter now the mirror world – a virtual replication of an actual world – not a fantasy world.  While Second Life members have reproduced certain real world buildings within its servers, mirror worlds take it even further and replicate actual cities.  And these cities are populated with avatars – 3D virtual representations of their users (or who their users want to be) who walk, talk and fly about with other avatars, any one of whom might be a real person sitting at their keyboard on the other side of the world, or your neighbor next door.

          One of the best of these mirror worlds is Berlin-based Metaversum GmbH’s Twinity which currently features mirror versions of Singapore, London and Berlin – with more cities in the works.  After creating an account and downloading their software, Twinity members can beam their avatars to just outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate as it looks today – or, back to 1989 as it looked before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Or teleport to London and stroll around Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square (no virtual pigeons that I could see).  The visuals are very good and the sense of place real within the limitations of today’s computer technology – and we all know how long that stands still.   Read the rest of this entry »

As reported by Jeremy Hsu, staff reporter for Live Science, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has contracted with three game developers to create a “massively multiplayer online” (MMO) video game that will allow players to participate in first-person lunar exploration.

Quoting Jerry Heneghan, founder and CEO of Virtual Heroes, one of the three game developers, Hsu reports:

“We’ve had to create a new genre of gameplay, creating what we call first person exploration,” said Jerry Heneghan, founder and CEO of Virtual Heroes. He noted that the full game will emphasize player cooperation to master both harsh space exploration and complex machinery. Players would take on astronaut roles such as roboticist, rather than becoming a grenadier or sniper in a more combat-oriented game. Eventually players may get the chance to provide their own user-created content, ranging from scouting out new paths for space exploration to creating and flying their own ships. But unlike other space-themed MMOs such as EVE Online or Star Trek Online, such ships probably won’t be toting laser weaponry.”

Not even set of clubs for a dusty nine-hole? No word of whether players will also be allowed to hold hands around lunar campfires and sing Kum Ba Ya, but optimism runs high.

NASA’s virtual moonscape may be a bit corporate and tame for well-caffeinated gamers already online with testosterone-spiked games like Star Wars Galaxies, EVE Online, and those chomping for the release of the upcoming Star Trek MMO. And while some players of NASA’s lunar game – like maybe, NASA engineers – will relish the exciting challenges of team building exercises and writing progress reports in their virtual lunar cubicles, the sheer temidity of this MMO reflects NASA’s depressingly trepidatious real-world plans to send Americans back to the Moon in barely juiced-up 1960s Apollo-style spaceships – a half century after the original missions.

TO NASA: Forty years ago you modified ballistic missiles and blasted real men to the Moon in aluminum cans that navigated space with “computers” that couldn’t even run a programmable coffee maker today. You were heroes all. And while we know that the giants of Yore no longer stride the halls of NASA – not your fault, they’re MIA everywhere – couldn’t you at least create a MMO imaginative enough to let us pretend, to dream that one day humans will be part of a space-folding galactic empire, exploring new worlds and duking it out with Klingons, Romulans and other badly-coiffed alien nasties? What got us to Space in the first place was your vision, your Moon-sized cowboy cajones and a spiteful Cold War obsession to bird-flip the Russkies from way, way up high. But inspiring us to dream about a better future through Space exploration was your greatest accomplishment. Couldn’t you just, you know – fake it a little today?

Or, to quote Bruce Willis in Armageddon:

“And this is the best that you c – that the government, the U.S. government could come up with? I mean, you’re NASA for crying out loud, you put a man on the moon, you’re geniuses!”

In these mediocre times of billion-dollar corporate bailouts and multi-trillion dollar stimulus bills, we could use a little of that old school Apollo-era heroism – even if it burns only in your hard drives and not in your hearts.

© Copyright Gary L. Cole 2009

In a world of 24/7 hyper-hyped trivialities masquerading as “news” and landfill bound digital gadgets designed mostly to separate the gullible from their cash, occasionally something comes along that reminds us of what Western Civilization’s chief exports to the world used to be: great vision, brilliant design and superb engineering. For this post I’ll happily stipulate that there’s always been a subjective aspect to what has and hasn’t ascended to the sublime. After all, one man’s velvet Elvis painting is another man’s Bouguereau; one man’s ‘71 Buick Riviera boattail is another man’s Bugatti Veyron; one man’s Animal House is another man’s Lawrence of Arabia – and so on. But beyond that limited concession to subjectivity, once and a great while, a fertile – and possibly twisted – mind delivers up something to the world that both critics and acolytes of high design agree is worthy of some kind of reverential emotion that evades naming. And no, I’m not talking about the iPod.

Enter the Corpus Clock and Chronophage – a $1.8 million completely non-digital “clock” with a five-foot wide, 24-carat gold-plated circular face – and no hands. Time is told by the location of swiftly circling blue LEDs peeking through slits in the three concentric rings of its gold face; one ring for seconds, one for minutes, one for hours; and kept by the Chronophage: a needle-fanged, slit-eyed hell beast of a grasshopper perched atop the clock and looking more likely to ram the three-inch thick fused quartz window of William Beebe’s steel bathysphere a half-mile down than to be demonically spinning the wheel of time in an Oxford library window. The Chronophage literally eats time – a brutal reminder of the brevity and unpredictability of our lives. According to inventor of the clock, John C. Taylor, “Time is gone. He’s eaten it.” Is it accurate? Only about once every five minutes – by design – to remind us of time’s fickle nature.

Or, according to Corpus Clock Conspiracy’s website (apparently tongue-in-cheek), it’s an occult device partly created at a secret military research facility and possibly having something to do with the start of the 2008 U.S. financial meltdown and breakdown of the Large Hadron Collider – both of which happened the same day the clock was unveiled. No mention of the Illuminati but it probably doesn’t help that the Master of Cosmology himself, Stephen Hawking, attended the clock’s unveiling. Who knows what dark secrets of time and space that guy’s keeping to himself?

A mandible dropping inspiration for inventors who aspire to more than making a fast buck from their inventions on 2:00 a.m. Sci-Fi Channel infomercials? Or, should-be-encased-in-radioactive-concrete-and-dropped-into-the-Marianas-Trench? I don’t know, but it scares me – and I bet it would scare Beebe too. What’s not to love about it?

© Copyright Gary L. Cole 2009

Photo of the Corpus Clock and Chronophage by Martin Pettitt.

As reported in the January 21, 2009 edition of the San Francisco Business Times, Second Life owner Linden Labs has just purchased two Second Life apparel retailers.

To translate that from virtual-speak to real world retail-speak: A real world company (Linden Labs), that leases Second Life virtual space (in the form of computer memory), to tenants who then build 3D virtual stores there (existing only in computer memory) and who sell online 3D virtual apparel to online 3D virtual representations of real-world people (avatars), for the virtual equivalents of real money (Linden Dollars) – just purchased two retail businesses, though the currency type and purchase prices are unknown.

Second life is a Metaverse, not an online game like the well-known World of Warcraft. Second Life isn’t played – it’s a place where Residents as avatars interact with other Resident avatars in a fully fleshed out 3D environment. Residents can walk, run, fly, drive cars – shop – and even teleport to different places in Second Life. From Second Life’s home page: “Second Life is an online 3D virtual world imagined and created by its Residents.” Real world companies, retailers, professionals, educational institutions, and religious organizations have established presences in Second Life. Anglicans have purchased a virtual island to construct a virtual Gothic cathedral; there’s a Second Life Israel and Muslims can now visit a virtual Hajj. The Maldives, Sweden, Columbia, Estonia and other countries have established embassies in Second Life.

With the U.S. and now European recessions in full swing, real world retail development has all but stalled. But the name of the game in retail is foot traffic – how long before retailers look beyond bricks and mortar stores to the virtual world for virtual customers spending real dollars?

© Copyright Gary L. Cole 2009

A December 11, 2008 post on Sean F. Kane’s Virtual Judgment, “Does Worlds.com Hold the Patent for the Virtual World?” discussed Worlds.com’s recent teaming with General Patent Corporation (GPC) to enforce patents Worlds.com holds relating to virtual world intellectual property. This was also covered by Mike Sellers’ December 12, 2008 post on Terra Nova, “Worlds.com Asserting Patents on Virtual Worlds.”

From Virtual Judgment:

“According to statements by Alexander Poltorak, General Patent Corporation’s Chairman and CEO, “[t]he Worlds patents represent exceptionally valuable intellectual property,” and “[w]e welcome licensing inquiries from the on-line game industry. Non-exclusive licenses are available on favorable and non-discriminatory terms.”
“Worlds.com holds U.S. Patent Nos. 6,219,045 entitled “Scalable Virtual World Chat Client-Server System” and 7,181,690 titled “System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space”. Thom Kidrin, the CEO of Worlds.com, stated that “[w]e are pleased to have the expertise and IP experience of General Patent and Lerner David to enforce Worlds’ patent portfolio,” and that “[a]s the number of virtual worlds and MMORG’s continues to grow, Worlds has seen the space we pioneered in 1995 validated in techniques and methodologies we believe are defined in our patents.”Second Life?NCSoft for patent infringement. From a December 31, 2008 press release on GPC’s website:

As noted on Virtual Judgment, this might apply to – a lot of virtual worlds. The stakes and implications are enormous and I’d imagine this announcement had a few dozen MMORPG developers scrambling for their IP attorneys. How will this affect online gaming as well as virtual interactive worlds like

Law/Ark has no comment as to the enforceability of Worlds.com’s patents or its likelihood of prevailing in such litigation, but if successful would virtual world developers be required to license the underlying intellectual property from Worlds.com? Would this cause license costs to be passed on to the end users? Would this have a chilling effect on the development of virtual worlds, or, would it encourage developers to create similar intellectual property, knowing that enforcement of their patents had strong precedent?

Since Virtual Judgment’s posting, Worlds.com has, in fact, sued

“SUFFERN, N.Y., December 31, 2008 — General Patent Corporation (GPC), a leading patent licensing and enforcement firm, announced today that it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against NCSoft Corp. of Austin, TX on behalf of its client, Worlds.com, Inc. (Worlds).”
“The lawsuit (Case 6:08-cv-00508) was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division.”
“Worlds.com, Inc. (OTC BB: WDDD), of Brookline, MA, owns US Patent No.7,181,690 titled “System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space” (the ‘690 Patent). The Patent relates to computer architecture for a three-dimensional graphical multi-user interactive virtual world system. Such systems are utilized in Massive Multi-Player Online Games (MMORPG) of the type known as Graphical Multi-Dimension (GMUD) games, which provide a graphical representation of the player’s character (avatar) wherein movement of the character in virtual space alters what the character views.”
“Worlds.com has been a pioneer in the field of Virtual Worlds since the early nineties,” stated Thom Kidrin, Worlds’ CEO. “We are pleased to see that the technology we developed is now widely used by MMO game developers. At the same time, we deserve a fair compensation for the use of our patented technology.”

Whatever the outcome of this litigation, the creation of virtual worlds represents an enormous growth industry which will no doubt spawn more real world high-stakes litigation.

Or, perhaps in keeping with the subject matter of the litigation, virtual world technology has finally matured enough for the legal profession to embrace dispute resolution in 21st century style – a virtual Kumite, à la Jean-Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport. The plaintiff’s and defendant’s ferocious avatars could meet in a cyber-sandy, sweat and blood-soaked virtual pit of deadly dispute resolution (after first clicking “I Accept” to the cyber forum’s “Rules of Engagement”), and may the last man – er, person, mutant, whatever – standing be declared the victor. Architects and game developers would be needed to create convincing 3D cyber courts. The virtual world doesn’t care about your age, sex, species or agility – all you need is quick eye-hand/keyboard/controller skills and the dispute is swiftly resolved and dismissed – with extreme prejudice. This might also give rise to a whole new type of ADR, when mediation and arbitration just won’t do.

Of course, now that I think about it, that sort of defeats the need for lawyers – so never mind.

© Copyright Gary L. Cole 2009