Multiple intelligences running amuck in VR!

The water cave meeting place

I am continuing to play with prims! I decided that if I am stepping away from being ‘realistic’ then I can play with whatever catches my imagination. I just need to be able to identify what I want to make and know its purpose. In this case, I am making another meeting place for students to chat together (almost a ‘classroom’ but less formal). I want to create a space that ‘feels’ like a place where people can meet to share conversations. In Second Life we conjure up illusions, and if it’s a good illusion, we actually end up sharing it with each other. We interact with objects in Second Life but we are also interacting with each others imagination.

I keep trying to identify where else we share imagination in this way? Certainly in books we enter the author’s imagination. Here in the virtual world we enter the imagination of many others, and we can be there simultaneously (or visit days and weeks later). In the case of Second Life elves, and IBM staff, it is possible to have 200 avatars sharing the same ‘imaginative’ moment simultaneously. This is done by using the connected corners of 4 separate sims to form a giant virtual elven circle or conference center. (Imagine shuffling the sim corners when no one is looking so that elves and IBMs are all mixed together at the next meeting!)

An English friend in Second Life once described the experience of going to see her team (Manchester United) playing at home. Everyone in the stands experienced the same intense emotions simultaneously, the highs and lows. The sheer excitement of watching their team playing was amplified by the thousands of fans gathered together. There is no way Second Life touches on that degree of shared emotion, but I am thinking about Second Life as a shared imaginative experience, not a shared emotional experience. (There are people in Second Life who also achieve shared emotional experiences but this blog does not venture into those zones of SL, sorry!)

Water glass class room and sunset

Now I am wondering who the virtual world appeals to the most, are there particular personality types more drawn to sharing the experience of virtual reality than others? Are we simply ‘fans’ of virtual reality? Or does virtual reality appeal to particular types of people?

If we apply Howard Gardner’s theories of Multiple Intelligences to Second life then it might be fair to say it appeals most to individuals strong in Visual-Spatial intelligence? But then, I can see Interpersonal Intelligence at work with the social web aspects of Second Life, drawing the extroverts into perpetual local chats and IMs where they can talk the hind leg off a virtual donkey. Ah, but perhaps those are the Verbo-Linguistic folks typing away like crazy, or chatting with their little green ‘voice’ lights pulsing above their heads ? The Logical-Mathematical intelligences must be the programmers and scripters (and precision builders) laying down the digital weft and weave of Second Life, establishing the world for avatars to immerse themselves within. I won’t leave out the introspective, slightly introverted individuals, who tend to turn into Second Life bloggers (rumored to number around 2,000 or more). Many bloggers are applying Intrapersonal Intelligence and some even transcend this to reveal moments of Existential Intelligence! This list of intelligences goes on, but I will stop here guessing that Second Life attracts the least number of folks with strong Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence as they will lack the patience to sit still long enough to allow the virtual world to rez. (Ah, but then could they be hanging out in the zones not covered by this blog by any chance?)

This shows how my water textures building is a bit 'skew-whiff'!

Well, after that meander around Gardner’s theory I return to my new interest in building. I love to photograph the light on water in the first world and this fascination is drawing me to play with water textures in the virtual world. In first life that would mean water fountains, and ice sculptures, in Second Life it means I can build sparkling water caves at sunset!

Chatting with a friend and his companion crow Charlie by the light of the digital stars

Take the Multiple Intelligence Test and see (or confirm) your own areas of strongest ‘intelligence’. This is a theory that educators have found useful but it is a theory only! Don’t take it too seriously! It’s just another way of looking at yourself, a bit like astrology! That makes me a visual-spatial fire sign with intrapersonal water rising!

‘Sit’ scripts and ‘whatnot’.

New chairs (created by cyberloom) & hanging baskets ( by Honour MacMillan) lending social presence to a virtual meeting space.

I have been experimenting with building in Second Life! Just a tiny little bit! Nothing ambitious! I am slightly embarrassed about my modest attempts when I know so many fabulous builders. On the other hand there are others who think that it will take years to master so they avoid it altogether. That is, some people think you need to know about programming and ‘whatnot’ to build, or you must be a bit clever with computers and technology generally. Well, its easier than you think! Another thought is to beware ‘experts’, those who mystify what they do to make it seem more difficult!

I will be teaching a class introducing people to Second Life in September and this has motivated me to start building classroom spaces. At first I wistfully wished to be very stylish, and monochromatically beautiful, along the lines of Alpha Auer’s Syncretia Sim. But the truth is I can’t pull off such sophistication in Second life or Real Life (sigh…) I quickly gave up such notions in favor of creating a friendly virtual place for my students.

Well (small fanfare of plastic toy trumpets) I created some simple chairs for one small meeting space. (I plan to build a number of meeting places on the island.) My thought, as I built these chairs, was to opt for the ‘Not Possible in Real Life’ approach. Why put legs on my chairs? I could not think of a good reason (and legs would spoil the line) which means that I now have floating chairs. I added cushions (for comfort) and for the practical reason that the seat must be rotated every which way, to achieve the right seating position for my ’sit script’. (It is much easier to spin a cushion than a chair!)

New meeting place on the Tiki House Dock by Madison Gardner

This dabble at very modest building was intriguing as it had me wondering about the social presence of virtual furniture. Just think how a spiky chair would look compared to one with a cushion. The effect would be different, a distraction. No spiky chairs then! The social presence of furniture is intriguing, it got me thinking how there are layers to the social presence of virtual environments. Second Life bloggers (including myself) have spent endless hours attempting to comprehend the social presence of our own avatars (virtual navel gazing?). Taking a look at the effect of virtual environments, and what goes into creating their atmosphere, is like peeling away another layer of the social presence ‘onion’.

For some reason, I found that it helped me to wear a Star Trek uniform, and take advice from a little alien called ‘Greypet’ as I twirled hollowed-out prims. Maybe it’s time for more virtual navel gazing? No time just now. I have more building to do! I am quite proud of my Second Life Landmarks gallery with pictures hanging on walls of water, maybe I will blog about that sometime? Though it sounds more exciting than it is, but you have to start somewhere after all… eh, Greypet?

Star Trek clad chair builder with alien pet.

‘Greypet’ created by Flea Bussy at Grendel’s Children.

Flower baskets created by Honour and available at Aintree Common.

Lost in a ‘Lively’ Nightmare!

I decided to take a look at Google’s new online world called ‘Lively’. It was a pretty horrible experience! With very mournful looking avatars and cartoon-ish environments. When you type, your text is attached to you by long voice bubbles that give the impression of pinning you to the web page like a dead moth! I think there were a lot of people dropping in to check out Google’s latest application while I was there, and that added some life to the proceedings. However, if too many arrived at one time we became tangled together like some unfortunate collision more suitable for a scene from ‘The Fly’! Here are a few images brought back from ‘Lively’. The name does make me wonder a little… why ever did they call it ‘Lively’?

cyberloom posing in Linden Lab's Room in Google's 'Lively'. Wondering why Pathfinder Linden added the mines? Is he dropping a hint?

Mournful looking avatar in Lively's Science Fiction Room

'Lost' in 'Lively'

Collision of avatar dna on the 'Lost!' Island

Nightmare Before Running back to my Imperfect World

Librarians will inherit the world!

Neko getting 'stuck into a book' in the Bavarian State Library

I am writing this post in my college library and that seems very appropriate as I want to share my theory that librarians will inherit the earth. Why you ask? Because they know how to manage information; they know how to store and label it, and even more amazingly find where they put it! (I speak of these skills in a hushed and awed tone.) The ability to manage information is becoming an ever higher art form as we move deeper into the surging tide of words, numbers, and pictures.

And another thought, as I sit amongst the book stacks, is that much of academia is floundering through an identity crisis. The golden crown has slipped awkwardly over the eyes of the emperors of knowledge. Academics are falling behind the curve as they struggle to maintain traditional learning environments where matters move at a controlled, slow pace. Take a look at Fleep’s Deep Thoughts where she describes waiting for the peer review process and publication of her paper to take place. My university is struggling under financial burdens (like most universities nowadays) but here things have been made more complicated due to the building of a huge new dorm, and a giant commuter’s car park. Both buildings represent the old world of higher education. That is, dorms and car parks are not necessary when students are opting to save fuel and environmental costs by working online. I am not saying that online education is better, not yet anyway, as it is going through its own identity crisis/teething problems. Many educators don’t dare to be imaginative online, but then, were they imaginative in the classroom either? Educational management systems, like BlackBoard, and to a lesser extent Moodle, are restrictive mediums making you feel as though you are teaching, and learning, wearing horse blinkers.

English Neko looking for something to read in the Bavarian State Library

Today we need to know how to access relevant information quickly, while simultaneously applying critical thinking skills to determine the legitimacy, and relevance of the information once it is located. We also want to be able to return easily when we need it. Everyday we hear of new software designed to help us manage our masses of digital data. But, the trouble with all these data storage systems is that they deteriorate in efficiency after a certain amount of data has been entered. Its not the software’s problem, it is a human problem. When things drop from view (as they do when archived) they drop from being vivid and alive in our active memory.

I think that we cannot cope with more than 5 items of information before us. Why five? I chose that number because I have five fingers on one hand. My brain can manage 5 ideas, or pieces of data, without great effort. We can then expand upon each item with new sub-items and perhaps comfortably manage 10 of these sub-items (all our fingers). When we move to 20 (i.e. bringing in toe digits) we start to slip in efficiency of thought! (Our toes are below eye level, wrapped in shoes much of the time.) Nature’s portable abacus is efficient in its simplicity after all. If I was a flower I would go by the number of my petals, if I was a spider I would use my legs. Don’t take this too seriously though! The point is that we cannot manage reams of facts, ideas and data efficiently that’s all!

Laputa Library - The City in The Sky

With computers we access everything through a flat screen. In a way this computer screen is like the slit of a letter box attached to a vast library that has a museum, sports stadium and shopping mall attached. Everything is seen through this tiny narrow window and we move the information around remotely, as though it was attached to an old typewriter’s silver golf ball. We don’t move, we spin the world around before us. This makes information management trickier as everything must always be accessed from this one narrow perspective… Well, that was until the 3D virtual world popped up on the other side of the window!

Now, we have the potential to arrange all our information spatially as well as logically. The buzz for cyberspace travelers, interested in virtual worlds, is the idea of virtual desktops. We will one day be part of a huge peer networking system where we can travel to each others desktop worlds for virtual meetings etc. I wonder though, when this information management revolution takes place, will we be so short sighted and stick to the desktop metaphor? I plan to have my very own virtual library. Forget the front door step give me the universe!

Perhaps we will then advance another step with our personal libraries? We will have librarian bots (with Social Presence) who respond to our questions, just as the Librarian described in Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’:

The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish, silver-haired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened, the sleeves pushed up. Even though he’s just a piece of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a vast web of cross-references. The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software that costs even more than Earth; the only thing he can’t do is think.

“Yes, sir,” the Librarian says. He is eager without being obnoxiously chipper; he clasps his hands behind his back, rocks forward on the balls of his feet, raises his eyebrows expectantly over his half-glasses.” (p99.)

Links to locations mentioned above. (All locations to be found in Second Life™)

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Bavarian State Libray

Laputa Library – The Sky City, The Treasured Isle

Sorry all links have to be put at the end of the post not with the pictures because this WordPress.com design is having a problem!

Doppelgängers, multiverses and dodgy arithmetic

Running in Space and time at the Grand Planetarium - Ginsberg Arts Ctr

I recently read Adam Frank’s interview with cosmologist Max Tegmark in the July 2008 issue of Discover Magazine. Frank introduces Tegmark with these words:

His grand theory posits parallel worlds in multiple dimensions of space and time, infinite realms where our doppelgangers live alternate lives. (Adam Frank)

This is one of those far-fetched imaginative places where we can all play with ideas alongside the likes of Einstein. Multiverses, with their realms of space and time have something in common with dinosaurs. That is, we don’t know what color dinosaurs were, or how they sounded, or what they did everyday. This lack of information allows imagination to be unleashed yet contained within what is known. A happy paddling pool where what is imagined can also be considered possible.

'Blue Eye' by Nyth Morgwain at the Mountain High Gallery

Multiverse First Level - All you need for a level 1 universe is an infinite universe – go far enough out and you will find another earth with another version of yourself. (Tegmark)

It is intriguing to contemplate how creative minds influence each other. Creative writers inspire mathematicians, philosophers and cosmologists inspire composers and artists etc (there is no order or sequence to who inspires who of course). All dip into abstract thought and return with new ideas. Tegmark suggests the ‘universe is really nothing more than a mathematical object’. And ‘Every mathematical object is in a sense its own universe’.

elros Tuominen's 'Moon Garden' at the Tubular Gallery

Multiverse Level 2 - This level emerges if the fundamental equations of physics, the ones that govern the behavior of the universe after the Big Bang, have more than one solution… There could have been ‘other Big Bangs. These would be parallel universes with different kinds of physical laws, different solutions to those equations. This kind of parallel universe is very different from what happens in level 1. (Tegmark)

A few years ago I found a little exercise book that I had used when I was about 8 years old. Scrawled in the back of this book in blue biro ink was a table: 0+1=2, 0+2=3, 0+3=4 etc. This was then followed by another table: 1+1=3, 1+2=4, 1+3=5 etc and 2+2=5, 2+3=6, 3+3=7 etc. Underneath these tables I had drawn some basic diagrams representing zero with a dot and I had written ‘All sums are wrong because 0 = something.’

You will not be surprised to learn that I had a few problems with mathematics at school. I was put into a special class with three others who were also ‘bad’ at maths. This class was taught by our Latin master who had a big, black, bushy beard that held samples of his meals all day long, cornflakes, grains of rice, odd sticky substances etc. One day our food strewn teacher said he was leaving to become a missionary in Africa (where there was apparently a shortage of Latin teachers or was he going to farm his beard?) I have wondered, once or twice, whether we were responsible for his turning to religion? But of course that is pure ego-centric thinking, seeing cause and effect through the very narrow lens of my remedial maths class.

elros Tuominen's 'City Lights' at the Tubular Gardens

Multiverse Level 3 This is a radical solution to the measurement problems proposed by the physicist named Hugh Everett in the 1950s… Everett said that every time a measurement is made, the universe splits off into parallel versions of itself. In one universe you see result A on the measuring device, but in another universe, a parallel version of you reads off result B. After the measurement, there are going to be two of you. (Tegmark)

As it turned out no teacher showed up to funnel equations into our brains at the next class. We waited, and waited, and began to realize that the school had overlooked our small class of arithmetical disasters. We made a pact to keep quiet and not draw attention to ourselves; when it was time for our class we discreetly disappeared to an empty music room and read magazines or did homework. The shocking thing is that we did this for over a year! By the time we took our final exams the school must have realized the oversight but also opted to say nothing! So, when I read that Tegmark suggests that we live in a mathematical universe I feel a little nervous. I prefer to think of it this way: the universe is really nothing more than an imagined object and every imagined object is in a sense its own universe. That works don’t you think?

Earth in the Grand Planetarium - Ginsberg Arts Ctr

Multiverse Level 4 – The mathematical universe. ‘Galileo and Wigner and lots of other scientists would argue that abstract mathematics “describes” reality. Plato would say that mathematics exists somewhere out there as an ideal reality. I am working in between. I have this sort of crazy-sounding idea that the reason why mathematics is so effective at describing reality is that it is reality. That is the mathematical universe hypothesis: Mathematical things actually exist, and they are actually physical reality.’ (Tegmark)

Perhaps I am a doppelgänger that got lost? I am simply applying the laws of the wrong universe to my sums! Easy to do and completely understandable. Now, is Second Life a doppelgänger multiverse? After all, if we can have parallel universes and parallel selves, then perhaps we can have parallel Second Lives too? Maybe I am more real in Second Life because I am generated by zeros and ones? Maybe my avatar is more real than me? Maybe it is good at maths?

Slurls to locations in Second Life™:

Grand Planetarium – Ginsberg Arts Ctr
Mountain High Gallery – Nyth Morgwain
Tubular Gallery & Tubular Gardens for elros Tuominen

Fake it till you make it

Experiencing virtual self-perception

How we think about ourselves effects how we interact with the world around us. We can easily accept that there is a link between how we feel and how we behave. Now, for those of us opting to enter virtual worlds, there is a new dimension of self-perception available for exploration, our avatar.

How do we perceive ourselves when we use an avatar? Our symbolic self-representation can carry out actions, and conversations, whilst being simultaneously observed by ourselves. We do not see a mirror reflection of our physical self we see instead an idea of ourselves. This visual idea of self is strangely powerful even though we do not quite understand it. What we see, and how it makes us feel, is of huge interest to bloggers and researchers alike.

Virtual Meditation (try it!) Meditation cushions available at Buddha Art

Take a look at The Center for Connected Health site which reports on research examining the dynamics of avatars, and the ensuing impact they have upon our self–perception and physical world behavior. Connected Health links to a Time Magazine report that covers a number of intriguing studies carried out by Stanford University researchers and quotes Jeremy Bailenson (of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab) who says “When we cloak ourselves in avatars, it subtly alters the manner in which we behave,”

Connected Health also links to a Boston.com report on neurologist, Dr. Daniel Hoch who is researching the effects of teaching the Relaxation Response in Second Life. As he observes, ”There are an awful lot of people creating their own meditation spaces”. This is true! There are many, many virtual cushions with meditation scripts embedded in them waiting to trip up un-mindful avis! All these cushions point to people seeking inner peace, even if only on the level of watching their avatar help land aircraft while seated in the lotus position.

Exercising by moonlight (Sports equipment available on Virgin Island)

These studies examine how our avatar’s appearance and actions affect us later when we are ‘off-line’. It is intriguing to read in the Time magazine article that people who observed their ‘look-a-like’ avatars exercising on tread mills in Second Life, were more likely to exercise later in their physical life compared to those who just observed their avatars lounging around.

Falling demo angel (the closest I will ever get to being angelic)

I am now sending my avatar off to exercise in Second Life to encourage me in my first life. I wonder about the effect of wishful thinking here? When I was at school I tried sleeping with my French verbs under my pillow in the hope I would wake up knowing them. (Sadly, it did not work! I suspect a lot of English school children have tried this approach, perhaps this explains why the English are so bad at foreign languages?) Still, it is worth considering the subtle levels of how our avatars affect our self-perception. At the very least this puts a whole new spin on the saying ‘fake it till you make it!’ Maybe it should be ‘Rez it, watch it, do it?’

Demo ball gowns from Sacha’s Designs