“In five years, we will be debating how real should Second Life be”

Dr Larry Johnson is Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC), a group of more than 250 colleges, universities, technology companies and world-leading museums interested in the intersection of emerging technology and learning. The Consortium aims to serve as a catalyst for the development of new applications to energise learning and creative expression, and sponsors programmes and activities designed to stimulate innovation. One particular example of this effort are the 85 islands that the NMC has on Second Life, where universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) take their first steps in the virtual world.

Dr Larry Johnson is Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC), a group of more than 250 colleges, universities, technology companies and world-leading museums interested in the intersection of emerging technology and learning. The Consortium aims to serve as a catalyst for the development of new applications to energise learning and creative expression, and sponsors programmes and activities designed to stimulate innovation. One particular example of this effort are the 85 islands that the NMC has on Second Life, where universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) take their first steps in the virtual world.

The way I describe it to my mom, who is always asking me "what is that you do again?", is that we are the machete guys. We are in the jungle of emerging technology hacking the first trails through that others will come along and follow! Yes! But somebody has to be the first to go and see what is possible and that is what we do. We publish a report every January called the Horizon Report, which identifies what we think are going to be the most promising emerging technologies over the next five years. Each year we profile six things and we take one of them to build a project around. Two years ago that thing was Second Life. Everything! Well, that is what the purpose of it is: to bring everything a physical world cannot. Most people begin their time in virtual worlds in spaces that seem very much like the ones we inhabit every day. But where Second Life becomes very interesting is when you are able to move beyond that. Consider a lesson about physics that is not taught in a classroom in Second Life but rather is taught at the scale of a photon. So you play with the sense of scale. There is no reason to build things to our scale level in a virtual world. No. In fact, for cellular biology why not build a cell? Why teach in a classroom when you can teach in the cell itself? Let's go visit mitochondria today! Not yet. Typically, when a university makes the decision to spend money on a project on Second Life, they are going to come in and build a replica of their buildings. For example, we just built the MIT campus on Second Life, and so we raised the big Dome that everybody knows is the famous main building on MIT. Yes: this is MIT! But the island is a big place: 256 by 256 virtual meters and we just put that building in one corner. The rest of the island we left open for experiments. They divided it into 12 different pieces, each piece for a different class or a different professor. MIT is an engineering school so they all are engineering projects. One is an example on how living spaces might grow organically. Just like that: organically. It is an interesting engineering model they are experimenting with. Of course, you can?t do that in a physical world. People might say: why should they be interested in doing that at all? The reason is that you can use those same kinds of algorithms to model social processes. And so, while it may be visualized as an organic habitat, it could be applied across other social contexts. I'll give you another example on how helpful Second Life can be for education. As you may know, one of the issues in our society is that Muslim people are having a very difficult time in the US right now. There was a project that Johnson & Wales University did to build a virtual Casablanca. The objective was to showcase day-to-day Islamic life in a way that you could immerse yourself in and experience it and see things that you would never see on TV or in newspapers. They built up the marketplace and most of the main points of the city and populated it with a lot of experiences intended to highlight Islamic culture in positive ways. It was a very nice project. Well, graphic cards will become much better, the software itself will become much better, so these virtual worlds will become very, very realistic. I think that much sooner than that, maybe in five years, we will be debating how real it should be. Should it be very, very real or should it stop a little bit before realness? There was a movie that came out with Tom Hanks in it, about a train... I can't remember the name. It was made by Pixar and it was an extremely realistic animated movie... Yes! They got criticised because it was so real it was creepy. It was "almost" real, but just "almost". There was a debate about that, and I think that is a valid one: how real do our virtual places need to be? I would like to see things reflect like this table reflects, light working like light actually works, physics working in the way it really does... Well, you can do that in Second Life right now. Most of the time gravity is off in Second Life and that is why you can fly and put things wherever you want. And that is actually about to be improved with the new physics engine. But going back to your question, there is one particular thing that will happen and that will be quite compelling: the emerging of art forms that don't exist anywhere else. There is a tremendous art community in Second Life that the NMC has taken great care to get to know. We have a museum and an island devoted completely to art and we do a lot of events with the artists on Second Life. And the reason why we do that is because I am convinced that this is where the innovation is. Those are the people that are really pushing. And that actually gives me great hope for platforms like Second Life. You could begin with Full Immersion, which is an experiment by an artist called Dan Coyote. The idea was: what if you took the full volume of an island and used it to create an art piece that filled that volume: 256 by 256 by 740 virtual cubic meters. It is enormous! It is a dynamic piece of art that responds to you when you move through it. When you navigate the space you are actually within the piece of art. It is like nothing I have ever seen. Yes, and I have been concerned about that the whole time that I have been in Second Life. When we first came in, two years ago, the very first thing that we did was to write a guide. Now we have designed a completely new orientation experience: an island that looks like San Francisco where there are four levels of orientation. In the first one, you can get your account, download the software and be off and running in ten minutes. Then, you can get to our San Francisco Mission District and learn more: how to do advanced gestures, how to do voice, how to build, how to modify textures... Or you can go to Fisherman's Wharf to learn about Second Life culture. And if you want to experience the education possibilities on Second Life you can go across the Golden Gate Bridge to Berkeley University. I think it is like with any new technology. Some people are interested and some are sceptical. What is interesting to me is how long it takes before the ones who are sceptical begin to become interested. That is when you can say you have got something fairly interesting. Ha, ha, ha! Well I guess there are a few of those as well! I never felt that it made any sense to push people to things: people make their own decisions about what is useful. And so, what we focused on is demonstrating how Second Life can be useful. We are not interested in trying to make the case that is useful for everything, because it is probably not. But it is useful for some things and one of the reasons it is more useful is that these spaces are global. The very reason why I am sitting here talking to you is because I met someone from the UOC in Second Life. Yes! And we have friends all over the world! Last night I was talking in Second Life with people from the United States and Australia. It has happened to me a lot that I meet someone in an educational context in Second Life and then in real life. It is a tremendous networking tool that allows me to keep in touch with people all over the globe in ways that I could never before. And when we see each other in Second Life it is like being together! So now I plan part of my day for being in Second Life simply so that I can keep up with these colleagues that I work with all across the world.