A Look Ahead: Virtual Worlds in Aerospace & Defense

 
Location: VWER Meeting

image courtesy of Sheila Webber's flickr photostream

Back on Feb. 3, were pleased to host two Greg Moxness & Charles O’Connell, technologists from a major US defense contractor, who spoke at some length about their predictions for virtual worlds entering the mainstream. They were not speaking in their role of company employees, but they spoke knowledgeably about how technological advances might reshape 3D immersive environments.

I'll summarize some of their points below. You can read the entire transcript here.

• Charles, on convincing coworkers of the value of virtual worlds, “Seed the young with ideas, soon become the decision makers or at least influencers–took about 4 years.”
• Charles on developments to come “not sure military or defense is leading in this case. [Advances] more from commercial spaces, gaming and entertainment.”
• Greg, on near-term advances: “the whole idea of gesture recognition and 3d worlds this could be this year or next”
• Greg suspects we’ll see “full body haptics,” and Charles notes “Haptics–likely to be involved because it has such high value. [It's] never all or nothing. 2D and 3D will exist together….documents and spreadsheets along with 3D objects”
• Greg on neural interfaces like those in Gibson’s Neuromancer: “[M]aybe a step too far. . .maybe 20-30 years but will the human become less and will the machines evolve?” Charles: “a key thing that might happen, if it can be done noninvasively, something outside the body that can monitor brain waves, nerve impulses.” (Iggy’s note to any student readers: from Anderson’s novel Feed, that is the early version of the Feed interface).
• Greg agreed with the following remark by Charles, about the relative merits of 2D and 3D environments for training: “3D has immense possibilities, not an either/or question. Use 2D when better suited, or good enough. 3D [is for] experimentation or experiencing things not possible for some reason in RL.”
• Greg on an advantage of virtual worlds, the need online for something approximating face-to-face contact. Charles notes his belief that “relationships are much stronger in VW.”
• Charles also came out in favor of transparency in avatar identities (if not appearance) noting, “Treat people with respect, it’s a real place. One life, not two. It’s probably best to be yourself when dealing with others in VW.”

I look forward to their returning to the Roundtable in 2012.

Do My Students Need a 3D Web?

 
Location: Certainty

image credit: Raph Koster, of Ultima Online, Metaplace, and more, via Cory Doctorow's Flickr Photstream

"No," seems to be the uniform answer. The reasons say a great deal about the directions in which virtual worlds may not evolve. I put the question of "why haven't we gotten something like Gibson's immersive Matrix?" to my first-year seminar class.

I'll paraphrase the answers the came back:

• Immersive engagement is best saved for when it is worth the extra work / software / time
• Students prefer easy applications done "on the fly." In other words, they don't need an avatar to check the weather or send a short text to a friend or a relative
• The less hardware needed, the better. Any rig like Case's would be tedious to use and hard to carry. An iPhone or similar fits into a pocket.

Would my students use a 3D experience? The answers here are complex. Yes, this group argued, for immersive gaming.  I don't know that current levels of virtual-world technology, with so much user-generated content, will ever enable that level of immersion. At best, they might make work for a class more fun.

We should look to other types of game-environments if we want something akin to Simstim or Case's rig. As I'll report soon, two technologists from a major defense contractor who spoke to VWER recently argued exactly that.

Will those emergent forms of 3D engagement replace our 2D Web? If my students are correct, no. It would, however, open worlds for gaming and for meetings, an ironic realization of Castronova's thesis that work and play will merge in the decades ahead. 

Anti-Neuromancer: Norman Rockwell's Comeback

Location: Waiting for my apple pie

image credit: public-domain image from Wikipedia

The BBC carries this story today about the "curious resurgence" of Norman Rockwell's artwork.

Disclaimer: Rockwell is a guilty pleasure for me. I love the man's gentle sense of humor.  But back to the Gibsonian connection: there's not a thing curious at all about the renewed interest in Rockwell's art.

In a present that looks so difficult, and a future that appears bleak if you ask most any SF writer, why not return to an invented world that was a pastiche of actual pre-Counterculture events but framed so that it looked typical?

Rockwell does grate on me at times. In none of his works do I see my Arabic-speaking grandmother and my dad, both hungry enough in the early 1930s to rely on an urban waste-spot for picking dandelion greens. I don't see dad's daily onion sandwich (to his death, he really hated onions).

But I have to put aside my Cybperpunk preference for dark visions and say, "many folks need this stuff and I enjoy it, too."

Or are such delusions dangerous?  As a Peak Oiler who thinks the current downturn is a symptom of longer-term hardships to come, and that technology will not solve but merely mitigate the worst effects of oil depletion and climate change, I wonder if visions of a past-that-never-really-was don't lull us into thinking we could somehow remake it.

Or perhaps we can still enjoy Rockwell for what the work is: comforting eye candy. Perhaps it is a brand of eye-candy with something more substantial inside. I find hope in a statement made by David Kamp, quoted in the Beeb's story:

"To go back to Rockwell's vision of the more community-based, and modest, American Dream has the appeal it might not have held five or six years ago."

That would be welcome news after a time with bloated Hummers with single-digit fuel economy and outsized, land-gobbling McMansions defined US life.

Rockwell's vision might have been middlebrow and whitebread, but it was modest.  That's not been a signature trait in our self-invention of American identity for a while. Like thrift and economy, it may make a comeback.

I believe that identity is invented, in real life as well as in virtual worlds, so Rockwell's return offers some hope.

Have a look at the online gallery at The Norman Rockwell Museum and see how his work moves you.

Neuromancer Thoughts: Both More and Less Than People

Location: Scarlet Tiers of The Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority


Image credit: "Hangars Liquides" by Ka Rasmuson at Flickr

Finishing Neuromancer for perhaps the fifth or sixth time, I am still stuck with a question that I put to my class earlier today:

What would motivate you to merge with a machine? To put in a neural  implant so you could interface with data as surely as Case?

Gibson projected doing that with electrodes glued to our scalps, something that seems as quaint to me today as all of his mentions of magnetic tape in what may be the year 2030.  We won't need electrodes if we ever do develop a brain-hardware interface: we know a great deal more today about neuroscience than we did in 1984. Over at New World Notes, Wagner James Au occasionally reports on interfaces that permit the blind or paralyzed to manipulate data.  In a silly way, his recent post on a novel use of Xbox Kinect shows that the drive to merge meat and mind online hasn't abated.

I suspect we will make the technological, neurological, and moral leap one day to do far more. On a bad day, when I'm very tired, I think "well, I'm glad I won't live that long." On better days, I hope to try something like that, if only as a "tourist."

On the other hand, there's a danger with any sufficiently advanced technology: it might make us think we are gods who work magic. That's the dark corollary of the third of Clarke's Laws for you.

I don't know if my students, many of them having had their heads spun round by this important and very confusing book, understand that this novel reaches for a big theme. Gibson wants us to ponder a few things it seems:

• What is "human"? 
• What do we lose as we gain power through cybernetic prostheses?
• Would we take the chance to become immortal if we could? Would we dare NOT take it?

Near the end of the novel, Case refuses Neuromancer's offer of immortality, a space where Linda Lee still lives, or thinks she lives, in what amounts to an event horizon inside the AI's self.

We may all live to know if such an offer awaits us. Before writing this post, I never realized that Arthur C. Clarke postulated three laws. The second is worth noting here:

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

Gibson's fiction, always venturing past those limits, will retain its cultural significance as the rest of us follow in his wake.

Four Years in Second Life. What Now?

Location: Montclair State University Virtual Campus

I've been setting out virtual furniture for a group of technologists from a major US aerospace & defense contractor who will be speaking at the next VWER meeting. Their firm is doing some amazing things with virtual worlds, mostly in OpenSim but also with technology that William Gibson would have predicted in Neuromancer : exoskeletons, VR rigs for antiterrorist training, and more.

Meanwhile, consumer-level VR interfaces make halting but continued progress. The Wii and Kinect are first steps to a future when such technology could meet  changing norms about being in virtual spaces. Even partial immersion "creeps out" too many of my peers and students. But what if, as Edward Castronova claims in Exodus to the Virtual World, norms slowly begin to change? Then we might experience something like Gibson's Matrix or Stephenson's Metaverse.

I don't plan to be in-world 24/7, but I'd like the option to be a tourist in such spaces, from time to time.

Linden Lab has been an early pioneer here, and though I've said intemperate things about them in the past couple of years, it's been more out of disappointment for what might have been. Perhaps we'd have all been better off without the media-storm in 2006 and 2007. It made us dream too big too soon. Now, however, that early optimism has changed to a balance of weariness and hard work. My colleagues are divided on the future of 3D immersive worlds. Some suspect they'll be a niche forever. Others, citing trends among younger Millennials, claim they will make the revolution to build a 3D Web happen.

I hope so. Though I like the older Millennials I teach, they are too serious and career-driven to start a revolution, and they lack enough experience with open-ended play to imagine one. They don't turn off their hive of social networking long enough to look deeply inside. They are always in a hurry. But they are nice kids. I worry about them when they get older and life throws them some curve-balls.

I hope their younger siblings show us all a few new tricks.

Whatever happens, as I look back over four years, my colleagues, friends, and I have been pioneers on the edge of what is possible with our computers. I don't feel like an SL newbie any more.

Are SL years like dog years? I blew through my rezzday without realizing it. I'm sorta over that.

Am I feeling charitable or could LL still be masters of this new reality? If not, they sure as hell gave us a good ride at times. I hope the new CEO can keep the torch lit and the ride will continue.

Living in Gibson's Future? Close Enough to Be Scary.

Location: Midpoint of Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis
image credit: Barclay Shaw

The students in my first-year seminar may not understand, for a book published before they were even born, how William Gibson's Neuromancer not only shook up the genre of science fiction but also helped spawn a revolution in how those building the Web and its applications regard information

When I created a Second Life account in 2007, I left it an open question, in the "first life" tab for the avatar, as to whether Gibson's future would be realized in SL. Now I have the feeling that my question needed a broader scope: has Gibson's future been realized in both the worlds of, to use his dichotomy, meat and mind? If anything SL tries hard to be Gibsonian but fails: no one is as immersed as Case is in the novel, nor, for that matter, Molly and Armitage in their own part of futurity.

Mostly, however, Gibson got things close enough to scare me. As Egypt's government shuts down Internet access and cell-phone services, I recognize an eerie parallel to Wu's idea of a Master Switch that did not exist in 1984, when Neuromancer appeared. Gibson envisioned a more open Net than we have or that Wu believes we might get, but Gibson conceded that the "spiral arms of military systems" (52) would be forever beyond the reach of loners like Case.  They still are.

Yet using free public software, a million disenfranchised loners have united to topple Egypt's government, and at the time of writing this they may get their wish.  The keepers of those spiral arms, the Egyptian government, like their counterparts in Iran a few years back, know that their foes need cell telephony and Facebook to organize.

The rest of the world can only sit back and watch the chaos and, in Saudi Arabia, the government may be patting itself on the back for shutting out Facebook not so long ago.

But if Gibson were actually prophetic, then other aspects of his future should be closer to our door than the streets of Cairo.

Zaibatsus and Archologies

Put a Fuller Dome over many exurban gated communities in the US and Western Europe and you'd have the residential component of Neuromancer's way of life for the megacorporations: happy corporate employees going to their desks and conference rooms to plan and build a world to maximize a company's return on investment. Shopping and entertainment are only at a small remove, along the suburban sprawl, from the home cocoons. Only cheap oil has meant that workers drive to various destinations, instead of living and working and shopping together in the same place.

What would an arcology look like? There is one very Gibsonian building at the Web site of Yanko Design.  Called NOAH (New Orleans Arcology Habitat) it evokes the end-times of a next Big Storm and the sense of heroic futurism that the megacorps might project in a post-governmental world.  The comments on the proposal fascinate me: techno-dread and triumphalism characterize the remarks.

Following the logic of governmental minimalists and libertarians in the United States, whose voices are loud these days, a future where self-defining communities evolve into self-governing ones may not be so far-fetched. At the consensual level, it may already be as close as one's neighborhood covenant.

But the coming of Corporate Man (and Woman) has concurrently meant an increased stratification of wealth in US communities. Bruce Sterling once quipped that the 1980s dawned not only as the first American decade that seemed like science fiction but also a return to a neo-Victorian world with social-Darwinist conditions for citizens. How did that vision, crystallized in Neuromancer, pan out?

What follows is less critical than it might seem. In fact, as I'll note, I'm not sure it's ever been otherwise, except for its sheer scale. In 2007, the 1% of American citizens controlled 43% of financial wealth and 35% of net worth. The title of the report where I gathered this, "Who Rules America," gave an ideological slant that made me a little doubtful about the lack of bias by Professor Domhoff, so I found another source.

The US Census Bureau's report,"A Brief Look at Postwar U.S. Income Inequality" paints a picture not unlike Dumhoff's:

The long-run increase in income inequality is related to changes in the Nation’s labor market and its household com- position. The wage distribution has become considerably more unequal with more highly skilled, trained, and educated workers at the top experiencing real wage gains and those at the bottom real wage losses.

There's more at the Census Web site. I become a little less convinced, then, that Dumhoff is riding a hobby horse of leftist angst. One should pause before numbers like these from Domhoff: "Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, [1983-2004] fully 42% of it went to the top 1%."

Even so, the distribution of wealth before 1983 was not one of which I'm proud, given my belief that a large and politically active middle-class of property owners, such as all those returning GIs in 1945, can be an excellent shield against the sort of governance (and lack of it) Gibson portrays.   Citizens like the GIs who built the neighborhood were I now live, of modest ambitions and demeanor, have historically been  eager to protect their families and thus they've supported strong policing and orderly neighborhoods. Except for the turbulence of 1968, America has never had Egyptian-style chaos in the streets: Egypt has no middle class any longer, by all accounts.

Sadly, after 2008 and the financial meltdown, many more Americans have been thrown out of our middle class. Each foreclosure and failed company could take us a step closer to a neo-Victorian form of income inequality that characterizes Cyberpunk's view of the future.  And I doubt that all of the millions of dispossessed will leave their bank-seized homes peacefully. 2011 may be an interesting year.

Console Cowboys

But housing, like travel to Case, is a "meat thing." On the mind front, the lone cyber-cowboys of Gibson's world have not emerged. Wikileaks' revelations took a team of dedicated "hacktivists" to accomplish. At the same time, another aspect of current hacking comes straight from Neuromancer.

The cyber-attack on Iran's nuclear installations may have set back the nation's bomb-building program for some time. In a world like Gibson's, a zaibatsu might have stopped a rogue nation, given the failure of the US and Soviet governments after Operation Screaming Fist.  In our actuality, Israel and the US and who knows else might have launched the attack.  Thus we've moved further along than Gibson's world, technologically.

The Soviet computer centers Armitage mentions had to be attacked with Special-Forces hacker-operatives sent in on microlight gliders. In our world, Iran's systems are tied to the global Internet. So are ours, and both China and the US are quietly jockeying, behind the scenes, to develop cyberwar teams. If our nations ever go to war, Internet services and all its dependent systems--power grids, air-traffic systems, banking--will become legitimate domestic targets.

Street Samurai

On the "meat" front, our Molly might be named "Mike."

Burly men doing legitimate (and, at times, dirty) deeds for whatever Blackwater is now called, and firms like it, does not quite have the sex-appeal of Gibson's razorgirl.

At the same time, for this reader it would have been impossible in the early 80s to imagine Mercs, and that is what all "private security contractors" are, Mercenaries, enjoying the cultural acceptance they now enjoy. Many of my fellow citizens get a bit queasy on this subject, but for the past decade the US government has relied on Mercs to do jobs we do not wish to task to our armed forces or that require manpower we simply do not have in uniform without drafting college-aged kids.

In the 80s, except for Soldier of Fortune readers, the use of mercenaries by our government would have stirred widespread outrage. Now, if I may risk a generalization, with a 24/7 new cycle the attention of the public appears to move faster than it did 26 years ago, to the latest tragedy, scandal, or political circus.  Meanwhile, private security companies have limited accountability to US or international law. They are true Gibsonian figures of the "interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art" (44).  Put in "law" for "art" and you have our situation.

Meanwhile, poor Molly. I don't think Gibson meant her to become a meme, but she has.

I'm glad we don't have razorgirl mercs walking the night cities of our world, but Molly can be found elsewhere: she's the badass sex-object of a hundred video games and action / adventure films. Hollywood understands male lust for these tough babes with guns and blades. Molly scares and attracts the boys, and I'm sure that more than a few male readers empathize with Case when he gets to enjoy her pleasures.

Naturally, one recent attempt to cast a film based upon the book would have featured Milla Jovovich as Molly: Resident Evil's killer star would get to put on the mirror eye-inserts. It's that way in any number of films or games where the strong woman is just as much a sex object as any gatefold playmate.  As my students will see when they get further into the book, there's that dark and disgusting desire out there to have a "meat puppet."  That technology is perhaps the most frightening of the book and, like organ-markets and stim-sim sets, it remains possible but not part of our lives.

We have Microsoft as a multinational, not microsofts that one puts into a skull-plug to learn a new skill. And the best we can do for Stim-Sim is the current 3D craze. Merge it with a Wii or Kinect, and we may approach something like watching through Tally Isham's eyes in her latest episode.

Better Living Through Bioengineering?

When students on campus trade Ritalin to do better on exams, yes, we live in a cyberpunk world. My students are afraid of our "street" and, whipped up the ladder by well meaning parents and educators like me, do their best to avoid it whatever the emotional cost.

At least, if any of us do wind up on the streets with between two and three million American homeless, we do not have to cope with illegal dealers in pituitary glands or black clinics in the worst part of town, ready to roll us for our kidneys.


In scope if not depth, Gibson was spot on about the culture of body modification, when teens have elective cosmetic surgery and their parents get Botox regularly. A single earring was a novelty on a man in 1984, and potentially a dangerous one. Now tats and piercings are common.

A dermatologist, who helped my mother with a degenerative eye disorder that required a monthly Botox injection, told me he'd given up on really iffy surgery that could land him in court. Instead, his income came mostly from vanity, that ready fix of Botox to keep the bathroom mirror lying to his patients every morning.

Verdict: Close Enough to Scare Me

Image Source: Unknown

In the end, we don't, and probably never will, have orbiting colonies of Rastas or French spas run by a maniacal and inbred family. I doubt that our planet has enough fossil fuels that are cheaply available to sustain enough wealth to make dreams like Richard Branson's, of cheap space tourism, happen. If I'm wrong, I'll be too old to get the ride to orbit I've wanted since I saw a Gemini launch in the mid 1960s.

In other regards, however, I'm happy to say that Gibson got a great deal wrong. May it continue to be so, because what he predicted correctly has been frightening enough.  Ours is a harder-edged world than it was in 1984, when the Cold War raged on.  And the technologies of interconnection empower lots of individuals. Al Quaeda, not the Panther Moderns, uses the Internet but the violence engendered is still the stuff of nightmare.

So, Bill, thanks for all of the bad dreams. You really invented a genre and, in some ways, a world.

Work Cited:

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.