Digital Day - August 2, I’ll be speaking to the Directors Guild of America, in Hollywood, demonstrating the use of virtual worlds for the film-making process. We’ll focus on logistics and real-time production meetings.

Virtual Worlds Expo - September 3-4, I’ll be leading a panel in the Enterprise Track at the Los Angeles Convention Center called "Using Virtual Worlds to Streamline and Augment the Film-Making Process." Guess what that one’s about?

XML Seoul - September 25 to 26, I’ll be helping with the X|Media|Lab’s "Digital, Social, Mobile" workshop in Seoul. More details on the conference connected with that soon.

If you’re going to be at any of these, let me know!

-Ken

The article examines artistic circles in Second Life via comparison to those existing in Tokugawa Japan . I very much support the argument that virtual worlds create something of a neutral, shared space that allows people to experiment in ways they might not normally do in their everyday lives, across society and geographical boundaries. What a fantastic opportunity for society as a whole.

From the article: "Such alternative spheres of sociability have been often coupled with people’s search for the possibility of creating a new social order built on the horizontal association of free individuals rather than on structures of vertical integration."

A very interesting and accessible read on a topic that I believe will get much more attention in the future.

Here’s the abstract for "Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres," with a link to the full PDF download.

-Ken

iLemon provides solutions for custom 2D and 2.5D virtual worlds. Based in Shanghai, they’ll help us extend our options for creating virtual world presences for clients. Check out their site.

We’ve also partnered with two exciting academic institutions working in virtual worlds.

The National Institute of Informatics (NII) is located in Tokyo, and is doing a wide range of research in virtual worlds. Led by Dr. Helmut Prendinger , their projects include the development of a Multimodal Presentation Markup Language 3D (MPML3D) , allowing improved scripting for interactions between virtual world bots and users. Genkii will help NII distribute their ideas to a wider group of users.

The Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) is using virtual worlds for large-scale simulations and visualization of astronomical data. Astronomers and researchers from a number of universities and institutions including Dr. Piet Hut from Princeton and Dr. Jun Makino from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan . Genkii will help MICA with explorations and development in OpenSim, and assist in facilitating support for this research from interested companies.

So, yeah. Lots and varied news. But there’s more to come!

Quillpill is a new tool that allows anyone with a story idea to write it via the web or mobile. Talk about your writing, jot down ideas, or write an entire novel. It’s good stuff, and Techcrunch agrees. Synthetic Entertainment , the creator of Quillpill is on Crunchbase , along with Genkii .

Eric Rice (Spin or Spin Martin in other spaces) is an author and geek-of-many-stripes in the Bay Area. He’s been using Quillpill to write interesting stories and you can check those out here .

Many thanks to Serkan Toto for a great article!

Oh yeah, and Quillpill is a featured staff pick at Apple for iPhone web applications.

Let us know what you think.

-Ken

We’ve recently partnered with Novamente , and will help them bring their advances in artificial general intelligence to Japan. Dr. Ben Goertzel , Novamente’s CEO, is the author of multiple books and articles on the subject, and is actively working in virtual worlds to advance AI technology.

Check out this video of some of Novamente’s previous work in Second Life training virtual pets.

As a futurist and SF writer, I’m excited to work with Dr. Goertzel and Novamente. Researching artificial intelligence using virtual worlds seems like a natural progression. Both technologies are vital to moving society to the next level.

Is the Singularity near? You bet it is. And it’s going to be an exciting ride.

Ken

最新のテクノロジーに関わる事業や、SF小説を書く仕事というのは時として苛立たしい。世界中があっと言うような画期的な改革を思い付く事は簡単だが、それを現実社会にもたらすのは難しいからだ。めまぐるしい進化を続けている技術を見て、私は、ついに技術的特異点 の時代が来たのだなと感じた。昨今は、日常生活における変化のスピードというのは目覚ましいが、テクノロジー面での変化のスピードは滞っていると言っていいだろう。

つい最近、Novamente という会社と提携したが、その目的はNovamente社の持つAI（人工知能）テクノロジーの日本への導入である。Novamente社のCEO、Dr. Ben Goertzel はこの業界では名が知れており、AIに関する書籍や記事を多数執筆している。将来バーチャルワールドでもこの技術を活かしたいとし、日々努力しているという。

Novamente社が以前Second Life で行ったバーチャルペットの育成プロジェクトが動画で紹介されているので、気になる方はチェックしてみるといいだろう。

SF作家として、またフューチャリストとしてDr. GoertzelとNovamente社の協力は大変嬉しく思う。AIの可能性をバーチャルワールド内で研究するという事は、その性質から言っても自然な成り行きであろう。どちらの技術も、社会の進化にとって重要な要素だと私は思っている。

Ken

After the Second Life user party, we trekked over to a great Showa era izakaya in Shinjuku for dinner and drinks with Ben Goertzel where we chatted about artificial intelligence and virtual worlds.

Later, we joined some people at BarTube, where Ben, Philip, Jun Doi, and dozens of virtual world geeks like us jammed, drank, and chatted about the future.

Next time you should join us!

Ken

Take a look around, peruse our presentations, and send us some feedback, if you’d be so kind.

And check out the new Ugotrade article. Good stuff about Genkii , plus words from our friends at Metabirds and Melting Dots .

We’ll be at the Tokyo Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo 2008 this Wednesday and Thursday. Hope to meet some new people there

Ken