IFTF's Future Now

Sharkrunners: Real World Sensor Grid Feeds Hybrid Reality Science Game

IFTF friends area/code, a pervasive game design consultancy based in Manhattan launched Sharkrunners last week on the Discovery Channel's website as part of the 20th anniversary of Shark Week celebration.

Some of you may be aware of my fascination with all things marine and nautical, which I'm trying to record over at the Blue Economy Blog. But Sharkrunners is more than just an aquageek's dream. It's a multiplayer web game that's drawing down real sensor data from a collection of sharks that have been tagged off the coast of California by marine biologists. As the real sharks' positions are plotted using real-time GPS tracks, you move your virtual science vessel around to chase them. When you encounter a shark you are presented with options to send divers down to collect data, which results in additional research funding or sometimes SHARK ATTACKS! that can injure your researchers.

This is a great example of sensory infrastructure being used in a novel way for fun and learning, and it will be very interesting to watch as others find ways to extend this model.

Network Reliability in San Francisco and New York

It's funny - I spent a half hour the other day on the phone sharing some insights with a team from the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the city agency that is developing a telecommunications plan for the Big Apple. They are focusing on ways to assess and ultimately improve network reliability so that even while terrorists fly jetliners into skyscrapers, blackouts occur, or steampipes explode, the investment banks and global media companies can stay connected.

My advice was - telecom networks are among the most resilient infrastructures we have. Let the carriers worry about that, as their customers will demand what they think they need. But they depend on two critical underlying infrastructures that are old, weak, decaying, and highly vulnerable: physical conduits (tunnels, roads, even sewers and water mains). It's also an areas where local governments have some regulatory pressure to apply (versus telecom where they have almost none).

Two days later, Pacific Gas & Electric in San Francisco proved my point for me by letting a transformer explosion knock some important web services offline. GigaOM has great coverage:

This resulted in a transformer blowing up, and causing even more disruptions, especially at 365 Main, one of the large co-lo/data center facilities situated in the SOMA area of San Francisco.

This resulted in massive outages at some of Web 2.0’s brand name companies - Six Apart, Facebook, Technorati and Yelp - knocking out their systems and web services out flat. Whatever the reasons behind the failure might be, yesterday was a rude reminder of how fragile our digital lives are.

The seemingly invincible web services (not to mention the notional wealth they signify) vanish within a blink of the eye. It was also a reminder, that all the hoopla around web services is just noise - for in the end the hardware, the plumbing, the pipes and more importantly, the power grid is the real show.

Full article. Also see O'Reilly Radar blog's coverage.

Update: Sean Ness of IFTF forwarded me a blog comment by somafm that has a fairly detailed technical explanation of the chain of events that brought down 365 Main, the AboveNet data center that was at the heart of web outages caused by the San Francisco blackout:

365 Main, like all facilities built by AboveNet back in the day, doesn't have a battery backup UPS. Instead, they have these things called "CPS," or continuous power systems. What they are is very very large flywheels that sit between electric motors and generators. So the power from PG&E never directly touches 365 Main. PG&E power drives the motors which turn the flywheels which then turn the generators (or alternators, I don't remember the exact details) which in turn power the facility. There are 10 of these on their roof.

The flywheels (the CPS system) can run the generator at full load for up to 60 seconds according to the specs.

There are also 10 large diesel engines up on the roof as well, connected to these flywheels. If the power is out for more than 15 seconds, the generators start up, and clutch in and drive the flywheels. There are no generators in the basement. (There is a large fuel storage in the basement, and the fuel is pumped up to the roof. There are smaller fuel tanks on the roof as well. )

Here's what I think happened. Since there were several brief outages in a row before the power went out for good, it seems that the CPS (flywheel) systems weren't fully back up to speed when the next outage occurred. Since several of these grid power interruption happened in a row, and were shorter than the time required to trigger generator startup, the generators were not automatically started, BUT the CPS didn't have time to get back up to full capacity. By the 6th power glitch, there wasn't enough energy stored in the flywheels to keep the system going long enough for the diesel generators to start up and come to speed before switching over.

Why they just didn't manually switch on the generators at that point is beyond me.

So they had a brief power outage. By our logs, it looks like it was at the most 2 minutes, but probably closer to 20 seconds or so.

Update #2: From Good Morning Silicon Valley:

OK, it's all happenstance and coincidence, but those inclined to see omens and portents might be excused for thinking that the gods are displeased with the Net. Almost a month ago, a huge fire in downtown Palo Alto came within an alley of PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, one of the major crossroads in the country for data traffic, threatening vast disruption. Then yesterday, a series of electrical outages and fluctuations left a good-size chunk of San Francisco powerless for several hours during the middle of the business day, including hosting service 365 Main, which powers many of the Web's most popular sites and boasts of doubly redundant backup in case of blackouts.

The effect rippled through the wired world. LiveJournal and Second Life went dead, AdBrite dimmed, Craigslist became unlisted, the 1Up gaming network went down, Facebook turned blank, Six Apart couldn't get it together, and Yelp was rendered silent. Unable to work, Web 2.0 programmers slathered themselves with sunscreen and stumbled into the unfamiliar daylight. Families were reunited as thousands of idled bloggers pushed away from the keyboard and were greeted by loved ones. Global temperature dropped as servers and PCs rested silently.

Soon enough, though, normality was restored, and the words "wake-up call" were zipping across the Net. "It exposed a larger vulnerability," said Technorati exec Derek Gordon . "If this could happen to such a collection of major websites, what would happen if this was part of a major catastrophe? This was sort of a wake-up call." And Don Dodge notes that this is exactly why companies that can afford it, like Microsoft and Google, are building their own multiple data centers.

Still, alarms about something as daunting and expensive as replacing aging infrastructure tend to get the snooze treatment until something truly calamitous happens. For a preview, see the Onion's report on the Great Web Crash of '07.

Telepresence: it's the details?

In the first years after its founding in 1968, one of the biggest projects the Institute for the Future undertook was a study of online collaboration systems, and their impact on organizational behavior. The dream of the electronic system that's as good as a real meeting refuses to die; but unlike some futuristic technologies (I'm talking to you, personal jet pack), this one seems to be getting closer to reality, as this weekend's New York Times article on the latest high-end telepresence systems suggests.

High-end videoconferencing — the magical ability to be two places at once — has had a bumpy past, plagued by jerky gestures, out-of-sync lips and sound and cumbersome equipment. Few executives liked what they saw, including unflattering pictures of themselves, and most thought the business tool was not worth the price.

But now, thanks to new technology, videoconferencing is delivering on its promise as an alternative to traditional business travel. The high-definition TV images are sharp. Broadband fiber-optic cable has replaced tired telephone lines. And the equipment is often installed in studios that are handsome and appropriately corporate....

Two things are notable about this upsurge in telepresence.

First, the video, audio, and connections are all unquestionably getting better. But what's really interesting to me about these systems, and what makes them more successful, are the low-tech details that HP, Cisco and other companies use to fill in the gaps between video and reality.

Cisco’s virtual meeting room includes an IP (Internet Protocol) phone, three broadcast-quality cameras, three ultrasensitive mikes, three 60-inch plasma screens, a crescent-shaped table that seats six and soft back-lighting.

“The table is maple to complement faces,” said a Cisco spokeswoman, Jacqueline Pigliucci. The studios are painted in identical colors, to give the impression that the people on the screen are in the same room.

The couple people I've talked to who've used these systems say that the room design is what really makes the illusion work. Another is that the service on these high-end systems is very good: as one consultant quoted in the New York Times article says, "Walk in a Halo room, and everything is ready to run." (No one ever has to reboot a real conference room.) Of course, seamlessness comes at a cost: about $18,000 a month, to be precise.

In other words, it's not just that the technology is getting better in the conventional, specs-are-getting-more-impressive kind of way: the experience of using these systems is changing for the better because their designers are paying more attention to deployment and maintenance. Nothing breaks the illusion of seamlessness like having to reboot the computer the video conference was supposed to run on.

The second notable thing is who's really using these systems.

It might be just an artifact of a very small sample size, but the heaviest users I've heard of are groups who already have standing meetings, not people who are using these systems to substitute for first-time meetings with prospective clients. The technology isn't bringing together people who have never met before, but is strengthening an connection between colleagues. As Business Week reported earlier this year,

A typical user is private equity star Blackstone Group. Several times a week, CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman gathers senior managing partners around a polished conference table in the firm's New York headquarters on Park Avenue for a five-way video call.... Blackstone has 40 video rooms stationed around the world. One executive is so enthralled with the system that he keeps the conference connection running in his office all day long. "We're big proponents of videoconferencing because of the way it enhances the quality of meetings," says Harry D. Moseley, Blackstone's chief information officer.

Financial and consulting firms have been particularly avid purchasers. Deloitte & Touche USA is installing a dozen $250,000 video suites made by Polycom so that various business units can collaborate on outsourcing ideas or interview job candidates from India. AIC Ventures, a real estate investment company, has three video rooms: one in its home base of Austin, Tex., another in Dallas, and one in Chicago. They are used for everything from reviewing new Web page designs to celebrating the close of a big deal with a (now crystal-clear) ring of a tabletop gong.

This is a bit like the experience we've had at the Institute with Google Docs: that collaboration tool has its uses for asynchronous collaboration among geographically-dispersed authors, but the best uses come when authors are in the same room, and able to talk about the document in real time.

Despite this, at least one telepresence consulting company argues that this isn't the future: "effective inter-company business," they maintain, "will be propelling this industry forward in the coming years (remember where you heard it first!).... The future of telepresence will be about connecting with vendors, customers, and joint venture partners... to lower the shared costs of business relationships."

Technorati Tags: collaboration, displays, office, video, work

Cool bar

The i-bar, a 10 meter-long bar that's also an interactive display.

Technorati Tags: displays, entertainment, pervasive computing, ubicomp

The End of Mobile Social Web 1.0

I first met Dennis Crowley in 2001, a few months before he and partner Alex Rainert, both grad students at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, launched the mobile version of Dodgeball as part of their thesis project. I remember thinking, this is interesting. Not long after that, Clay Shirky (inspired largely by Dodgeball and other ITP projects), wrote a great piece on what he called "situated software". In short, Dodgeball was an early indicator of a new ecosystem of lightweight apps create by small communities of users for each other.

And it's been fascinating to watch Dodgeball work its way through the multiple challenges of innovation in the mobile application space - from overcoming walled gardens, to massaging their UI model, to the dozens of social hacks to make the service appealing and fun without being annoying. (Crowley used to give presentations that had a whole slide called "The Ex-Girlfriend Problem"). In the process, they figured out how to make Dodgeball scale beyond its small early adopter community in downtown Manhattan.

When Google picked up Dodgeball 2 years ago, there were cheers throughout the scattered remnants of Silicon Alley. Gotham City still had something to teach the West Coast math geeks about taking the web to the streets. Developers in California spend their weekends hunched underneath their desks eating pizza and playing Doom. As Crowley's Dodgeball profile summed it up, New York's new breed of mobile developers were more likely to "spend my weekends either (a) fixing this website, (b) on a chairlift or (c) hungover." No Second Life here, we're looking for tools to have a more interesting, intense, serendipitous First Life.

So it's come as a real shame that Crowley and Rainert have left Google. It's truly the end of Mobile Social Web 1.0. While Dodgeball never figured out how to monetize its network without really pissing people off (there was an unsuccessful attempt to create an Absolut Vodka user that people could friend to get invited to events with free drinks), it was a light in the dark for entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to break open the mobile Internet, despite the obstacles imposed by mobile carriers. And it was just plain fun.

The worst part is that the future of the mobile social web looks bleak. Twitter has stolen a lot of the thunder as Dodgeball stagnated over the last year due to benign neglect inside the G-plex. But as a great comment on today's ValleyWag story speculating on a shutdown of Dodgeball puts it:

Twitter is just a suburban man's Dodgeball. They have no lives, therefore, they twitter.

If Twitter is the mobile social web 2.0, I want a downgrade.

More importantly though, I fear what this development has to say about Google's much-touted R&D model of letting employees spend a day working on their own projects. To date, the only thing that Google has figured out how to monetize out of beta is search.

If two talented and motivated innovators like Crowley and Rainert - who were given ALL of their time to work on an idea that was ALREADY PROVEN to be successful - were frustrated enough to leave the money and free gourmet food behind, it tells me that the Google research emperor might not have any clothes.

Language Schools in the New, Voice-Enabled Second Life

Second Life has finally caught up with every other immersive VR world (games) and will soon have voice capabilities. Entrepreneurs are stepping up and exploiting this new medium to offer interesting services like virtual language schools.

Technology Review: A Boon to Second Life Language Schools

Immersive language learning in a realistic environment with native-speaking teachers will soon be available online, in the popular virtual world Second Life. Starting in September, a language school called Languagelab.com will offer English and Spanish classes. The cost of the classes will be comparable to those in the real world, which can cost several hundred U.S. dollars for a semester-long course. "You won't be taking classes in LanguageLab because it's a lot cheaper," says LanguageLab founder David Kaskel, an entrepreneur and PhD candidate at the Center for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. "We think it's a lot better than in a physical space because there's more you can offer than in a classroom."

I have to wonder, though, if this is one of those examples of good intentions gone very very bad. Isn't the whole idea of language immersion about gaining the deep, rich cultural and human context that language is embedded in? Doing it in a virtual space seems even worse than doing it in a classroom, where you are stuck for 90 minutes with a teacher and classmates. No logging off if you don't know what to say. You're on the spot.

Seems like a case of bad virtualization to me.

MagicBoard - lightweight interaction space

I'm surprised that this software was developed in 2003 and I haven't heard more about it. MagicBoard is like a lightweight version of Jeff Han's Multi-Touch Interaction work that was demoed at TED recently.  The setup could be as simple as a whiteboard, a video camera, and a projector (image below links to video).  When I mentioned this to Alex, he immediately started imagining an  environment with multiple translucent screens with the cameras in front and projectors behind the screens.

The user works on the board as in the usual way, drawing or writing with ordinary marker pens. Whenever she chooses, the user can "grab" an electronic copy of the things that have been drawn or written with the marker pen. This copy is projected back onto the board, precisely overlaying the original markings with the appropriate colour. The physical ink may then be erased and the electronic version manipulated on the board's surface: it can be duplicated, moved, enlarged or reduced, printed, or hidden for a moment before being recalled.

(from Barney Pell's blog)

Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

A few weeks ago I saw an estimate by Russel Seitz of how much cyberspace weighs. (Two ounces, if you're interested.) Now, Nick Carr (author of Does IT Matter?, which I've written about here and here) calculates that a Second Life avatar consumes as much electricity as a Brazilian:

If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars "living" in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals... 60,000 kilowatt-hours....

Which, annualized, gives us [an average avatar consumption of] 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year..... [T]he average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.

Which means, in turn, that avatars aren't quite as intangible as they seem. They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints.

From Mark Baard via Tim Bray.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, energy, games

Yahoo! Design Expo

Yesterday I went to the Yahoo Design Expo, an event bringing together bright design students from the U.S., England, and Brazil.

The exhibit had a number of demos or performance art-like pieces, which ranged from a bit weird (but I'm not very avant-garde) to fun to pretty compelling. Peter Merholz is right that Aaron Koblin's work is mighty cool, but I thought that the expo overall exhibited a few interesting themes. First, as Larry Tesler pointed out, they all played with a few big themes:

• Tangible interfaces;
• Collaborative/social media things;
• Geolocation;
• Wacky performance art stuff.

Okay, the last one might have been mine. (And for anyone who was there, yes, I'm the one that nearly destroyed the project with the spitballs and the ship's wheel. And yes, I hate art that much. I truly do.)

I talked for a few minutes with Joy Mountford, who has been organizing this expo every year since 1990, and got Yahoo to sponsor it after she joined the company as a senior designer. Joy is one of those Silicon Valley interface design types who's made the pilgrimages to all the storied, hot but unstable, or interesting places-- she founded Apple's International Interface Design Project, worked at Interval Research in the 1990s, and now it at Yahoo-- and taught here and there. (This ACM Ubiquity interview is a good intro to her work.) It's the kind of career path that's like a river. To visitors it seems meandering. Those more familiar it can decipher its logic and know its more picturesque turns. And the river itself is absolutely determined to get somewhere.

We talked about how the expo has evolved over the years. In particular I wanted to know when the tangible interface stuff-- which connects with my own work on the end of cyberspace-- started showing up, and when people started trying to move interface design beyond the WIMP interface. She said that there had always been such projects, but they'd become more prominent in the last few years, and now were commonplace: everyone in design and UI circles takes for granted that this is the future.

But the most interesting thing she said was that while in the Olden Days, students had to do a lot of fudging and improvising-- using magnets instead of sensors, or doing videos that showed how something would work if the technology were available-- today, the sensors, RFID tags, and just about everything else you need to make a working prototype are within an intelligent student's reach. At least four of the projects were using Max, a high-level programming language that makes it pretty easy to build simple systems combining sensors, logic, and actuators.*

As Larry Tesler put it, an exhibit like this is worth putting on at a place like Yahoo for two reasons: first, it gets Yahoo people thinking outside the box; and second, art students are a group that's regularly thinking about things that everyone else thinks about a few years later. As William Gibson might put it, they have an unusually high concentration of the future.

My instinct is that this is true for the tools they use, as well: just as CAD has gone from an exotic expensive thing to something that you play with in Second Life, and robotics is now as accessible as Lego, If design students are able to build M.A. projects with this stuff, when my daughter is in high school she'll be building anti-sibling detectors to keep her younger brother and his various robots (which he will have also built) out of her room.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, design, digital-physical, geoweb, prototyping

Memory spots

HP has announced a new device, Memory Spots. They're similar to RFID tags, in that they're passive, wireless, and are designed to carry information around on physical objects; however, they have more processing power and memory, and HP doesn't envision them being used in the supply chain.

My instinct is that while the company talks about early uses in documents and medical contexts, the big niches will be elsewhere, as an augment objects that have have complicated histories or are embedded in rich social networks.

More on the Spots at End of Cyberspace.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, memory, pervasive computing, RFID, ubicomp