One of my clients, Cerego Japan, has built a social learning platform called iKnow that helps learners create and share educational content. They have already amassed several hundred thousand users in Japan, and having added support for numerous other languages from Arabic to Klingon, they are now poised to expand throughout the rest of the world.

What iKnow didn’t have up until now is was a synchronous learning element. Although there was all kinds of ways to share learning materials, the actual learning in iKnow is individual, with a personal browser-based Flash application.

Enter Second Life.

Our Second Life / iKnow mashup uses the iKnow API to pull lists from iKnow into the metaverse. The result is a multi-player game where each question choice appears as its own object, and avatars compete with each other to be the first to jump on top of it.

This builds on some of the work we’ve done before in Sloodle, where we built a Second Life interface for the Moodle Quiz. But iKnow content also features images and sounds, so those are included too. We’ve uploaded the sound and audio for a few featured iKnow lists, and Second Life’s Quicktime-based parcel sound and media for the rest.

Teleport here to try.

One of the main barriers for educators working in Second Life has been the high spec required to run the software.

In Sloodle, we have tried to lessen the impact if these problems with our web intercom - an object which allows chat from the 3D virtual world to be relayed in real time to a traditional 2D chatroom in Moodle.

Japanese company Sun Inc. have gone a step further with a Java-based version of the client that runs on low-spec PCs, inside a web browser. They released a Japanese-language beta last week, and promise that a version supporting other languages is in the works - as well as versions of their viewer targeting Japanese mobile phones. (Their Japanese press release (PDF) is here.)

You can login to their system here. (The login form asks for your avatar’s first name, last name and password.) Once logged in, you can navigate using the normal Second Life navigation, and use the buttons on their page for chat, navigation, etc. For impatient non-Japanese speakers, here’s a bookmarklet you can use to get the Tokyozero Viewer buttons In English.

Read this post in Japanese (日本語)

Michio Kanda is a Japanese town office employee planning a world-record-breaking attempt to fly from Japan to North American in a hot air balloon.

Kanda-san is well prepared, with world records for altitude, distance and time in the air under his belt. But when they met to discuss preparations, the ground team was worried about one thing: How would Kanda-san communicate with Air Traffic Control when got to North America?

To help out, we hooked up with Australian Aviation English specialist Mike Smith of Aerospace English who set about creating a customized language course designed to teach Kanda-san the things he would most need to know, in the shortest possible period of time.

We mocked up Kanda-san’s balloon in Second Life and built a simulation, along with the instruments that he would need to control based on instructions from the control tower: A transponder to adjust the the frequency on which he would talk to the tower, and an altimeter on which he would base the his reports to the ground.

Here’s a clip from the lesson, featuring Mike Smith in the control tower and Michio Kanda in the balloon:

The Economist has an article on “telepresence” systems - high-end teleconferencing setups designed to fool the brain into thinking you’re in the same room as the people you’re talking to.

As well as using very expensive high-definition TV and recording systems, they do things like matching the wallpaper in the rooms at either end. I can imagine these kind of systems would work well at locations that are geographically relatively close - like across the US or Europe - with low latency, ferociously fast internet connections and top-of-the-range technical support. But if anything goes even slightly wrong - a slight lag between seeing someone’s lips move and hearing them speak, the video or audio pausing for a few seconds - the brain will figure out the illusion and the feeling of presense will disintegrate. That’s presumably why:

“HP charges $350,000 for every room it kits out for telepresence and, in America, a further $18,000 a month for service. Cisco charges up to $299,000 per room.”

The rest of us, though, need a way of tricking the brain into thinking it’s there that doesn’t rely on exactly recreating the visual experience that we’d be getting if we were in the same room.

We need to replace a physical space with an artistic space; Abstract out the information we really want, and let the brain skip over the stuff it doesn’t need to care about (like the colour of the wallpaper). We do this by going in precisely the opposite direction to HP and Cisco: Replace the detailed reality we’re used to with a space full of visual and linguistic metaphors.

Here’s a space Jeremy Kemp had rigged up for the pre-conference SLCC meeting in Chicago. A bunch of people involved in developing tools for virtual worlds - including our own project, Sloodle - were there in the room, and representatives from Blackboard and Angel Learning were attending the meeting via Second Life.

(Part of this session is also available as a YouTube.)

You can’t see it in the picture, but two of the four walls in the room were projecting images of the shared space in Second Life, shown by different avatars standing at different angles. That helps make the people in the room feel like their part of the shared virtual space.

Of course there are limits to how far this approach can take you - which is why I flew out to Chicago in the first place. And I think the range of expressions that we’re getting with Second Life avatars still leaves a lot to be desired. What’s particularly tricky is the subconscious body language and facial expressions that nobody is going to type, even if they had a gesture for it.

The feeling of presence virtual worlds can give us right now is very powerful, and it’s getting better all the time. But to really make friends with someone a long way off, you still need to get on a plane.

And I bet that’s true even if you have $350,000 to spend on a telepresence room.

Fumikazu Iseki at Tokyo University of Information Sciences has written a proxy server that you can run outside your firewall between your client and the Linden Labs servers.

The idea is that you put it on a box outside your firewall, connect to it on a permitted port (like port 80) from your client PC running Second Life, and it connects on your behalf to the various ports used by Linden Labs. That way you can use Second Life even if your network adminstrator won’t open the ports you need to connect to Second Life.

The thing is still in Beta, and doesn’t yet support voice. Also, presumably it’ll mean extra latency as traffic has to travel from your PC to the proxy server, then from the proxy server to the Linden Labs boxes, instead of straight from the PC to the servers. And the license, although friendly to non-commerical users, appears to be non-free. But it’s an interesting piece of work all the same.

The server runs on Linux. You can download it here. Be sure to check your IT security policy before you try it on someone’s network…

A related project that would be very useful if we could bring it off would be to setup a caching proxy server to save textures locally, instead of having to pull them from the Linden Labs server every time. Currently educators wanting to have a number of students run Second Life at the same time need to have an absolute monster of a network connection to avoid the kind of problems they’ve been having at the Japanese end of Pacific Rim X. Much of the traffic hogging that connection is duplicated, as all the avatars visiting the same space are downloading the same images.

Maybe if we ask Iseki-san nicely he’ll work his magic on the caching problem as well…

—UPDATE—
Looks like we can solve the caching problem with squid.

There’s an article over at What Japan Thinks on a survey that found that 30% of Japanese people are interested in learning English in Second Life.

(The original Japanese article this is based on is at at japan.internet.com)

Obviously it’s nice to have some statistics that appear support the basic assumptions on which I founded Social Minds - that we can teach effectively in virtual worlds, that people will want to learn in them, that this model will be successful in Japan, and that this market will be very, very big indeed. And this would appear to fit in with what I’ve been finding myself: Japanese people are signing up for Second Life in large numbers, and looking for somewhere to learn.

Having said that, I’m a little bit skeptical of these numbers; I’d be surprised if 30% of Japanese people out there actually knew what Second Life was, let alone whether it would be the kind of environment they could learn in. I suspect that you’d have got a similar result if you’d asked them,

“Would you be interested in learning English in a new way that you haven’t tried before?”

As you can tell from looking at the bookshelf of pretty much any Japanese learner of English, students will try pretty much anything once if it promises a new approach.

But then the approach has to deliver.

The numbers that will really prove our case will be the recommend rates as students start to complete their first courses:

“Would you recommend this course to your friends?”

If we, Avatar English, Language Lab and others involved in virtual-world-based education start producing really high recommendation rates, we can be sure (if we ever doubted it) that this kind of 3-D immersive learning is here to stay.

Back when I was working on internet projects at the British Council in the 1990’s, an entrepreneur, building his first business while still in Harvard, stopped by to ask us about the Japanese education market. His core assumption was that enabled by the growth of broadband in Japan, he could hire teachers in Britain, where English speakers were cheap and plentiful, and provide a better service at lower cost than schools that were stuck in Japan, paying Japanese prices.

Since then, the technology followed the trajectory he expected - even if the economics of hiring teachers in the two countries didn’t.

Faced with permanently increasing internet connectivity and ever-faster computers, it’s tempting to assume that this trend will continue indefinitely: That geographical distance will become increasingly irrelevant in determining the quality of the environment you can build for your students. But it’s also worth looking at the limitations on connectivity, and what that might mean for how we’ll have to teach in years to come.

When you transmit data over the internet, it’s limited by two things: bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth measures how much data - how many 1s and 0s - a line can carry 1s and 0s it can carry in a given period of time. Latency measures the time it takes to get a single 1 or 0 from one end to the other.

Bandwidth is often referred to as “speed”, but this is misleading; Once you’ve eliminated bottlenecks, a car travelling at its top speed won’t get down a 10-lane highway any faster than a 2-lane one. We can go on increasing bandwidth until the cows come home; Just keep on laying more cables side-by-side, and bandwidth will increase accordingly.

But latency is a lot harder. Data in a fiber optic cable currently moves at something like 2/3 of the speed of light. Unless Einstein was very much mistaken, the speed of light is the fastest it can conceivably go.

There are other factors that cause latency too - things like the time that routers take to pass data from one portion of the network to another - but even with those included, we’re already typically shifting data at between 1/4 and 1/2 as fast as God is prepared to let us go, no matter how clever we get.

You can see the effect of latency in Second Life by firing up two copies of the client side-by-side. Turn your avatar, and it moves immediately in one window, but takes a second or two to turn in the second one. This is the time taken for the information about the avatar turning to get from your computer over the internet to Linden Lab’s servers, be processed and sent back over the internet to your computer again.

Working with Second Life today, network latency isn’t necessarily the biggest consideration. There are so many ways data can get slowed down getting from one person’s screen to the other - from Linden Lab’s overloaded servers to the time it takes for our computer’s graphics cards to draw the images on our screens - that network latency is the least of our concerns. But all these things are well below their theoretical limitations. As we keep building better computers, and building out wider information highways to eliminate localized bottlenecks, the things that we can’t fix will become more important.

If you’re building a next-generation distance-learning environment to use over next 3 to 5 years, and you want to run really effective distance-learning classes, with a really responsive, as-good-as-being-there feel, you really want your teachers, and your servers (Linden Labs won’t let you do this yet) to be local.

By “local”, I mean not more than around 10 light-milliseconds, or 3000 kilometers, away from the students.

Hot on the heels of John Edwards, Ron Paul and Jean-Marie Le Pen, Minshuto politician Suzuki Kan has staked out a claim to be the first Japanese politician in Second Life.

This must be aimed at getting real-world PR. And it’s working very well on that score.

But the in-world space appears to a fairly useless clone of a real-world office. Its basic message appears to be,

“Vote for me! I’ve got an office! With tables and chairs!”

It doesn’t have to be like this; Here are some of the things that, insane-Japanese-electoral-law-that-he’s-probably-already-breaking notwithstanding, political campaigns could be doing to leverage their Second Life spaces:

• Create legible displays related to your political campaigns. (Doh…)
• Track everyone who turns up and invite them to join a group. You can then advertise real-world events and online activism through in-world instant messages to the group. (Teleport here to receive instant-message spam from John Edwards.)
• Give away some kind of free merchandize - a hat, t-shirt or whatever - to help them advertise your cause in Second Life.
• Second Life makes it really easy to donate small amounts of money. Setup a donation box. It doesn’t matter if they only give you a few Linden $’s - once you’ve confirmed that they’re willing to donate, you can follow up and get more money out of them later.
• Create a space for people to chat to each other. (Look how the Ron Paul campaign does this.)
• Give visitors something actively useful to do to participate in something you’re campaigning for. The obvious thing would be to sign an online petition. You can then turn your petition signatures into more cutesy real-world PR. (”2000 Second-Life avatars demanded that the government fix the pension system…”)
• Have somebody there to talk to people who turn up, make them feel welcome and try to turn interested people into active volunteers for your campaign.
• Offer links from the virtual world back to your 2D-web resources - your website, your Mixi community, the place they sign up for your e-mail list, etc.
• Put a box on your website saying that there’s a volunteer online who can talk to you right now. This will give you a lot of the advantages of live chat systems, but with a greater sense of presence. You can have it only display when there’s somebody actually there, so you don’t need to staff your in-world location 24-7.

Virtual Worlds News has a story on a new Japanese virtual world called “Meet-Me”.

We’ll doubtless be hearing about plenty more attempts like this to create 3D social networking spaces without all that pesky user-generated content.

Interesting comments in the original Japanese article:

Second Lifeの場合、開発元の米Linden Labは土地を提供するだけで、建物やデジタルアイテムなどは原則、すべてユーザーが作っている。meet-me開発を担当するフロムソフトの神直利社長は「Second Lifeのような“オープンソース”は日本人には向いていない」と指摘。建物や空間をあらかじめ作っておくことでユーザーが何をしていいか迷わない作りにするほか、ゲーム内イベントやアトラクションもある程度作っておき、受け身のユーザーも飽きずに楽しめるようにする予定だ。

In the case of Second Life, where developer Linden Lab only provides land, virtually all buildings and digital objects are produced by the users. Kami (Jin?) Naotoshi, the president of developers From Software, said, “‘Open Source’ like Second Life is not suitable for Japanese people.” By creating buildings and space beforehand, they intend to make things in such a way that users will not be confused as to what to do. And by creating events and attractions inside the game, they aim to make it so that passive users will be able to enjoy it without getting bored.

Long-term Japan residents tend to be skeptical of Japanese cultural exceptionalism; We’re too used to hearing things about Japanese uniqueness that are either mistaken or self-servingly bogus. Still, there’s no denying that in the fields of both games and social networks, home-grown things have succeeded where foreign things have failed.

But the key barrier to adoption in Japan is not “open source” vs “closed source”.

The great Japanese web success story of the last few years, Mixi, is built entirely around open content. The leader in the mobile field, iMode, got that way by creating an open platform that anyone could work with.

Not knowing what to do when you arrive in Second Life isn’t a particularly Japanese phenomenon, and has a lot to do with the awfulness of the “orientation” experience you have to go through when you arrive; In fact, this is the one area in Second Life that isn’t user-created - and it’ll probably get a lot better when they open it up.

Adult content in SL is another question altogether, but I think you’d have a hard time arguing that there was - ahem - some kind of uniquely Japanese aversion to porn.

Right now, I think the real barrier to adoption for Second Life in Japan is quite simply language; The Japanese version has been coming soon for months, and you can’t start using the non-Japanese version without wading through a load of English.

Sooner or later, Japan will have an open, accessible 3D social networking platform, driven by user-built content; And if Linden Labs don’t provide it, someone else will.