AI 134 Linden Lab’s sponsoring MIT Labs to develop X-Reality ideas to blur the boundaries between virtual worlds and real worlds

Paradiso, a professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, is working to create what he calls X-Reality (Cross Reality), a system designed to bring virtual and real worlds into a practical sort of alignment.

With funding from Second Life parent company, Linden Lab, Paradiso aims to use sensors, displays and software to bring real-world data into virtual worlds and to integrate access to virtual worlds with real-world situations.

Later in November, Paradiso's team of seven Ph.D. students plans to switch on 45 PDA-sized devices mounted on the walls of the Media Lab's building. Each is equipped with an iPhone-like touch screen, a version of Second Life's software, wireless connections, cameras and a variety of audio, motion and infrared sensors.

According to Paradiso's plan, anyone in the building wearing a small electronic badge can walk up to one of the small screens and peer into a landscape in Second Life and communicate with users.

Second Life users will likewise use the screens to look into the real world through floating windows in the virtual world, watching passersby or even remotely sitting in on meetings.

AI 133 How fast will plastic surgery move towards cybernetic surgery? The USA military show glimpses of our future

The USA military could now be moving towards cyber surgery. This is a list of cyber surgery techniques that are being speculated about:

1. Growing back body parts, both internal organs and limbs

2. Regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding" - using molecular-sized particles that act as nano-scaffolding for the human cells to grow

3. Telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp (intrusive?)

4. Erase bad memories (whose the judge)

5. Devices that will translate one soldier’s thoughts into electrical signals that can be beamed to other soldiers, to help in stealth operations

Other experiments are using real solders to create ghost effects on the battlefield –these techniques are being tested using virtual worlds.

AI 132 Sony to launch their virtual world service called Home in December 2008

Sony intends to use its Playstation 3 console to launch its Virtual World service and is yet another example, like Apple, that will be based on a Closed System (refer to AI 131)

Jack Buser, Sony's Director for PlayStation Home, says we'll soon see a rapid expansion after the launch.

"We'll launch within open beta. That means two things," Buser explained.

"It will be available to all PlayStation users at no cost. But there will obviously be a certain percentage of people who want to stand out from the crowd and customize their avatar with certain items or have a premium space and they will have that option within the PlayStation Mall, but it is not required.

Second, we are calling it an open beta for a specific reason. Home will always be evolving. You will be seeing new stuff, including new technology. The platform will always be evolving and living and breathing."


"It's important to realize the scope of PlayStation Home. When you look around, it's just the icing on the cake," Buser said.

"The cake is that it's a development platform for third parties to develop content on. We want Home to scale rapidly, and we figured the best way to do that is to get third parties involved. After launch, you're going to see Home grow rapidly with new media, new content, and new experiences, coming quite rapidly. That's absolutely been the demand from the users."

AI 132 Artificial Intelligence Agents in 3d-Web and Virtual Worlds will be Closed Systems that will change the dynamics of the web and mobile

AI Agents that have conversations with humans will become the must have for 3d-web and Virtual Worlds. As the search engines cannot penetrate the ai agent conversation this barrier will change the dynamics of mobile and the web. As more and more interaction with ai agents occurs the more it will change the dynamics of advertising spend.

Any new technology that can profoundly change advertising spend will change the dynamics of the market as we know it today.

A Closed System strategy has been best executed by Apple with its iPod and iPhone linked into a seamless service that remains invisible to search engine giants like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.

But ai agents, like the technology from Decisionality, will enable everyone to build Closed Systems.

This change could happen faster than that most people realize.
ai agents that converse with humans will be the foundation for web 4.0 and web 5.0 (Please refer to AI 1) and their natural habitat of 3d websites, virtual worlds and mobile devices and will be underpinned by Cloud Computing (web 3.0).

AI 131 Linden Lab to create a wonderful first one hour experience for those new to its Second Life virtual world

Linden Lab (refer to AI 116/115/77/20) announced today that it had hired the interactive design agency Big Spaceship "to dramatically simplify the sign-up stage, ease users’ introduction into Second Life, and quickly connect people to relevant content and experiences in Second Life."

AI 130 AI Agents are being used to Interview Candidates

The vendor, HRMC, markets a solution called Acclaim that uses human-controlled artificial intelligence to interview job applicants.

There are several issues with traditional interviewing that include:

- the poor quality questions interviewers use when evaluating candidates

- the expense and lost productive time spent interviewing

- the need to have a complete resume before an initial screening interview has occurred

The approach HRMC scripts the ideal (not average) job qualifications and creates explicit proof points that must be verified by applicants. Applicants can respond to job listings by taking a telephone-based interactive interview over the telephone. An IVR (interactive voice response system) system asks the candidate very relevant questions. Responses are captured for future playback with a recruiter.

What distinguishes this approach are the following characteristics:

- The software asks a qualifying question (e.g., “Have you ever had to fire a poor performer?”)

- If the candidate responds ‘yes’, the artificial intelligence behind the software follows up with one or more behavioral and insightful questions (e.g., “How did you handle this and what would you do differently today?”)

- If the candidate responds ‘no’, the software skips to another line of questioning. If the experience this question relates to is critical to the execution of the job, the interview could be materially shortened and the applicant moved down the scoring list for applicants.

- The very best candidates move to the top of the follow-up list for a face-to-face interview.

This solution is definitely an improvement over prior methods. Recruiters are substantially more efficient as they can play back dozens of candidate responses in the time they would normally spend interviewing just one candidate. Second, the lost time and expense that companies would incur to conduct face-to-face interviews is substantially reduced. This is a good thing in a tough economy. And, the quality of insight that a company gains about the candidates is materially improved.

AI 129 Competition for Talking Avatars Benefits from More Venture Capital Funding

Here are some of the movers and shakers for talking avatars.

Fix8 is a Los Angeles company that animates your expressions, letting you communicate over video live via a personalized avatar. It has just raised $3 million in a first round of venture backing. The funding comes from Vickers Financial Group, a Singapore-based private equity firm. Fix8 had partnered with the Shanghai Media Group to offer something called “AuditionsTV,” where audiences can submit fix8 content for insertion into live or taped programming. Fix8 says it will soon launch a mobile edition.

Gizmoz, an Israel-based company that lets you create 3D avatars, has raised $6.5 million in a second round of venture funding. DoCoMo Capital — a subsidiary of NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest cell phone operator — led the round, which Gizmoz plans to use for expansion in Asia. ngi capital and previous investors Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital also participated. Gizmoz is also unveiling a new partnership with AOL, which will allow AOL Instant Messaging users to animate their chats with Gizmoz avatars. The company says it has already created animations to illustrate more than 50 trigger words that can be used in a chat, such as “blabla” and “brb”.


Big Stage Entertainment is a new generation digital media company enabling vivid personal projection in online activities. BigStage.com, currently in restricted beta, offers breakthrough technology allowing users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3-D avatar of themselves, called an @ctor, into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, e-mails, social networks and more – instantly. (Refer to AI 56). It has raised $2.9m funding.


Meez, is another site that lets you play around with customized avatars so that you can escape your real world and dabble in fantasy. It was launched by Sean Ryan, who previously ran the music site, Rhapsody. But Meez wants to let you take your avatar wherever you go, including eventually on cell-phones. It is owned by Donnerwood Media, of San Francisco, which has received $4.3 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, Transcosmos Partners, Allen & Co. and other individual investors.


IMVU, is another company that lets you customize your avatar and go off and chat with people in virtual bars and coffeehouses. Ries, 28, co-founder of IMVU.com, an avatar-creation and instant-messaging service that's lined up more than $8 million in venture funding.


Union Square Ventures invested in Oddcast, which is a leading provider of flash based avatar services to the marketing community and small and medium businesses. Oddcast uses SitePal which is a speaking avatar platform to deploy "virtual employees" on websites that can welcome visitors, guide them around the site and answer questions.The use of SitePal on commercial websites has been controversial because may visitors report finding them annoying. Some research has shown that they can increase sales in comparison to using static photographs.

AI 128 A very Dexterous Robotic Hand

The Shadow Dexterous Robotic Hand, is a very advanced robotic hand in the world and the only which has all twenty-four degrees of movement of the human hand.

Each robotic hand sells for around £100,000 and can be used "anywhere you need human dexterity, but can't put a human being".

Robitic hands can be applied in areas such as bomb disposal, the handling of hazardous.

Maybe this robotic hand should be connected to a robotic arm! (Please refer to AI 127)

AI 127 Small and long robotic arms find commercial applications

First a robotic hand (refer to AI 126) and now a robotic arm. This one comes from
OC Robotics and delivers 1/2" diameter snake-arm robot.

The arm is the smallest snake-arm robot to date and uncoils out of a briefcase-sized box where it is stowed.

The arm is 24" (610mm) in length, with longer arms under development, and was designed for the US Department of Defense who needed a way of inspecting and working inside confined or cluttered spaces - a capability not previously available.

Snake-arm robots are flexible robotic arms that don't have 'elbows', so they can 'follow their nose' into confined spaces.

Snake-arm robots are flexible and compliant, like endoscopes, but they are fully controllable like a robot and can be precisely positioned.

With a snake-arm robot the operator needs only to drive the tip of the arm around obstacles using a tip-mounted camera and the software will control the rest of the arm to follow where the tip has been.

AI 126 The Robotic FreeHand wins a Prestigious Award

FreeHand®, Prosurgics’ is the next generation robotic camera holder and has been selected by the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons (SLS) as their Innovations of the Year, 2008.

The FreeHand laparoscopic camera holder is the first of Prosurgics’ new generation of affordable robotics, and is designed to bring the benefits of crystal-clear visualization and direct camera control within the reach of surgeons in every laparoscopic surgical unit.

BillPerry, President of Prosurgics’ newly formed US organisation, is delighted that the benefits of FreeHand have been recognised by the SLS:

“FreeHand is an important innovation because it has been designed to solve problems experienced by every laparoscopic surgeon, such as poor visualisation and variable levels of surgical procedure assistance. FreeHand’s numerous benefits and its affordability explain why we expect FreeHand to become an everyday necessity in operating rooms across the world in the coming year .”