A senior executive at Electronic Arts (EA), the company which owns the Sims franchise, said that in light of the popularity of virtual worlds and other computer games which allow players to compete with each other via the web, the Sims may soon become a multi-player game.

It has to be a joke, right? Nancy Smith, if anyone, should be familiar with the now-euthanized EA-Land, nee The Sims Online, which was, in fact, a MMO experience based on The Sims.

But I’m thinking maybe the reporter missed the story here. I’m thinking that the point is not to turn the Sims 2 or 3 into another MMO, but to take a page from Facebook and Spore and make the Sims more of a massively single player experience, but with extensive social elements.

In other words, the doll houses are not all in the same shared town — you might visit a friend’s house, but don’t expect shared public spaces, since that’s most likely where TSO went wrong. The point is to put our creations in a shared, explorable experience (not necessarily one big space), but leave the personal drama to someone else.

Which only goes to bolster my "anti-social" theory of on-line fun. Yes, some people want to discover strangers randomly. But given how badly strangers can and do act in on-line spaces, ranging from usenet to Second Life, I think my theory works pretty well for the other 90% of us who prefer to meet new friends more through mutual interests, activities, and introductions, than via common coordinates and/or curious costumes.

Verizon Communications Inc, Google Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Ericsson, are believed to have a joined a group calling itself the Allied Security Trust.

The companies will pay roughly $250,000 to join the group and will each put about $5 million into escrow with the organization to go toward future patent purchases, the paper said.

So their plan seems to be for the Alliance to buy patents, license them back to individual member companies, and then sell the patents again. It’s a form of collective self-defense, but I’m not convinced it’s the wisest possible move, or one that will be free of public (government) scrutiny.

Think about this. A patent that had been neutered for use against cash-rich companies should be worth less after the deal is done. After all, some potential buyers of those patents would want them specifically to extract payment from those same companies, and those doors would now be closed. So the Alliance might seem to lose money over time, eating up those $5M escrow accounts fairly quickly.

On the other hand, if the patent is worth more after the deal, as I suspect is the intent, esp. for the Alliance to be self-sustaining, then that’s a reasonable indicator that the patent was probably weak in the first place. The very act of licensing gives it validity and added value.

In other words, for the Alliance to be successful in its current form, it needs to perform part of the public disservice of patent trolls. It’s an escalation in the patent war, not a deterrent or détente. And that in and of itself could drive the prices up, not down, for patents it seeks to acquire. And a speculative market for patents is born.

It seems to me that in the "circling the wagons" metaphor, the settlers are stuck playing defense, and their defense, for the most part, does no one any good. Wouldn’t it better for everyone if they could actually kill the marauding patent trolls outright?

Whether this consortium, which includes Google, is ultimately seen as "good" or "evil" largely depends on that question, and how others feel about being let in or kept out of the Alliance, which is priced a bit beyond what any small company could afford.

All fixes and upgrades are now complete, and the universes are separate once again.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled technology.

The other major announcement, the magnitude of which probably won’t sink in for a year or so, is the agreement with ESRI to release ("from jail," as MTJ puts it), most of the world’s ESRI-based GIS information, such that Google Eartth and Virtual Earth can show it and, perhaps more fundamentally, search and index it. All it takes is the latest ESRI update and a single click of a checkbox to let the information be free. This is where the rubber meets the road (or the mashup meets the world beyond the metaverse).

I was pleased to hear about his pitch to US governors and counties to release the info — the abstract fear of terrorism is insignificant compared to all the good that can and will be done with this information. Not to get political, but I suggest you all add "Release the GIS" to your regular communication with your elected officials.

For anyone who read the "Second Life on iPhone" stories or saw some demo video, the key take away is that the 3D graphics are not being rendered on the iPhone itself. It’s being rendered on a beefy server somewhere else and delivered essentially as compressed video.

Now, this is not the simplest thing in the world to pull off, by the way. It’s definitely worth some kudos to anyone who can minimize the extra round-trip latency for your controls, improve the UI, encode that video stream cheaply and cleanly, and work out a server co-location solution that doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg.

But there’s the rub. If you were to put a single 1U quad core rendering server in a managed hosting facility (assuming they even support your choice of hardware), it could easily cost you from $1-$5 per hour, every hour. You can probably only serve one rendered video stream per server at any given time without some serious R&D expenditures and some really hot hardware. So you need at least as many servers as your peak customer load, which could be thousands or many thousands if you’re going to make a business out of it, and even cheap hosting might still require you to recoup $1 per server hour. How many people are willing to pay an extra $1 per hour to play a laggy(-er) compressed version of Second Life or Worlds or Warcraft on their iPhone? Any guesses?

Keep in mind, it’s not like serving web pages, where a single server can handle thousands of simultaneous requests because the payloads are so small and relatively infrequent. It’s more like YouTube’s hosting problem, except not even YouTube has to continuously encode each video frame they send you. They do that once, ahead of time, and just serve the files up as fast as they can — they’re probably limited by bandwidth, not CPU.

This approach is not entirely new. SGI worked on remote rendering and even got a patent based on work of former colleague of mine (who is now at Google). People always want more rendering power than they can currently get on their local machine and using big iron is the only way to cheat Moore’s Law (barring time travel, that is). And remote rendering is common in the hotel business, if you’ve ever seen those video games you can play on your in-room TV.

What I’d personally like to see is something really new. Let’s get that grid computing farm that can speed up key parts of our 3D rendering pipelines. I mean, why send finished compressed video at all? The mobile client can render polygons, flattened to 2D if need be. It just can’t too many things at once, so choose carefully.

It may in fact be more efficient to send compressed polygons, pre-transformed, occlusion culled, and lit, and treat the local graphics hardware as a cool form of device independent 3D video decompressor. Hell, that would even work in Flash. And the benefit is that it could run on generic CPUs. The dedicated 3D hardware is only essential when you’re doing the full render.

While we’re at it, let’s offload the shared physics calculations (which is what SL mainly represents) to the servers. Let’s offload the animation. Let’s offload whatever individual bits and pieces of the mobile app are slowing us down.

But whatever solution we try, let’s also make it future-proof. A Flash client that offloads geometry transformation & lighting to a server would be cool and unique today, but what about in a year or two, when Flash is fully hardware accelerated?

Remember, the same hardware we put in those servers today will be available on mobile phones in 2-4 years. In fact, some of the best "mobile 3D" solutions companies are simply riding that curve, doing their software R&D now so when the phones are ready and popular, they won’t even need the servers.

But what would happen if Intel or AMD or NVidia decided to do the "grid" thing with enough GPUs? Would they even think about cannibalizing their consumer products near-term, or might there be a way for such a service to help sell even more cheap (to them) silicon, and to more devices than they reach today?

Well, Intel seems to be partnering with Comverse on the mobile Second Life demo, so maybe they’re already heading that way.

Frank Taylor has the news about Google’s Panoramio geo/photo/sharing site adding a more "Photosynth-like" feature that lets you navigate from 2D photo to 2D photo based on their computed areas of overlap. In essence, the software seems to figure out if/where two photos overlap, then computes the viewing transformation to go from each photo to the every overlapped match, and then does ye old cross-fade warp (a simple trapezoidal stretch) when you select some source and destination combo to navigate around.

The effect is somewhat similar to Photosynth, in that you can navigate a well-covered real-world scene based purely on existing 2D photos. The downside is very similar to Photosynth — the transformations are still lacking something that’s hard to pin down. Each photo is still 2D, and the warping or flying around isn’t enough to preserve the implied 3D perspective you get when you view a photo from the exact angle it was taken. Move a little to either side and the 3D effect diminishes, while disorientation increases rapidly. Both apps try to minimize the downside by fading a picture out when it gets too far off base, leaving lots of missing information temporally and spatially.

Now, I’m deeply impressed with Photosynth’s ability to find those per-pixel correspondences among so many photos so quickly, and now for Panoramio as well. That’s the real heart of each technology. But both apps will need to make a big leap in UI before they’ll be really useful.

It ultimately needs to be as simple as Google Earth’s UI — grab the panoramic-composite-of-many-photos and click or slide the view to where you want to go, the way you can grab the earth or fly from place to place.

Here’s an example of how it works well (IMO) for a pre-defined video sequence. It’s not exactly the same hard problem to solve, but it shows some of the cool new (invisible, intuitive) UI I’m getting at.

So the real-time viewing transformations ultimately need to choose and blend the most relevant parts of each overlapping 2D image, preserving correct depth at each pixel, compensating for irksome lens deformations and divergent fields of view, seamlessly sliding the new composite 3D view around.

Neither product is quite there yet — the 3D point cloud of Photosynth isn’t really working for me either. Both apps frankly make me a little queasy to use because the "world" is constantly warping or fading in unnatural ways.

The problem is that this is very hard to do right. Hell if I know how to solve those per-pixel transforms cheaply, i.e., in real-time. It’d take someone much smarter than me. However, if someone can show how to solve the problem at all — and I’ve seen some academic work on this, making 2D photos pop out in 3D with some serious pre-computation — then the results can be pre-digested in such a way as to make them navigable in real-time. That part is something I’d at least know how to do.

Still, the best results, IMO, will be when the many 2D photos can be easily "splatted" (projected, dissected, virtualized) onto and above the 3D landscape & buildings of Google’s Earth or Microsoft’s VE. The goal should be to make it all viewable from many more angles than originally captured, not just to move around a set of limited 2D photos in pseudo-3D. Once you can do that, moving around the 2D images in 3D becomes a much more natural activity. In fact, do this well enough, and you’d never even notice that the photos are only 2D to begin with.

Sorry if that was all a bit too technical today. My head is full of computer science. Ask questions in the comments and I can try to clarify.

I’ll post more when I get a second, but it’ll take some time to digest.

For what it’s worth, my present take on the Singularity is a cross of Vinge’s and something Stoss said at a WorldCon party (or elsewhere), and Kurzweil, despite some inherent contradictions:

1. The future beyond a singularity is fundamentally unknowable. That’s the whole point. If we can accurately describe what’s past a so-called singularity, then it’s just your basic run-of-the-mill evolution, revolution or "disruptive" sea-change, which happen all the time.

2. People are good at extrapolating linearly, not exponentially. We can predict a few years out, but after that, reality diverges wildly from our naturally limited mental models.

3. We’ve already gone through multiple "singularities" throughout history, though perhaps increasing in frequency. Singularities are never the end of anything, but a new platform on which to complain about our current ways of life and ponder the color of the pasture on the far side of the next singularity.

Before their introduction, could people have predicted how the world would change with Writing? Or Computers? Or Corporations? Could they have even predicted the invention itself? If not, then these may also be singularities, points in history that we can only understand by looking back, not forward, like the approaching event horizon of a black hole.

That is not to say that some visionaries don’t imagine a world past that event horizon or see the event coming. But it’s all speculation, cautionary or wishful fiction at best.

Even the inventor of the mechanical computer, beyond genius for his day, could not have predicted word processors, virtual reality, AI, or even the CAD software that would have unquestionably helped design his mechanical computer.

One could argue that the One True Singularity will occur only when we (our heirs or errs) become smart enough to see through to the future beyond, i.e., the real Singularity is the last Singularity we will ever know.

Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world. Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay. Changizi now says it’s our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd. His research on this topic is detailed in the May/June issue of the journal Cognitive Science.

It makes perfect sense for those of us who’ve done work compensating for lag in networked 3D worlds. To counter the lag, the client usually predicts the motion of key objects a small way into the future. Those predictions can be wrong, in which case you have to correct or suffer the consequences. Even in video compression codecs, we exploit these properties to reduce file size.

In our visual system, those consequences may be the misperception of relative size of objects or of motion in perfectly static images. In a virtual world, it could be an avatar being in the wrong place or popping. In video codecs, guessing wrong can be more easily corrected during encoding, but at the cost of more bits to store the same information .

But it’s amazingly cool, assuming it’s true, that our visual systems can predict the future position of every "pixel" we see and do it well enough that we rarely if ever notice. That may indeed be an important cue for machine vision systems to adopt — predict and notice when the algorithmic prediction is wrong.

Of course, as some people will point out, we’re not actually "seeing" the future. It’s only our own image of what is likely to happen next, which can be wrong (in the case of these illusions). But it’s equally true to say that we don’t actually "see" the present either — only our internally processed and highly synthetic memory of our environment, which in some ways, can be far more incorrect than any low-level extrapolation.

Well, it had to happen sometime, but this seems to be a first. The town of North Oaks, MN, has completely excised itself from Google’s commercial panopticon, at least at the street level. I’ve argued before that Street View can and should remove people, cars, and other transient objects, not only to protect privacy, but to permit more sophisticated use of the data beyond the basic "snapshot in time."

But North Oaks didn’t stop at cars and people. They didn’t even want their streets in Street View.

Like Barbara Streisand, they apparently don’t want their digs visible to outsiders. Someone might use that information to gawk at their greatness, which would be embarrassing, if not outright dangerous, when outsiders so covet what these fine folks have worked so hard to establish and keep away from them…

But unlike Streisand, North Oaks can actually do something about it — their roads are considered "privately owned" and their posted "No Trespassing" signs prohibit people from driving through (no gate, mind you) to take photographs.

The town, of course, can’t do anything about the aerial and satellite views. They haven’t privatized the airspace above the town, at least not yet.

But my questions is this: lots of towns and cities are incorporated, and that corporation technically owns the roads. What’s to stop any "public" entity from ruling that their streets are "private" and therefore off-limits, at least to non-tax-payers?

Some towns and cities have already tried to ban public photography (for security and/or copyright reasons, the latter of which invariably translates to the profit motive). Why wouldn’t all of the most elite and effete communities wish to bolster their internal self-image by removing themselves from public view, like Brigadoon, but under their own ultimate control?

Non-existence, oddly enough, is the ultimate status symbol.

Of course, someone might do well to inform this town that, like those mysterious and blatant zones of pixelation in Google Earth and Maps we keep talking about, it’s the missing information that draws the most scrutiny.

What are they hiding, we wonder? Why are so many stories being written about the mysteries of North Oaks — the town that wasn’t there?

Much better to hide out in plain sight, I believe. Or, if you really want to keep people out, then put up a friggin gate, and a guard, and pay the actual market price for your insulation from the rest of society.

Here’s the thing — a plugin is just a DLL. There are some clever ways it can detect where it’s running (the API key for one). But I imagine you could now write a compiled application that simply pretended to be a browser, or you could embed the built-in IE Browser widget in a .Net Forms app. Calling the Google API functions via COM would make it simple to control, not via Javascript in this case, but actual compiled C++ if you wished.

You could load your 3D objects via Collada/KML, make them move via the API, and even see them interact with each other, if you maintain game state in your own code. But beyond that, it gets a little tricky. The cute Milk Truck example has my truck disappear or flicker when I jump high enough — this is most likely due to a near clipping plane being set without considering the dynamic object so close to the viewer. Expect lots of those sorts of issues to work around, as best you can.

But the one 3D mashup people may really clamor for is famed Second Earth or Google Earth meets Second Life mashup, as previously discussed. I think it would be much easier now, at least at the basic level.

Here’s the general outline:

Wrap the new GE DLL in your own pseudo-browser as above (preferably using a compiled language like C++). Combine that with the now-open SL client code, sitting "outside" and running the show. Intercept the calls in the SL client code that create objects. Add some export code such that these calls now save the geometry, prims and avatars for the most part, as Collada. Have GE re-load those into the world (preferably asynchronously).

It would be great if there was a more direct path to get gobs of 3D user data into GE, not yet from what I saw. You’d also intercept the regular SL spatial network updates from the server for objects and avatars and turn those into positional updates in GE. Better yet if you can grab the final (post-smoothed, extrapolated) positions, since you don’t want to see the latency, do you now?

Trickier would be handling the animation of avatar face, skin and joints, since it requires real-time bones and morph support to exist in GE, which I’m sure isn’t exposed. You’d be left with loading a replacement avatar geometry file every frame, which will absolutely be slow. You’d probably settle for avatars that can only move, but not animate.

In fact, the whole thing would be too slow for my tastes, but it’d most likely work as a proof of concept, or at least a cool demo.

I give it a month or two before someone shows a working prototype. Just putting a dozen or so avatars in the world this way would be pretty simple. But don’t try a thousand or more unless you’re a glutton for punishment.