Arcade Exchange Update

Revision 2.95

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Marketplace: http://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/22206

What’s New

AES (Audio Engine System)

When we first built the arcade series, we weren’t entirely knowledgeable about scripting in the high-end. Of course, there was the llPlaySound command to handle short clips, but when you’re dealing with arcade machines that have audio loops measured in minutes, even for the attract modes, you can see how this falls short as a solution. Stringing together the audio commands with llSleep in between only goes so far, and when you begin extending the amount of files needed in that loop, the rest of the menu system begins to stall while it waits for the audio and sleep commands to complete.

This has been an ongoing issue for the life of the Series III Arcade Exchange, but we’re proud to announce that as of Revision 2.95, it is no longer a problem.

We’ve re-written the audio engine system (AES) to be more dynamic, pre-load items in advance, and handle hundreds of audio clips in a loop without interfering with the main script.

What his means for you: The menu system is now responsive, even when playing the audio loop, as the AES has been separated into its own script and handler to multi-task.

As a result of the AES upgrade, your arcade machines are now able to loop many minutes of audio when toggled – in many cases, an entire run through the game itself.

That being said, please keep in mind that the pre-loader is not an indication of actual time to pre-load but merely an estimation. The actual time to pre-load and play those clips is entirely dependent on your connection speed and other various factors such as sim lag and Second Life itself. You may not hear the entire loop the first time through because of this, but we’re pretty certain the second time through you will.

Support Call Decal

On the back of every arcade machine, there is now an Andromeda Games Support Decal (Upper Right Corner). Because your arcade machines are under “Second Lifetime” Warranty, you can always trade-up to the latest revisions or have broken machines fixed for free. However, it hasn’t always been clear who to contact or get in touch with to handle this. Sure, we put that warranty information into your Instructions card that is included, but we also know that customers aren’t always interested in reading.

As a result, we’ve put the support call decal on the back of every machine, and made it an active call sticker. Which is to say, if you click on them, it’ll give you the warranty information, and contact for support. It’ll also page me (Aeonix Aeon) in-world and let me know who is requesting support and what machine you’ve invoked it on.

We don’t think it gets any easier than this, really.

Various Updates

There have been some amount of various issues (minor) which have gone unfixed in the past on our arcade machines. While not all game-breaking, they did warrant another look during this update and a correction. TRON, for example, had a minor alignment issue with the side panels which left a small gap. The Glow was set way too high, and so on. It is also currently one of two arcade machines that do not have an animated screen (Space Invaders being the other). With this machine there are some technical limitations in-world which we haven’t quite sorted out yet – the screen is not uniform and due to the complexity involved with the build (geometry and faces) it isn’t feasible to animate the screen as of yet. We’re still looking into it.

Fix-It Felix Jr has had the animation set for the screen re-done with better quality, and the audio is now much better without the lag. However, this game is only available in the Arcade Exchange Mega-Pack as a bonus.

Joust had the same panel alignment issue as TRON, and so it was also corrected in this update.

Tetris as of 2.91 and earlier is now broken – the game itself no longer works. The 2.95 update corrects this.

Instruction Card

The instruction cards on all of our Arcade Exchange have been entirely redone for legibility and to include new information. This includes a better explanation of your warranty so you know what is and is not covered. I’ve made the card more unified with ASCII headers and such, so now it should be quite easy to discern all the main topics as you scroll through. The same has been done to the card for “How to fix Flash for Second Life”.

Marketplace Availability

During the long tenure of the Series III Arcade Exchange, our customers will have noticed that the original premise of the name meant that you could purchase only the Polybius arcade machine on Marketplace and then trade it in-world for the one you really wanted. While available in-world via our vendor boards at certain locations, we didn’t make them available on Marketplace directly.

That is until recently.

There are many pros and cons to doing this, and most importantly is that being a near perfect replica of the original arcade machines in real life poses a bit of a problem. Many hours of debate and discussion have happened over the years about this very issue – IP Infringement.

While we absolutely will not contest that our arcade machines are IP Infringing, there is a deeper explanation about why they should be left on Marketplace. If you read below, we’ll get into those details.

Marketing

One of the other things you may have noticed as of recently is that the ad-copy and marketing for our products has been updated to be more uniform and professional.

Having a real life marketing background helps in this case, in that I used to work for Pulse Point Media as a VP of Operations.

Now, just as a reminder, when I use “we” and “I” in these posts, it’s a matter of who in AMG I’m talking about. I refers to me (Will Burns, the founder) and We refers to the rest of the team involved with the products (such as RobsterRawb Jaxxon, Jon Dragoone, et al) inclusive.

When writing these blogs, I’m writing them on my own and so it’s always coming from “me” as a representation of the group interchangeably. Just wanted to clear that up in case you were wondering.

In any event, as I have had years of marketing experience, I decided to go ahead and apply that to our forward facing image by creating proper ad-copy for our arcade machines. A unified look and feel so to speak. It is purposefully reminiscent of an Atari logo in a subtle fashion.

I think it’s something you don’t normally see with a lot of items on Marketplace or in-world. Of course, the bigger brands do this properly, but that’s the difference between the big kids and inexperienced. Doubly so for the listings involving Arcade Machines on Marketplace – but we’ll get to that below.

The ad-copy is mirrored on our boxes now, and the look/feel is also in our magazine advertisements (as you see above at the beginning of the post). We regularly advertise in both Attention! Magazine and Playdolls as a two page spread. It is clean, gets attention, and gets to the point with a visual and short, witty slogan.

We’ll be using this format going forward.

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Backstory

In the course of the Series III Arcade Exchange, we’ve undergone quite a lot of updates and revisions. Originally conceived in 2010 before Second Life had mesh ability, it was a major overhaul when we started updating them all in higher quality mesh.

Back then, and even today, we spent quite a lot of time sourcing our materials and pouring over reference photos for the arcade machines in real life. There was and still remains a lot of points to why we would go to such painstaking trouble with these builds for what amounts to a virtual product with a limited audience.

VIPER Licensing

One of the biggest issues with doing something like this is the obvious elephant in the room: IP Infringement. In the modern age, it is considered the scourge of IP Holders, and takes up quite a lot of time attempting in vain to police their Intellectual Property online.

The standard tools for this give those IP Holders the legal precedent to DMCA or issue a Cease and Desist order. On Youtube, we see this as “Copyright Strike” where a claim is filed against a video.

But does this really solve the problem? It’s a never-ending battle that is both costly and time consuming, with little result. You win battles but arguably are losing the war.

In the example of the fan created game AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), it was a brilliant game made by fans out of the love of the game. In my opinion, it absolutely did justice to the franchise and IP. However, it still remains that they did not have permission from Nintendo to use that IP and so Nintendo issued a DMCA to take it down.

But here is where it gets tricky.

The tools of DMCA and C&D are not effective in the bigger picture. If anything, it is akin to cutting the head off of a Hydra and being surprised when it grows back a thousand heads. What DMCA and C&D invoke in the modern age is known as the Streisand Effect – which is to say the thing you want to get rid of instead draws more attention and becomes more available as a result.

In the case of AM2R, this was true. Yes, the fans who made it took it down and complied with the DMCA, but those who had already downloaded it simply mirrored the files all over the world and on BitTorrent.

If anything, AM2R ended up with far more visibility in the media and higher accessibility as a result of the DMCA from Nintendo. In short, it had the opposite effect they wanted. Their strategy backfired spectacularly.

Back in 2013, I wrote a chapter in a college textbook whereby I outlined the solution to this miserable state of affairs: VIPER.

In the beginning, I outlined that IP Holders rarely (if ever) have a clear avenue to pursue in the instance of user generated media. For instance, most companies have a clear protocol to handle either a Producer of content or a Consumer of content, whereby a producer is seen as a large media firm that can pay a large licensing fee up front and a consumer is just the person who is expected to buy such items or be exposed to what the producer has created.

But what about the prosumer culture? The user-generated media made by the consumers as non-professional producers?

This is where we get into the grey area of legality and approach as we look at spaces like Second Life. Yes, those companies have every right to issue DMCA notices to take content down – but is it effective? In this case, the answer is absolutely not. If anything, it only exacerbates the problem as we see with AM2R.

You take one down and twenty more pop up to take its place.

So the premise of VIPER is to be an effective tool for IP Management in a user-generated content environment. Something that Second Life is sorely lacking, and companies in the real world do not currently subscribe to, which is exactly why we see this Streisand Effect continually playing out despite their best efforts.

VIPER is an acronym for: Virtual Intellectual Property Engagement and Recourse. The premise is simple: to manage IP on the prosumer level effectively and without the content explosion back-fire otherwise seen with typical DMCA approaches.

In the case of the Arcade Exchange, the premise is quite clear – to make available the best options for those media examples as a poison pill approach to IP Infringement. If high quality versions exist, it makes the countless low quality knock-offs irrelevant and so they will slowly cull themselves. By leaving the best options to fill a need in a space whereby a company would otherwise not be engaged, it has far more positive impact in regard to IP Management and Protection than had the same companies sent an army of lawyers to issue a paper storm of DMCA notices.

In short: Absolutely, these arcade machines are IP Infringing. By no means should DMCA take-down be implemented as a recourse. They are there to actually cull the plethora of existing knock-offs that are low quality, and in effect have the actual intended outcome that the constant DMCA take-downs and account bans have tried to accomplish all these years.

VIPER is a mindset that follows one of the biggest rules in user generated worlds; Whether that is the hobbyist at home making a fan game, somebody making creative content on YouTube (Adult Wednesday Addams for example), or virtual worlds like Second Life: Work within the system.

In this case, “the system” means not the legal recourse you’ve been given (DMCA etc) but the mentality of the community by which the IP is existing.

In order to understand VIPER licensing mentality, you as a company must ask a few questions to qualify the action:

• 1. Will a DMCA result in the desired outcome, or will it backfire and cause a Streisand Effect?

• 2. If our end-goal is to reduce or eliminate the IP Infringement, protecting our intellectual property, then would engagement in the system to fill the supply where there is clearly a demand actually achieve this end?

• 3. What is the least involved manner by which we can accomplish #2 on this list?

• 4. Does it make sense to engage and ask for a marginal licensing fee on each sale of said item in a virtual world (percentage) or is it enough to sanction the item as a preventative measure to cull the majority?

The answer in this case is obviously to identify the best version of the IP Infringing material and sanction it. However, one must also be willing to leave the other low quality versions alone to their fate as a result. This is how to eliminate the Streisand Effect in virtual worlds and elsewhere while actually accomplishing your end goal.

That doesn’t mean as a company that you should be saying “This is an official product” of our company. What you’re really saying here is: This is a licensed product in a virtual sense, we acknowledge it, and it represents the IP and brand in a positive light. It is the responsibility of the content creator to handle the sales, the marketing, the updates, and customer interaction.

In the event that said virtual item no longer represents the IP in a positive light, then you have a dialog with the end-user about how this can be corrected (reasonably). Again, we’re not going into things DMCA-Akimbo. After all, you’re running the risk of punching a hole in the dam of IP infringement and letting the torrent of knock-offs take its place.

We clearly don’t want this to happen.

This is also entails that companies (internally) set up some sort of “Best Practices” guidelines exactly for this purpose, and to convey to the end-users (consumers) that should they wish to use the IP in this manner, these are the rules they must follow.

Of course, in this document, the point is to be fair about it. So don’t go into it with massively unbalanced disincentive. In example – saying “Sure, you can make and sell this in a virtual world, but we expect a 90% cut on money earned.” or “Sure you can make this but you cannot sell it in the virtual space or make any money on it.”

Let’s be real here. If your goal is to cull the IP Infringement and protect your IP, it does you no justice to create a hostile environment whereby it makes more sense to just ignore you and do as they please, albeit in a less visible manner.

See also: BitTorrent and AM2R.

You absolutely don’t want to drive those virtual goods underground, because then you’re really screwed. So be fair about it, make some light concessions, and be willing to work within the system and with the end-users themselves to achieve these means.

The perceptual cost of those virtual goods sales versus the amount of money you’ve been burning trying to DMCA everything is like night and day. The perceptual loss of revenue from said virtual goods is negligible by comparison and is far less than what you would spend to police it otherwise.

So instead of approaching as a loss, approach it as a quadruple positive in your favor -

1. The loss of perceptual revenue from said virtual item costs you far less than trying to police it via typical DMCA means. Instead of counting it as a loss, count is as time and money saved. You could be paying lawyers ten or one hundred times as much to have zero impact on the state of affairs versus the negligible loss of the virtual item for sale having a massive impact on the state of affairs. It just makes perfect business sense.

2. Because the items in question are high quality, consider them as a marketing gain instead of a lost sale or cost. You’re not paying for that marketing, nor the time it takes to create the items and maintain them. You’re not paying the person responsible for making it either. You, as a company already know how costly this normally would be if you hired a marketing firm to develop this sort of content and maintain it. Again, this is advantageous to you.

3. High quality items in a virtual world represent your brand in a positive light and are the antithesis to low quality knock-offs, thereby killing two birds with one stone that costs far less than the DMCA nuclear bombs you’ve been using that apparently couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. It is actually effective, and that’s what you’ve been trying to accomplish all this time – isn’t it?

4. Instituting negative penalties for IP Infringement when it is presented in he best possible light to do justice to the brand is actually counter-productive in the most exponential fashion possible.

Allow me to expound a bit on the last point further.

Normally, yes the companies can issue a DMCA to Linden Lab concerning said items. Linden Lab would, therefore be legally required to comply, and as a result likely issue a temporary or permanent ban on my account in the process. This, again, is typical. It happens the same way with YouTube, and elsewhere.

But here’s the fallout from those actions:

1. The highest quality items would no longer be available, thus creating a void to fill in the market.

2. That void would quickly be filled not with one but likely dozens of IP infringing materials to take the place of the dam you just broke.

3. What is eliminated on the open marketplace will thrive in-world under the radar, making it impossible for the same IP Holders to find.

4. You’ve punished one creator for doing the one thing you actually needed done, and undone the positive outcome of those actions while vastly multiplying the negative outcomes. You’re back to square one.

It wouldn’t make any logical or reasonable sense to therefore issue a DMCA or Account Ban. There’s literally no positive outcome to doing so, and it amounts to dropping the bomb on your own foot making matters worse instead of better.

That doesn’t mean companies will listen to reason.

VIPER is simply an appeal to reason, and to accomplish the IP Management companies so desperately need in a world that is exploding with content. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

What the Arcade Exchange represents is a viable means to accomplish exactly what the owners of the IP have been trying to do all along and have been failing at.

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High Quality vs Low Quality

When it comes to virtual worlds, or any other media, there is no shortage of high quality examples. Just the same, for every high quality example there are ten times as many low quality “cheap” knockoffs.

You can very well buy a Galaga arcade machine on Marketplace for 99L$ and you’d get something like what you see to the left from Brazilian Surf.

Yes, it works (if you’re lucky)… but that’s about it. What you’re getting is a generic cabinet haphazardly retextured with a media prim glued to the screen.

It doesn’t have the game history, it doesn’t have an extended audio loop, it doesn’t have an animated screen, and more importantly it looks nothing like the actual arcade machine. We’re not even certain it has any sort of warranty or support if it breaks. This is the standard fare when it comes to arcade machines in Second Life.

Then you have the Arcade Exchange version of Galaga to the right which, as you immediately notice is of much higher quality and detail. It has far more features than the cheaper knock-offs, and is jam-packed with attention to detail.

If you were Midway (or whomever owns the rights to Galaga), which one of these would you want representing your IP?

Only one of them actually does it justice, and that is the entire point of VIPER.

We’ve supported the Arcade Exchange since 2012, with bug fixes, updates, and revisions. As of Revision 2.95, there is a service call sticker on the back of them all to quickly and easily contact us if ever your machines break or you would like to trade-up for an update.

So long as you own one of our arcade machines, we will support them and continue working to make them better.

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Brand Human

Identity in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing

 

Something we need to be aware of is that the bigger issue of social media overall is simply that when given the ability to freely share our lives, we are quick to share our lives. That may sound like an oxymoron or counter-intuitive as a statement, but it means in the digital world we have a bad habit of over sharing.

Remember, a social graph is literally designed to infer who you are at all levels through your interactions, preferences and relationships. The more you share, the more you should care - since companies like Google, Facebook, etc wind up knowing more about you than you may ever realize, and more than you may even know about yourself through relational inference.

 

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Digital Identification

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

If you've never heard about this initiative, you really should read up on it (link below). Essentially it's a government initiative to further online identity and secure interaction through participation of third party private sector efforts.

In short, think of it like a manner by which to identify a person online reasonably. The solution to make that happen is a trusted social graph which strengthens as you use it, and eventually can become verified by the third party (or collaborating third parties), creating a trusted identity online for situations when an elevated level of trust is required.

The best way to accomplish that, then, is to implement systems like Google Plus, Facebook, etc wherein your "social graph" creates that unique online identity and eventually gets verified. Compelling people to use these systems isn't exactly hard, either. Just add a dose of gameification element to it all and viola!

People click "Like" or "+1" on stuff and build their social graph all over the Internet, which in turn strengthens their "trusted identity". The problem is that, while you are compelled to share with your friends online all those details about yourself, there is a third party that is also looking in on you and your friends - namely Google, Facebook, etc which in turn has an open channel to the NSA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security who are privy to the raw information you are submitting.

It's a double edged sword, and we need to keep it in mind as we go bravely (or stupidly) into the future.

The Real Issue

For now it's all fine and well that we're getting all of these online services for "free" and sites are integrating the social graph into their own systems for authentication, etc... It is not uncommon to see sites these days that encourage you to log-in using Twitter, Facebook, etc as a one click step. Ease of use makes it really compelling, but in the long run you are giving up just a bit more than you realize through doing so.

The price you pay for these services is not measured because you are paying with a currency that is completely invaluable - which is to say, namely yourself. As +Gary Vaynerchuk says - Brand Human is the most underrated brand there is. The most important brand in the future and today is not Nike, Coca-Cola, or Pringles - it's you.

As you use those social graphs to log into other sites, you are adding those sites to your social graph as part of your "online identity system". It's still a double edged sword but one that can easily be abused by third parties and government if not careful.

For instance, I'm sure being branded a terrorist for clicking "Like" on #Occupy streams or sites seems far fetched, but if you're not careful that's exactly what happens in your social graph. The same could be said about people who show a public interest in things like #Anonymous or whatever other non-sanctioned and fringe outlets exist such as #Wikileaks or #BradleyManning

What's more, the further these services become collective, the more likely there is a single choking point for access online. Sure, you could just use another service, but as they start implementing social graph log-in methods over their own, those sites become part of the Google and Facebook extension as well, even if they are run by parties outside of Google and Facebook. So if Google and Facebook decide to shut off access to your account and services - those sites outside of them shut down your access as well by default.

Even more interesting is the implementation of cloud storage and applications into this ecosystem, whereby you are perpetually renting access to your own data and the programs that allow you to manipulate it. We see this with Tablets recently, whereby the on-board storage is myopic by default and the App-stores compel you to rent cloud storage to offload your files to. Google already does this with Google Drive, giving you a preset "entry" storage account and then setting “reasonable” rental prices for more.

As computing moves in that direction, I get a little nervous at the implications. Do something a third party doesn't like or disagrees with, and in a single request you're essentially cut off from anything meaningful online as a result, losing a majority of your data as well.

Email, videos, documents, social media, calendar, pictures, music, blogs, and (over time) the rest of the useful Internet itself that uses those social graphs to let you log in.

Something to mull over in our race to ubiquitous computing.

 

 

External Links

 

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf

Image by:

Ragaru | deviantArt - http://ragaru.deviantart.com/art/Cyber-Eye-111574083

 

Euclideon Dreams

Give me something to believe in: Is #Euclideon Unlimited Detail a hoax?

 

 

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Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:

 

1. It's completely impossible.
2. It's possible, but it's not worth doing.
3. I said it was a good idea all along.

- Arthur C. Clarke

 

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Where to begin?

 

Recently I made a post on Google+ about the future of graphics technology, citing both the Outerra and the upcoming Euclideon Engine. In some regard, they both represent an interesting crossroads in the industry where one company (Outerra) is using the polygon methodology mixed with procedural systems, while Euclideon is using a variant of a voxel based system with procedural methodologies. What transpired was a really interesting debate between myself and one of the staff from Outerra (Brano Kemen) who falls somewhere between the first and second category of debate as listed above from Arthur C. Clarke.

 

His insistence that Euclideon was likely just a hoax wasn’t what raised my eyebrow, but instead it was the reasoning he was using. In a typical fashion, he put forth his best arguments against Euclideon from the perspective of a current generation technology programmer.

 

The obvious stance being – Well, this isn’t a new idea and it’s been tried before, but nobody has managed to pull it off like Euclideon claims they have.

 

I’m a little perplexed at this statement because it’s really no different than saying:

 

Thousands of people in the past have tried this and failed, therefore it’s not possible that somebody will come along and succeed.

 

At best, that’s a bit of faulty logic.

 

Generally speaking, if you’re coming at this from the perspective of what you already know in the industry, then the Euclideon engine looks like nothing more than witchcraft and magic. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke also notably commented on this phenomenon as well:

 

 

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

– Arthur C. Clarke

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Past Tense Future

 

I've done a few articles on this blog awhile back concerning the Euclideon engine and what I believed at the time were the general mechanics of the engine which made it so powerful (and unique). For the most part, the more I research into this system and read (or listen) to the details that are made available, the more I am convinced it is not a hoax. If you would like to read the original posts on this subject, feel free to hop over to Quantum Rush and Quantum Rush [Redux] for some perspective.

 

To be fair, the Outerra engine is marvelous in its own right and has definitely earned my respect for what is being accomplished, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s like praising one technology at the height of advancement but knowing it’s a sort of last hurrah! before the sun sets and a new age approaches. I say the same thing about Crytek as well, and even they believe that technology like Euclideon is not a hoax because they tried to import a point-cloud model of a tiger during their research on the Crytek engine.

 

So in the grand scheme of things, at least one company thinks it’s possible and they sure as hell are bigger than Outerra. That being said, Crytek also acknowledged that they didn’t manage to crack the secret recipe for point-cloud data approaches and went with the approach they have now in the Crysis 3 engine.

 

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Outerra Engine in alpha stages. Ground is procedural, but models are polygon.

 

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In the beginning, was the Pixel

 

Simply put, the Euclideon engine is not a typical voxel engine. It may use similar foundations from this technology, but that’s about where the similarities end.

 

In order to wrap our heads around the claim of Unlimited Detail, we first start with the idea that your screen only has a certain amount of pixel space. Let’s say this is your screen resolution and go with 1900x1200 as a default resolution (which is mine).

 

Now, the first thing we ask is how many pixels is that on the screen?

 

It’s really a math problem, simple multiplication:

1900 pixels wide by 1200 pixels height.

 

This math problem yields us an answer of:

2,280,000 pixels on screen.

 

We can display photographs on screen at 1900x1200 resolution and that still image looks, well, photorealistic. But in a 3D Engine, photorealistic seems to be a word reserved for rendering farms and a year of processing.

 

In the case of Euclideon, they realized something that I don’t think the rest of the industry realized when dealing with point-cloud data models. Typically we’re loading the entire model into memory and shuffling it around, and that actually does get computationally expensive, but we’re talking about also moving around all the little digital atoms in the model that you can’t see, which is about 90% of the model at any given time.

 

Why exactly are we shuffling around 90% of a model we can’t see? That means we’re wasting 90% of our processing power doing stuff nobody will notice.

 

The obvious question then became:

What can the user actually see?

 

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The answer to this is clearly:

They can only see what’s in front of them at any given moment, or whatever pixels are lit up in their resolution.

 

Well, this gives us something interesting to think about. If the pixel space 1900x1200 is the maximum amount of pixels on screen at any moment, then the only thing we need to know from there is what color those pixels are.

 

This is just one half of the equation, though. So we set this thought aside for a moment and ask:

 

How do we figure out what the user can see out of those 2,280,000 pixels on screen?

 

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The World of Tiny Little Atoms

 

 

Setting aside the answer of 2,280,000 pixels on screen, we then look to figure out how we deliver only what will satisfy that prior question of what of the models can be seen in that screen space.

 

This is the point where another explanation from Bruce Dell in a recent interview comes to mind where he explains that current systems are pulling the entire book (model) and processing, yet what happens when you index the individual words in the books properly and make them searchable?

 

In a point-cloud model, we’re working with little digital atoms, so the model file itself is comprised of atomistic descriptions. The goal, then is to figure out which of those digital atoms in the model file are visible on screen at any given moment and ignore the rest of the model file.

 

So when you take a model of 500,000 polygons and convert it to the Euclideon point-cloud data format (which for all intents and purposes likely also indexes those points in the file) you end up with a high resolution point-cloud model where every point is indexed for searching. This is where we get the beginning of the second part of our answer for Euclideon and where the typical voxel engines stop.

 

The Euclideon engine is said to work a lot like a search engine, where the only search query is:

 

What pixels on the screen correspond to the point-cloud data in the model files that this user can see?

 

When we do a camera check in-world to see what is in front of the user, the engine likely returns the models it sees, and then the individual points from those files that are visible to the user within the screen space (again, 2,280,000 pixels).

 

Knowing this information, we ask the point-cloud data models up front to return only the points within it that correspond to the pixels on screen. Since the point-cloud models are pre-indexed to begin with, and the points (atoms) inside of it are individually indexed inside the file, only the points in the model that match the search query are returned as an answer to the engine, ignoring the other 90% of the file up front.

 

What we are likely left with then is something like this in the scene:

 

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Clearly this is a good start, but we have quite a lot of empty space in between those pixels that are unanswered from just the points in the model files that are stored. Obviously, we wouldn’t want to store the point-cloud data at absolutely full resolution (because the storage then becomes the issue), so there must be a way to fill in the blanks on this point cloud scene.

 

Luckily for us, we have an answer.

 

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Algorithmic Interpolation

 

More or less, the idea of what happens in between the points on the point cloud model are likely left to an algorithmic interpolation sequence. If we have two points and there is space between them, then the algorithm takes the average of the two sides and creates a new point algorithmically generated.

 

This isn’t a new idea, but when applied to something like voxels it gets interesting. The closer you get to the atoms in a voxel display system the more they enlarge and even start generating algorithmic interpolation to fill in the spaces, creating detail where there wasn’t before.

 

This is a common technique in console emulators to upscale 2D sprite art to modern HD screens, so Mario as sprite art can look good when made bigger on your high definition computer screen. One of the more popular algorithms for this 2D Sprite scaling is the hqx algorithm, and is available as part of most current console emulators.

 

In image processing, hqx ("hq" stands for "high quality" and "x" stands for magnification) is one of the pixel art scaling algorithms developed by Maxim Stepin, used in emulators such as Nestopia, bsnes, ZSNES, Snes9x, FCE Ultra and many more. There are 3 hqx filters: hq2x, hq3x, and hq4x, which magnify by factor of 2, 3, and 4 respectively. For other magnification factors, this filter is used with nearest-neighbor scaling.

 

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Procedural Methods

 

In much the same manner as Outerra makes use of procedural methodologies for their terrain, Euclideon seems to make use of procedural methodologies for a majority of the engine as applied to specialized point-cloud data that is indexed efficiently.

 

It’s like going to Google in order to search for something. Naturally you don’t expect Google to start at the beginning of the Internet and go through everything in a linear manner looking for what you searched for?

 

No, instead Google crawls the Internet and indexes the content which is why when you search for something it skips 90% of the Internet and brings back just what you searched for in a few milliseconds.

 

Therein is the secret for Euclideon. The typical 3D Engine is the equivalent of having to travel from the beginning to the end of the Internet to find what it needs, whereas Euclideon is the equivalent of skipping 90% of it and bringing the results in milliseconds. This, in turn, makes Euclideon a highly optimized graphics engine, and the indexing of the files happens when you’re converting the high resolution polygon models into the Euclideon point-cloud data format (the equivalent of Google crawling the Internet)

 

The former of the two approaches uses up quite a lot of processing power with computation that is wasted because 90% of what it’s dealing with can’t be seen by the user to begin with, while Euclideon frees up that computation for other things.

 

Under the traditional methodologies today, the graphics cards are just sufficient enough to handle the polygon detail and all the computations, but under the Euclideon methodology, that same graphics card suddenly has nothing to do and is vastly overpowered for the engine.

 

So what do we do with a graphics card that is sitting around twiddling its thumbs?

 

Now we have room for improvement, assuming you can even imagine improving on photorealistic 3D at 25-30 FPS on the CPU alone. Stuff like astronomical resolutions for screens, ultra high fidelity, lots of GPU free to do more advanced physics and lighting calculations, and more. Instead of sharing those calculations on the GPU as an afterthought after the initial 3D calculations, now the entire card is free to unleash its full attention on it.

 

So the claim of Unlimited Detail is accurate, but it’s a contextual statement. Unlimited Detail, but you don’t need to load all of infinity at once to see it any more than you need to see the entire universe you live in to claim it has unlimited detail. All you can see is what is in front of you at any moment, and you take for granted that the rest of infinity exists because it’s there when you get around to seeing it.

 

Essentially, Euclideon engine works like the real world does. Everything is made of tiny atoms, and nothing exists except what you can see at any given moment at the level of detail you can actually see.

 

Polygons are a lot like a Classical Physics approach while Euclideon is the Quantum Physics approach.

 

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Voxel Animation

 

Which brings us to the sticking point concerning the ability to animate point-cloud data. It’s not exactly easy, and it has come with a lot of ups and downs. Originally, it was thought to just be impossible and that was that, but we now know that’s silly because of the three points from Arthur C. Clarke at the beginning of this article. Eventually, somebody actually did manage to figure out a way to animate sparse-voxels but the conclusion was akin to the second stage of revolutionary technology statements:

 

Yes it can be done, but it’s not worth the effort.

 

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What are Voxels?

 

 

How to Animate these things…

 

 

Further information on Voxel Animation

 

 

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With Euclideon, I’m going to say they figured out the animation aspects further and will progress into the third statement of revolutionary technology:

 

I said it was a good idea all along.

 

The people in this industry years ago who came out and said that point-cloud data was the future of the graphics industry were likely correct. The problem with being a visionary is that often times you make predictions that are completely accurate, but far ahead of their time.

 

Because the technology and methodologies hadn’t been figured out in a reasonable time from those visionary statements, the rest of the industry lost interest and said:

 

“See? It was just a false alarm. Nobody came out with it, so it must not be possible. Nothing to see here, move along. Point and laugh at the suckers who bought into this idea to begin with.”

 

So when a company like Euclideon comes out and says they figured it out, those same industry people who saw the original visionary statements years ago chime in again and say the same thing –

 

“Oh, this again? Didn’t we already conclude it wasn’t possible and move on? *yawn* Tons of people already tried this before and failed. Clearly Euclideon is a hoax, because if it was going to be accomplished, it would have been one of us with all of our training, expertise and money - not some guy in his basement programming in his free time. Since we haven’t figured it out, clearly this Bruce Dell guy isn’t able to.”

 

Do you know what that makes the rest of the graphics industry, with thinking like that?

 

Arrogant. That’s what.

 

Or, more likely, these are the people who have heavily invested in their current generation technologies and are subject to technology lock-in. With all of that invested in their own systems, you would obviously think every single one of them would come out against Euclideon as a hoax or impossible. It’s a biased viewpoint altogether, with absolutely every possible motivation for being biased that exists. So why are we listening to them in the first place if we know they couldn’t possibly have an unbiased view of this type of technology?

 

Jon from id Software says it’s not possible for a few more years. Notch from Minecraft says Bruce Dell is a snakoil salesman. Even the CEO of Epic Games predicts that photorealism in games won’t happen until between 2019 and 2024.

 

Those people all have one thing in common:

 

Each has a vested interest in Bruce Dell and Euclideon being absolutely wrong.

 

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Bruce Dell sounds unprofessional

 

For a guy who has been coding the Euclideon engine since 2006 as a hobbyist programmer in his spare time, do you really think he’s going to come out and get a professional actor and marketing team to do the presentation?

 

Secondly, he’s Australian and that accent comes across pretty heavily. He really does talk like that normally… cut the man a break.

 

Does this guy know the terminology of the industry? Probably not nearly as well as most would. It doesn’t really matter if you know what he’s talking about as long as he knows what he’s talking about in his head. Just because he doesn’t know the word for it doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what it is.

 

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This is the best interview of Bruce Dell and Euclideon I’ve seen so far

 

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We’re talking about a guy who wasn’t told this stuff was impossible, and went into coding a graphics engine from scratch with the thought that it was perfectly feasible and he just didn’t know how at that time. This likely drove him harder than most coders would for solving the problem.

 

Think logically for a moment… when you go to college and try to earn a degree in programming, your professor is teaching you things they studied and learned from other people in the industry. There is a bias already in what you are going to learn, because it is heavily geared toward teaching you the current practices and not encouraging you to try and invent new ones. Hell, even if you’re just learning from the latest publishing of GPU Gems, you’re learning from the accomplishments of others in the industry who are themselves following accepted practice by the book. Sometimes standardized education is far more poisonous than unconventional learning methods.

 

They aren’t looking to turn you into a creative, unorthodox, thinker… they just want a guy/girl who can churn out code in an existing industry that has a vested interest in specifically not drawing outside of the lines on the coloring book.

 

Bruce Dell wasn’t poisoned by that preconceived ideology atmosphere. He didn’t even realize the lines existed to begin with, and as such likely was free to create a masterpiece of coding.

 

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So, Euclideon is not a hoax?

 

It’s not likely that Bruce Dell and Euclideon are trying anything funny. If anything they seemed to have figured something out that much (if not the entire) industry failed to do. All it took was thinking from left field and the ability to ignore all the people who failed before hand telling him it wasn’t possible.

 

It’s funny how that works out.

 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I know exactly how Euclideon works, but I can give a simplistic rundown on what I think is happening based on what Bruce Dell has already said. From my point of view, it seems to work out just fine, and has the potential to do exactly what he says it can do. Of course, I’m not a programmer either… so all I can do is give an analysis from a layman point of view. There’s plenty going on behind the scenes of this engine, and I’ve only simplified it as much as possible for a general audience to digest.

 

What does that mean for the industry as a whole?

 

Just what Bruce Dell said in the original Euclideon demo video below – Your graphics are about to get a whole lot better, by a factor of about 100,000 times or more.

 

When is this supposed to come out? That’s the number one question on people’s minds right now concerning this technology. Well, I can say that Bruce Dell made a comment concerning this if anyone was paying attention. He had a number in his head, and that number was about 16 Months, give or take polishing things up for a release.

 

He said that around August 2011, and 16 months from then is December 2012. Give or take, that means a near Christmas release for 2012, or Spring 2013 release. There’s a good estimate for you to shoot for.

 

If Bruce Dell is particularly a man of twisted humor, he’d release Euclideon as a demo on December 21st, 2012 (Last day of the Mayan Calendar). Something tells me that is a very likely date, because it’s the end of an era… and would be fitting. If Euclideon does exactly what he’s claiming it does, then it may as well be the Apocalypse for polygons, unleashing an era of photorealistic gaming and virtual environments.

 

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Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology | Euclideon 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who Ya Gonna Call? Ghost Writers!

Linden Lab looks for guest bloggers, finds laughter instead. #SecondLife

 

Are you a passionate Second Life resident who loves to write about your Second Life experience and are looking for exposure for your own existing blog? Looking for a way to connect with other bloggers and open your door to new Second Life community readers?  If so, you might want to submit an original blog post (no links please) to us and it could end up being featured in the Second Life Community blogs.

As the movers, shakers, and experts on everything Second Life, we’d like to invite you to submit your original blog articles to us at blog-call@lindenlab.com with the Subject Line: Guest Blog Submission.  Selected submissions will be posted to the Blog section of the Community as a featured guest post!

 

 

Dear Linden Lab – My laptop in-world sucks less than yours. I’m actually blogging from it.

 

If you’ve been paying attention, Linden Lab recently put out a call for guest posts from the prominent bloggers in the community, and as much as I’d love to give them kudos for trying, I have to concede that the response they received from the community was expected.

 

It’s about ecosystem and the community of sharing, and on this point Linden Lab dropped the ball very publicly. We live in a world of content creation and sharing, and we take pride in our blogs because these blogs represent our freedom of expression and ideas on not just the virtual world but also all the things that go with it. We’re the Digerati because we’ve been so diligent in building our own brand and avatar presence, not because we’ve been busy building it for somebody else. That’s the lesson about Second Life – It’s not about Linden Lab, it’s about us, and every time Linden Lab acts selfish in this regard the community calls them on it.

 

This isn’t to be mean spirited, either… it’s just the way it is in this media-as-commodity society and prosumer culture. I’ll post a video at the end of this for you (and for Linden Lab) to thoroughly explain what the hell is going on, and how they (and you) can benefit going forward.

 

It wasn’t so much the offer from Linden Lab that made me laugh, but the guidelines and constraints they set for submissions -

 

If you would like to submit a guest post for the Second Life Blog, please consider these guidelines. Only submissions that meet these criteria will be considered for publishing.

 

• All selected posts must adhere to our Community Participation Guidelines.
• All selected posts should support the inclusiveness of the Second Life community.
• Selected posts must not include marketing-related links and must not be entirely self-promotional.
• The post may include links to your website and blog in a brief author’s bio (approximately 3 sentences), which will be published at the end of the guest post.
• Please limit the number of images included in your submission to 4 or less.
• We reserve the right to review and edit. We regularly edit posts by our contributors and guest bloggers.
• Guest posts must be original and may not have been published elsewhere online already.  

 

I’ve put the offending terms in bold for which I would believe the most astute of bloggers who would be of any interest in this co-op posting would disagree with. We’re capable of editing our own content, and aside from minor edits, I’m not comfortable with a third party reconfiguring what I have said behind closed doors to suit their own needs. More importantly, the last requirement flat out misses the point of the sharing atmosphere and community which it is soliciting responses from – in that you are being asked to write content, without compensation of any kind, that Linden Lab can freely edit and manipulate as they see fit, and to top it all off, they demand that the content you are writing is exclusive to them alone.

 

This would exclude simultaneously posting the same article on your own blog, and to wit, makes you little more than a ghost writer for a company that is looking for free SEO content to fill their blog roll.

 

Like many blogs, this blog carries a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license (or a variation of Creative Commons). This means you are free to repost my blog posts in full or in part anywhere you would like, as long as you give me attribution and as long as you aren’t charging people to read it or making money on it. This does not mean I endorse you, your blog or magazine, or anything you say. It simply means you are free to share what I’m saying here with little restriction. The choice of license does not necessarily exclude commercial use of my work, but it does require that you seek written permission from me to have that constraint waived.

 

In stark contrast, Linden Lab is immediately shooting themselves in the foot by demanding the exclusivity of submitted articles, which is a direct violation of what many established bloggers adhere by. In the event that exclusivity is required, the next logical question from any blogger is going to be –

 

What’s in it for me? I mean… why should I write for you?

 

For this question, Linden Lab gives no substantial answer other than they assert promotion of your own blog, which to me sounds a lot like the website client that says they’ll pay you for making them look good by putting a little by-line on the bottom of the page to promote you.

 

No self-respecting website designer would agree to those terms, and no self-respecting blogger of any merit would agree to those terms either.

 

The bigger issue with all of this is that the very idea of exclusivity and tight constraints in a digital media ecosystem is a direct contradiction to the ecosystem itself – in a world of sharing, Linden Lab is asking for permission only to take and gives nothing back, and by association alone are showing that they are thinking like a traditional company that simply does not understand social media.

 

Despite all of this, however, I’d like to offer a better solution for everyone – far be it that I should be the Debbie Downer for Linden Lab’s hopes of building an army of bloggers willing to write stuff for them with little or no incentive.

 

Instead of asking for bloggers to submit content specifically for Linden Lab to publish exclusively, if they were truly interested in celebrating the diversity of culture and opinion in their community, they would instead be asking for their community of bloggers to be submitting posts from their own blogs to be reposted on the Linden blog in a celebration and expose’ of their community and wide reach. Any editing that is done to those submissions should be done in a transparent manner with the actual writer, because the writers themselves are the creative force behind what is being said on those posts – what they are saying is very deliberate and intentional.

 

For those of you into social media (and that’s probably quite a lot of you) the following video from Gary Vaynerchuk should be highly interesting and informative. This video should also be considered homework for the people at Linden Lab to take notes on.

 

 

 

It’s time to learn what a prosumer is all about–this is worth every single minute of watching it. Trust me.

 

 

 

Seriously… I wasn’t joking before. This isn’t a mockup. It’s my actual laptop in Second Life, on a desk that I made myself, and running a fully functional Cloud OS through Shared Media.

 

 

 

 

I wasn’t kidding when I said my laptop in Second Life is better than the one that Linden Lab used for their screen shot. Unlike their laptop, mine actually has a cloud operating system on it with a full suite of actual applications. Let’s just say I happen to like using Shared media to the absolute fullest potential.

Dreams in Digital

A discussion about the premise of Copyright, IP and Artificial Scarcity #SecondLife

 

The premise of Artificial Scarcity is, at the core, flawed at best and woefully inadequate at worst in the context of the digital age. It is no secret that copyright and intellectual property is gravely threatened by the digital culture we live in today, and increasingly so at an alarming rate of advancement. Such is the nature of the Internet to effectively circumvent censorship and treat all attempts to censor as damage and route around it.

 

 

 

 

After all, the Internet is a digital system that was at its very core designed to withstand a nuclear war and come out relatively unscathed.

 

What is most disconcerting is not that the Internet itself is nearly impervious to the worst attempts of censorship, but that the paradigms that fostered the creation of this system are no longer relevant to the situation at hand. Worse, still, is that this understanding of distribution of materials and information in the digital age is entirely counterproductive to the existing paradigms which create these media forms.

 

I can give a quick lesson on the past ten years or so of innovation in this digital culture, but I’m fairly certain most of us already know the drill. Peer2Peer came about in systems like Napster, and the copyright and IP industry lost their nut trying to kill it. All that managed to do was throw fuel on the fire, leading to more advanced networks of distribution and even after those legal battles ensued – first against the networks (which by law should have been protected under safe harbor) but later against individuals as young as twelve years old and as old as your dear grandmother in what amounted to a legal paperstorm.

 

Astronomical fines and penalties, legal cases that no individual could possibly afford to protect themselves against, and what turned out to be further fuel on the fire of piracy in the form of the invention of Bittorrent.

 

Clearly the attempted enforcement of artificial scarcity within the confines of a system that does not acknowledge scarcity at all is likely to lose, or make the problem worse.

 

There are very interesting insights from people like Jaron Lanier who believe that artificial scarcity is a necessity in order to give digital experience value and meaning again, but I will have to disagree with his assertion (at least in part). When it comes to Jaron, I rarely disagree with his vision – but this is one of those topics where I have to respectfully shake my head.

 

It’s called artificial scarcity for a reason, and that reason is because it is an artificial construct in a system specifically designed without scarcity in the form of digital media in all forms. When music was simply on CDs, there was natural scarcity in the availability of the content in physical form, but in the digital world it doesn’t cost anything to copy data. There is no physical cost in duplication, and the very least of the costs is relegated to the production of the original media.

 

But that’s where the costs really end. Unlike pre-digital days, the costs no longer carry over past the production cycle, and such things as marketing and distribution are freely available, if not exponentially so and for free. Even the production cycle has a diminishing cost, as we can see with DJs, Mashups and Youtube.

 

Nobody has to pay a distribution center to get airplay on the radio any longer, or produce physical compact discs for the record store shelves. Terrestrial radio airplay isn’t as important as it used to be in the face of countless internet radio stations, satellite radio subscriptions and more.

 

This is the dilemma.

 

It’s a matter of old school thinking versus new age. In a world that became accustomed to the natural scarcity of products, and literally based their entire business model on that natural scarcity and the control of the distribution channels from start to finish, it must be terrifying to suddenly lose that control – and so we see a constant battle between copyright and IP holders (RIAA & MPAA) and the “Pirates”, culminating in toxic legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, as well as the attempt of leveraging $75 Trillion dollar fines (RIAA vs Limewire).

 

This isn’t a new problem, however. This goes back to the printing press itself, wherein the same arguments were leveraged and fought tooth and nail. It carried on further with the invention of BetaMax and VHS, the Cassette Tape, Blank CD Media, and the MP3 Player itself (Roxio), and even into the right to use the MP3 Format altogether (Thanks, Fraunhofer, for the legal battles).

 

The thing about this history is – no matter how much we cry and complain about the damages that a new technology will bring to an industry in the form of piracy, those fears never seem to materialize. Even more interesting is the seemingly opposite effect that piracy has had on the music and film industry, with the record profits of those industries plain as day despite their constant arguments that piracy is hurting the industry and costing them hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Uproxx provides an excellent insight to this by giving an overview to the situation (further reading)

 

Pirates are your friends (Yarr!)

 

Yes, I just opened up a massive can of worms with this statement, but it had to be said. Given the industry of intellectual property and copyright, it can be shown time and again that the greatest harm to the copyright and IP industry are themselves.

 

Let’s break this down logically…

 

Modern piracy is simply the enactment of a highly efficient and targeted distribution system without any centralized control or overhead of cost. We can’t necessarily claim that piracy is stealing, because theft is the removal of the original instead of making a copy. Piracy is copying, plain and simple. The only difference today versus prior to the Internet is that there was a physical component which acted as the barrier to entry – Cassette tapes, blank CDs, VHS tapes, etc. and those media forms came with an additional blank media tax to compensate for perceived losses to the industry. The only reason that piracy is equated to theft is because of the false assertion that every file downloaded is automatically a lost sale.

 

If we were paying attention, we’ve seen this claim for as long as these industries existed – case in point:

 

 

 

 

 

Clearly this turned out not to be true, as the recording industry continued to make record profits and even today they continue to post profit gains and not losses. The only losses they are claiming are entirely imaginary losses based on fabrication.

 

We could make a convoluted claim that even the unauthorized copying is costing the owners of the copyright and IP the premise of future revenue which is entirely estimated, and based on fuck all, as seen with the RIAA statement that they believed Limewire owed in damages an amount that exceeded all the money in the world. The RIAA and MPAA can spew out all the make believe numbers they want, but it’s not based on anything substantial. It’s a lot like me saying that because people read this blog I estimate the damages from lost revenue to be 400 trillion dollars a year. I’m just pulling a number out of my ass, and totally out of context to the total situation at hand, much like the RIAA and MPAA does regularly.

 

Zen and the Art of Piracy

 

So how do we effectively stop piracy? I’m the first to proclaim that protection of intellectual property and copyright is something that needs to happen – despite my advocacy of piracy in the same breath. It’s really about looking at the bigger picture and actually taking the time to see the widespread implications past narrow interests of the old paradigm.

 

 

 

For instance, think about all the money spent in the promotion and distribution of media by the RIAA and MPAA. More specifically, let’s look at the process for the RIAA wherein they spend an astronomical amount of money to A&R representatives in order to essentially buy a spot on the radio to play a new single for promoting an artist. This is a regular occurrence, and it baffles me.

 

When I was younger, my highschool actually had its own radio station and radio communications was one of the classes offered. Of course, I was enrolled in that class and managed straight A’s (45 days away from having my radio communications license to work as an on-air personality). Even then, the process baffled me due to the no solicitation rules. The station manager would have us regularly listening to new music coming in, and checking to see if it violated any of the rules, but that list of music always came from some A&R representing a label, whereas local bands trying to get heard would be routinely turned down. As DJs, our hands were pretty tied, as the station manager would be approving the playlist and helping to compile them.

 

Even if we were approving music on the list or disapproving it, most of the time that didn’t even matter. Those songs would be inexplicably stricken from the list when we approved them, or oddly added to the playlist when we as DJs decided the music was utter crap by consensus.

 

It more or less came down to who was willing to pay more money to get a band heard and played, and not necessarily based on merit. 

 

The apparent point of this process is to get an artist’s material heard by a large population of listeners, and they treat this process as a marketing expense, yet if we turn the tables and look at piracy – this is exactly the sort of distribution and outcome that Bittorrent has without the overhead. Interestingly enough, piracy is based entirely on merit and not who has the most money or connections for marketing and distribution – a stark contrast to how it used to work. Today, that local band (Garageland) wouldn’t have to be bending over backwards to get their music heard, and instead they’d simply make an official website for the band and distribute their own music via Bittorrent as a marketing loss. Those local bands would simply exist on their own merit and ability – which I always felt was how things were supposed to be.

 

So let’s call this what it is – it’s the inability of the industry to differentiate between personal piracy and commercial piracy. Commercial piracy is the problem and by all means should be fought or at least intelligently channeled, whereas Personal Piracy should actually be encouraged to no end.

 

The moment we stop trying to lump together personal piracy and commercial piracy, the faster we realize the benefits that personal piracy gives us. This idea that personal piracy costs the media industry hundreds of billions a year is absurd (as absurd as the assertion that it cost the RIAA $75 Trillion dollars in damages from Limewire) – because if anything it is actually increasing the revenues through widespread proliferation of new media at a cost that is exactly zero to the distribution channel (and subsequently to the media holders). What scares them the most is that media is now based on the idea of a meritocracy and not who has the most money or connections.

 

Personal piracy is good as long as we’re willing to call it what it is in proper context. The best course of action for the media industry going forward is to literally, and without hesitation, pirate their own media and make it available at a high quality to the masses.

 

 

 

 

Why on earth would I suggest this? I mean, I just offered the equivalent to the digital media apocalypse as the solution to the digital media apocalypse.

 

Natural Scarcity

 

This brings us back the idea of artificial scarcity versus natural scarcity. Natural scarcity was the model that the media industry was originally built on and it worked absolute wonders. It wasn’t until the introduction of mass reproduced media that they began to panic and invent methods of artificial scarcity to sustain a model that is based on natural scarcity. Natural scarcity was the sold out concert you couldn’t get tickets to, artificial scarcity is deliberately limiting the amount of CD’s pressed to inflate worth arbitrarily or (in the digital age) creating convoluted DRM schemes to restrict the usage rights of agnostic digital media.

 

The future of media is authentic experience. Natural scarcity is something you cannot reproduce in a digital form, and thus holds intrinsic value over time. You can film a concert, and maybe sell the t-shirts online, but you can’t pirate the actual unique experience of actually having been there. You can create DRM and other artificial scarcity methods to continue propping up your old business models, or attempt to force the old business methodologies on new media, but the sad truth is – artificial scarcity in an environment built without scarcity is a costly and failed endeavor.

 

In the movie industry, I’ll just cite all the DRM and Ultra-Violet Digital lockers having no effect on Bittorrent distribution except to make it more popular. However, I’d also state that all the unskippable garbage and advertisements on those DVDs are also a major factor, just like advertisements in between and during shows on television send people off to pirate the more authentic experience of the DVD version off of Bittorrent.

 

Physical goods and actual experiences that are unique are the new media paradigm to embrace, while the old media paradigm (currently being propped up desperately by artificial scarcity tactics) should be relegated to marketing channels in order to promote the natural scarcity of unique experiences and sales. Sure there are people out in the parking lots selling knock-off t-shirts for $5 out of their trunks, but the only reason they manage to make a killing is because you’re charging $10 for a cup of beer, $5 for a hotdog and $40 for a t-shirt inside. The problem isn’t the counterfeiters, it’s your inflated sense of worth and douchbaggery to the honest customers and fanbase.

 

Instead of writing piracy off as a revenue loss, we should be saying it is a marketing and proliferation surplus without additional cost. We’re actually saving money through personal piracy, if we’d actually figure out how to embrace it and wean ourselves off the artificial scarcity paradigm, we’d see that it’s actually helping far more than it hurts. As far as counterfeiters – actually curtailing them has less to do with trying to stop them and more to do with stopping yourself.

 

Telling a Story

 

Remember when VH1 had the Storytellers concerts? Only a certain amount of people could attend those intimate concerts, and there was far more natural scarcity for the experience than listening to it in MP3 or watching the recorded show on VH1. There’s a level of abstraction there, and anyone who watched those VH1 Storyteller episodes has at least once thought to themselves how amazing it must have been to actually have been there.

 

 

Authentic experience is the new reality of media | Greenday at Storytellers – Extraordinary Girl

 

 

Hopefully you’re starting to get the bigger picture now. VH1 Storytellers was (and is) a unique experience, an authentic experience, and not easily reproduced. It had intrinsic value – far more than the DVD version or the MP3 Soundtrack. In this manner, we foster the piracy of the VH1 Storytellers albums online, and even offer the videos online without restrictions (but maybe advertising is alright). The end result is you are utilizing the piracy aspect of a lesser experience in order to strengthen the value of the natural scarcity of a greater experience. You can always offer a pay what you want model as well, but you should never be under the delusion that it won’t be pirated for free after a short period of time.

 

If you want to offset that personal piracy as marketing loss, sit down and figure out how to charge for live streaming access to that experience, as well as the much more valuable experience of the tickets to attend that experience in person (since it’s a limited audience). These limited experiences should be more available as the revenue source, creating a value based on natural scarcity and access instead of artificial scarcity. The more authentic the experience, the more it is actually worth.

 

It’s always much better to attend a Broadway show than to watch it online, but if you were streaming it online for free, you’d drastically raise awareness (the point of marketing) and increase the demand for the personal experience of actually attending that play in person as an authentic experience.

 

The other benefit to pirating your own media is that you are immediately sabotaging the bigger threat of commercial pirates who are trying to sell the media illegally. Why would anyone buy what they can get for free? More importantly, what is left to pirate commercially is something that cannot be pirated at all – the authentic experience. Authentic experience creates loyal customers – which is another lesson for Social Media.

 

I actually applaud Deadmau5 in this context for the way one of his recent concerts was handled – it was streamed live on Youtube for the first hour (maybe half hour) as a preview and then turned into a pay-per-view sort of experience. However, this doesn’t entirely grasp the full potential of unique experience or utilize it to the fullest advantage. It’s a good start, but could definitely have been done better.

 

Sure, the ideal here for the limited access to a live streaming concert is still considered artificial scarcity, but it is based on natural scarcity at the root and not just arbitrarily applied as we normally see. For instance, in the context of the Deadmau5 concert, it would have been better to stream the entire concert for free in SD quality and make the HD stream a pay per view stream. The first half hour would have been an HD preview of the live concert, switching to the SD quality free stream afterward unless you had already paid for the stream access in advance.

 

Again, we’re going on the concept of pirating your own media for your own benefit, and writing it off as marketing expenses instead of lost revenue through piracy. It’s a balance between marketing and natural scarcity, creating additional value in a digital product or unique experience.

 

Who got this brilliantly right?

 

Pomplamoose

 

This is how you pirate your own music for marketing benefit. Take note, media industry.

 

 

Even better would have been if those concerts were streamed using not just high definition audio, but a Binaural audio stream for spatial audio fidelity. One step further would have been to offer that binaural stream in conjunction with 360 degree video so the viewers could pan around in real time with full spatial audio.

 

This is a massive step up from the lower definition of a simple SD stream for free, and something that constitutes a unique experience worth more money to the fans. The more authentic the experience, the more value it has in a culture where the lowest common denominator is mass distributed media.

 

And that’s the point, really.

 

It’s not piracy we should be afraid of, but the clear indication that non-authentic experience is nearly worthless in the digital age. It is this understanding that should be shaping our decisions going forward concerning digital media, copyright and intellectual property. Authentic experience has value, and that value can be used as marketing to sell more authentic experiences with increasing tangible value. The very fact that this point is being ignored on the whole is far more troubling than the specter of piracy.

 

Virtual Environments

 

Which brings us to the idea of virtual environments and the idea of prosumer culture. In a virtual environment where the users can create anything they want, it is no surprise that they more often choose to create what is familiar – as in brands that exist to them in real life. Companies have done an excellent job in marketing their brands into ubiquity and pop culture, but seem to be utterly confused when the ultimate result of that comes to pass.

 

Of course people want Coca-Cola in a virtual world and any number of other familiar brands, and they aren’t in a position to have to wait until such time as those brand owners decide to give it to them. This creates a conflict of interest, because we’re trying to apply the artificial scarcity rule to a virtual environment that (much like the Internet) has no such constraint of scarcity.

 

The current accepted practice is to file DMCA notices and have the offending content removed, which is a direct violation of the Streisand Effect, having the exact opposite of the intended outcome. Agnostically, we look at media overall – whether it is an asset or an MP3, and we should already know that it’s not in our best interest to call it piracy, but instead call it marketing.

 

In the end, what is more important to the end-user is authentic experience. As long as you control the authentic experiences, the non-authentic experiences of lesser digital value should serve as marketing in order to support the authentic experiences.

 

Case in point – let’s go back to Coca-Cola.

 

The proliferation of unlicensed digital representations of branded merchandise in a virtual environment like Second Life constitute the lower quality and less authentic experience, and as such act as the user generated marketing and advertising for the authentic experiences which they will gladly pay for in real life. Accordingly, the Coca-Cola merchandise in a virtual environment, generated by the users themselves is the best viral marketing the company could ever hope for, because it creates further brand loyalty (and is in fact a display of that loyalty) which in turn leads to the authentic experience of actually drinking Coca-Cola.

 

Even if those virtual representations are being bought and sold, it is in the best interest not to place that into the category of commercial piracy in that the users themselves are showing a willingness to pay to be advertised to on a wider basis than you could ever hope to achieve had you spent a few millions dollars on a 30 second Superbowl ad.

 

Does this necessarily mean that you should be relinquishing your right to the brand? By no means! It’s more about how you choose to handle that brand in context to the environment of experience. Much like Youtube offers a ContentID matching system for videos, virtual environments should offer something similar – wherein a ContentID match wouldn’t necessarily mean the content is removed, but instead simply labeled as being owned by a certain content or brand owner.

 

This follows the general rule of sanctioned personal piracy as marketing. If a content creator exceeds a certain amount of money in a virtual world from the sales of a branded item, then it should trigger an automatic percentage paid to the brand owner as compensation (a virtual item license fee).

 

In this manner, the brand owners actually make some money on what normally is seen as purely a piracy loss, instead treating it as pure marketing and licensing gain across the board. It also costs a lot less in legal fees, DMCA and litigation because you aren’t in a mindset to try and stop the actions but instead finding ways to foster it to the extreme for your own (and the prosumers) total benefit.

 

The end goal should always be promoting authentic experiences and fostering additional value in things which cannot be pirated, through encouraging personal piracy and brand loyalty to the extreme.

 

This doesn’t mean, however, that DMCA takedown requests aren’t needed. In context, it should be treated as the absolute last resort instead of the first. Explore all of our options first before we invoke censorship as a solution, because the potential for backlash with censorship is far more damaging than trying to work within the system of digital experience and organic community.