virtual

Nov 15 2008   4:21PM GMT

g-speak: Oblong brings the “Minority Report” operating system to science reality

Posted by: Alexander Howard
operating systems, virtual, media, data, Technology, fun, video, Internet, multimedia, innovation, cool, culture, interesting, futurism, invention, creativity, entrepeneurship, interactive media, tool, buzz, science, virtual reality, interface, display, geek, demonstration, immersive 3D worlds

William Gibson noted recently that the cyberpunk fiction he’d been writing over the past quarter century has now become science fact. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are both set in near-futures with technology and social norms that are only a slight extension of the complex technological realities of the present. The neural shunt that jacks you into the network he imagined in Neuromancer hasn’t quite have arrived yet but some humans now have direct brain-computer interfaces implanted in their brains.

Brad Feld appreciates this relationship between science fiction and fact as few others do. As he writes in ‘Science Fact‘ on Oblong’s web blog, the future of human-computer interaction is looking breathtaking. And, while the genetically-engineering precognitive humans Philip K. Dick imagined in “Minority Report” in 1956 haven’t arrived yet, g-speak certainly has.

g-speak is a spatial operating environment from Oblong Industries that combines a gestural interface, DLP projectors and ‘recombinant networking.” It’s modeled upon the virtual OS operated by Precrime Agent John Anderton in Minority Report, the film adaptation of Dick’s short story.

That connection is no accident. The science adviser that Spielberg consulted for the film, John Underkoffler, has been quietly busy since the film’s premiere in 2002. A few stories have popped up over the years, to be sure, but since Oblong Industries was founded in the research in 2006 he and other technologists have advanced the technology considerably, as you’ll see in the video below.

Once you’ve watched it, read g-speak in slices and about the origins of Oblong in the MIT Media Lab to learn about the potential for this human-to-machine interface and the long road to bringing it into reality..

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

[Hat tip to Engadget's Josh Topolsky and Jamie.]

Embedded below is a 2007 report on g-speak featuring an interview with Underkoffler.

Apr 23 2008   8:46AM GMT

Video: Exploring presence technology with tele-immersive dance in cyberspace

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, virtual, media, Technology, fun, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, innovation, cool, culture, college, learning, academics, interesting, invention, event, creativity, collaboration, participation, interactive media, music, mashup, science, virtual reality, geek, demonstration

Often the title of a video alone raises an eyebrow. Today’s video selection certainly does — it’s a presentation from two tele-immersion labs, one at UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the other within the University of Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department. According to the IEEE Computer Society, tele-immersion is when “collaborators at remote sites share the details of a virtual world that can autonomously control computation, query databases, and gather results.” It might be a stretch but I see tele-immersion used in that was as an advanced version of presence technology, in which an application make it possible to locate and identify a computing device wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network.

As it’s a dance performance, both labs worked in close collaboration with the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College. The video quality admittedly isn’t great — and you may want to skip ahead to 11:30, when the actual performance begins, or to 20:00, when the dancing starts — but the concept itself is noteworthy for its aspiration to bridge the gap between real and virtual environments.

From the show notes on YouTube:

The Resonance Project Dance Group performed for a very large crowd in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley. The performance was a blend of live, modern dance with live tele-immersed dancers from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Using a large network of cameras and computers the dancers were able to span the geographic distance and mingle in cyberspace. The computers merged three-dimensional video images of the dancers onto a single projection, which was broadcast alongside live dancers.

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a “performance as research” model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

The nature of the performance has a close conceptual relationship with CAVE, a tele-immersive environment used for learning in a wide variety of disciplines, and the CAVEman, the first 4-D human atlas.

Jan 28 2008   3:47PM GMT

What is virtual networking? Readers respond to “virtually everything.”

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Networking, Virtualization, command line, virtual, commentary, feedback, buzzword, controversy, word meanings

Virtualization was top of the mind for IT administrators and media alike last year. 2008 is no different. Just review the much-discussed recent survey, IT priorities in 2008. If a technology can be remotely related to any virtual, you can bet that vendors will do so. “Virtual insanity” isn’t a 90s Jamiroquai tune.
Our job, as always, is to cut through the buzzwords to the meat of what any particular technology is, how it works, who is using it and why it’s important. Read our definitions for server virtualization, application virtualization, file virtualization, virtual machine and paravirtualization to get just a taste of our virtual offerings. We even added Second Life to the database, after it became clear that virtual worlds needed some explanation as well.

If you want the complete virtual file, head over to the complete virtualization taxonomy.

A couple of readers responded to a Word of the Day from last week, virtual networking. One asked for clarification, the other outright disputed the entry. Following is most of our definition for virtual networking, if you missed it (and if you did, make sure to sign up for the Word of the Day newsletter).

Virtual networking is a technology that facilitates the control of one or more remotely located computers or servers over the Internet. Data can be stored and retrieved, software can be run and peripherals can be operated through a Web browser as if the distant hardware were onsite.

Virtual networking facilitates consolidation of diverse services and devices on a single hardware platform called a virtual services switch. The centralization of control reduces the cost and complexity of operating and maintaining hardware and software compared with administering numerous separate devices in widely separated geographical locations. Maintenance personnel and administrators can install device drivers, perform tests and resolve problems on the remote machines from a single location.

It may be necessary to install virtual networking software on the remote computers or servers to take advantage of this technology. Several vendors, including Microsoft and VMware, offer virtual networking software. Some vendors offer comprehensive virtual networking services, allowing business network administrators to outsource labor and resources to the vendor. Virtual networking capability is a standard feature of Windows XP and Vista.

Here’s our reader’s request for clarification:

“Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought accessing something over the Internet is still a physical network. Yes, it isn’t a LAN, but I think it wouldn’t be appropriate to classify as “Virtual Networking”. It is a real network, physical connection, but under the cooperation of the original network (ie a company or home network) , telecommunications provider and possibly an intermediate ISP. It is still all physical and I would think “Virtual” would be an inappropriate classification/definition.” -Justin Snyder

Justin, thanks for writing in. In this sense, the term virtual is used in a more figurative than literal way. In general, virtual simply means the quality of effecting something without actually being that something. All of the various virtualization technologies are a variant of this concept. In server virtualization, one physical server is divided into multiple isolated virtual environments, each of which is masked from the users. Virtual tape makes it possible to save data as if it were being stored on tape although it’s actually be stored on hard disk or on another storage medium. A guest OS is an operating system installed in a virtual machine or disk partition in addition to the host or main OS. In each case, a software layer has been added in lieu of a physical connection.

Virtual networking is much the same. A virtual sevices switch allows the sysadmin to monitor or change configurations remotely — or virtually — instead of going to the location in person. Justin, you’re right — whenever you access something online, it does flow over physical devices at one point or another, even if it’s wireless — but the technologies that underpin much of that traffic are these days, often virtual.

Our other reader strongly disagreed with the idea of virtual networking on a more existential level:

This entry [virtual networking] is specious and should be deleted. Unix workstations and servers have had this capability for at least 15 years. And there is nothing virtual about it. It simply uses a little hardware and OS capability, accessed via the network. Since when did anything and everything involving the network become “virtual”? Is e-commerce going to be renamed “virtual shopping”?

Microsoft and VMware have done nothing more than catch up to 1990’s technology, slap a “virtual” label on it, and pretended as though they invented it. Give us a break. -Brian Herzog

Brian, I agree. Virtual has now been attached to so many products that the term is well on its way to being meaningless. You make a great point, with respect to the historical abilities of Unix gurus far and wide to effect changes through the command line, abilities only now being entrusted to mere mortals using Windows GUIs. That being said, even if Microsoft and VMware are adopting “old” technologies and incorporating them into their offerings, I think the process of networking using this kind of is fairly described as virtual. If I’m wrong, I’m sure I’ll hear more from you, our dear readers, on this count.

Thanks for writing in!

Apr 26 2007   12:30PM GMT

Netcosm: 3-D network monitoring and performance management tool

Posted by: Alexander Howard
virtual, innovation, commentary, design, interesting, futurism, network

One of our colleagues,  SearchNetworking.com’s Tessa Parmenter, wrote a provocative message to her audience this past week. In it, she commented on a new tool, Netcosm, described by Andrew Hickey in his recent article, “Network Monitoring gets a video game touch.” Here’s what Andrew had to say:

What if monitoring tools got a 3D kick and incorporated slick, video game-like graphics and sound effects to alert IT of problems on the network?

Sounds a bit goofy, but it just might work.

NetQoS, maker of tools like SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer, recently announced its latest creation: Netcosm, a 3D graphical representation of the network and the traffic that traverses it. It uses video game-style graphics, resembling something out of the futuristic 1980s movie Tron or early incarnations of popular games like Doom or Quake.

Netcosm, to put it simply, represents the network and the traffic that traverses it with 3-D graphics that look distinctly like those of a video game. While the tool is not yet released, Netcosm can be viewed as an online demo.

Tessa asked some provocative questions in a recent newsletter, which, with her permission, we’ve excerpted below. Please feel free to respond to with your thoughts in letters to the editor or in the comments section of this post. Do you think this is the future of networking and tech support?

Netcosm targets the younger generation of networking pros, those used to the graphics and sound effects of video games — the IT pro gamer.

What does this say to the non-gamer, networking professional? Maybe it won’t matter because the graphics are doing them a service, presenting lots of metrics all at once with quickly comprehensible images. But could this be ostracizing, or even belittling to the more informed and practiced IT pro?

My guess is no, since much of work these days feels, well, much more like work. Laughter seems to have been squeezed out of our daily work lives — no play allowed, no laughter, no games — so why not add a little joie de vivre to our work day? Isn’t this like getting paid to play video games? And isn’t that a gamer’s dream come true?

In a sense…but then what is this saying about our culture? Maybe the boundaries of work and play should not combine. If you go into this program with the mindset that you’re playing a video game, then you might want to rethink things. There are no pauses, no cheat codes, and certainly no extra lives. Once a failsafe has gone down and the bad guys have taken over your network, you’ve compromised corporate data, not just your self-esteem. And the excitement of the graphics might be tempting. Even the best network admin might want to see what happens, just this one time, when something combusts. Though unrealistic, it’s still a thought to consider. The worse things get, the cooler things look.

All in all, though, we can take this for what it is: a great way to illustrate what is going on with your network. Rather than deciphering vague alert messages, this gets the point across immediately. And, because the majority of us are image-oriented, it makes sense to represent these pertinent metrics graphically.

Do you feel differently about this? Is there something you want to add or comment on? Share your thoughts with us at SearchNetworking.com and send your message to: editor@searchnetworking.com.