George Rebane

• Linden Labs’ Second Life reigned in by feds.
• Contact Lens to give us Bionic Eyes

Second Life grabs attention of the Feds

Linden Labs is the developer and operator of today’s most popular online virtual world, Second Life, in which ‘residents’ can travel, shop, meet, and carry on many functions of the real world.  Companies today hold meetings on (in?) Second Life and some people actually earn their living doing business in Second Life.  It’s all made possible by Linden dollars, the currency of Second Life.  But watch out, here come da judge!

Investment advisor Porter Stansberry writes –

Our government has added a new universe to its sovereign domain: Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world in which people – “residents” – interact with other “residents” via digital alter egos, or avatars. Yes, people really do spend entire days living in this digital world, setting up businesses and earning “Linden dollars,” which is the virtual currency.

Recently though, Second Life was alerted to the fact that it might be in violation of Federal Reserve regulations, as Linden dollars could be construed as competing with U.S. dollars. So Second Life has had to change the rules of its universe…

From its press release: “As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such as an ATM, located in Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.”

And the rest of the story is even more amazing. Apparently, Second Life has seen a rash of Ponzi schemes – banks that were promising to pay 40% annual interest rates. “Some may argue that Residents who deposit L$ with these ‘banks’ must know they’re assuming a big risk – the high interest rates promised aren’t guaranteed, and the banks aren’t overseen by Linden Lab or anyone else. That may be true. But… we can’t let this activity continue.”

So… even in the virtual world of Second Life, the Federal Reserve’s monopoly remains intact. Their Ponzi scheme is the only one allowed…

So you see that this is real stuff if the government is becoming worried that it will lose out on its pound of flesh.  To make things more exciting, now there are additional virtual worlds opening up for us on the internet, and people are already planning an approach that will allow all of these worlds to be connected.  This will let your avatar travel and transact in all these different worlds – imagine them as a whole different universe in which we may live in the future.  Admittedly, the user interface today is a little klutzy, but hang on.  As every year goes by it becomes better and more natural (recall the ‘Matrix’ series of movies).  To understand how this is all evolving see the next entry on Bionic Eyes below.

Bionic eyes are on their way

Engineers from the University of Washington and their collaborators report that the first ‘bionic’ contact lens has been designed and fabricated.  This promises to open up whole new dimensions of human vision.  Hannah Hinkley reports on this project on the UW website and writes –

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes — visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go. 

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the UW have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.”

The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW’s electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center’s ophthalmology department.