It was immensely satisfying to see Bruce Sterling commenting on Carbon Goggles in his Beyond The Beyond blog for wired last week, not only because I’m a big admirer of his work, but because his 4 year old Spime neologism came up in the original discussions about Carbon Goggles at EuroFOO 2 years ago.

Sterling’s original description of Spimes make them sound extremely sophisticated and active objects: recording and publishing information about their construction and ownership, usage, possible modifications and alerting owners about the need for maintainence and so on. Our current reality is one of more passive objects which are annotated via the web: despite being able to run web servers, the possibilities for modifying Linksys SLUGs are independently published on the web; the lifecycles of passive books are tracked and determined using services like bookcrossing and bookmooch. Everything is web enabled right now: a subject I gave a talk on at BarCamp Brighton last year.

The current model relies on human identification and administration to grease the wheels of dumb objects. We see a Linksys SLUG and google to find out information about it. We enter the information added to a bookcrossed book to find out about it’s sequence of owners and route around the world. Augmented reality takes a step towards automating the process: objects are still passive, but RFID readers replace humans in the identification of objects, automated processes pull information on the object from external databases and augmented reality overlays display the information over the object in a way that gives us x-ray like abilities. We can see the details of the construction, components, chemistry and recycling options for objects. Able to make visible the invisible, to see the full picture beyond feature lists and prices.

Sterling talks about the “need to document the life cycles of objects” and this was the original plan for Carbon Goggles. Everything from an apple to a supercomputer has an Id in Second Life and so the goal was to compare the carbon footprints of everything over it’s entire lifecycle. The apple is cultivated using machine tools, transported, refrigerated and stored and has a carbon footprint just like an object that actively emits carbon like a motorcycle. In many cases the carbon costs of creating and destroying objects can dwarf the carbon they emit in their use. It can be more carbon efficient to buy a second hand car than to buy a new hybrid, despite the later’s frugal emissions while in use.

Unfortunately collecting data on entire life cycles is incredibly difficult. While people can measure the electricity usage of an appliance and add it to the AMEE wiki, it’s much harder to find out the emissions produced by the entire chain of companies that have built transported and assembled the myriad pieces that produced that object. When I last met Gavin in London he told me that the goal is for AMEE to provide this complete lifecycle picture of everything, but we’re a long way off. Environmental costs have been externalities outside company accounting for a long time. AMEE intends to add this missing accounting, but it’s tantamount to annexing every company’s accounting process and is likely to be just as complex as counting the pounds and pence.

In the future we will be able to automatically see everything there is to know about everything around us and be fully aware of the impacts of our consumption. Right now services like bookmooch, freecycle and bookcrossing allow us to add Spime like intelligence to objects if we’re prepared to do a lot of Spime wranging. Experiments like Carbon Goggles give us a glimpse of what the future in the real world might look like. We’re going to be a lot more aware, which is lucky, because we’re going to need to be.

Second Life has benefited greatly from growing in popularity alongside video sharing services. Many people’s first glimpse of Second Life or a particular Second Life experience is through the lens of a YouTube video. When promoting real world brands in Second Life, videos of the Second Life experience that can be viewed by a wider audience on the web are often an important part of the campaign. Even for experienced residents like me, it’s often a video posted on New World Notes that inspires me to fire up the Second Life viewer to take a look at an amazing new build or experience.

The goal of the Carbon Goggles demo and tutorial videos was to make it clear what Carbon Goggles do and how to use them, but videos are also a great way to make the Carbon Goggles visualisations themselves available to a wider audience on the web. As well as being an ambient augmented reality application that allows Second Life residents to passively learn about real world carbon costs, Carbon Goggles can be used to quickly create images and videos that illustrate real world emissions.

If you annotate new objects with carbon emission data using Carbon Goggles, please consider recording some footage of the newly annotated objects and adding it to the Carbon Goggles vimeo group. I’ve added a vimeo badge to carbongoggles.org to show the newest videos. As well as allowing Carbon Goggles users to share the locations of annotated objects in Second Life, carbongoggles.org now shares visualisations of carbon emissions data to everyone on the web.

2 years ago at Euro FOO 2006 I met a mass of great people and enjoyed a torrent of wonderful conversations, but 2 of them in particular stuck with me. The first was with Gavin Starks who commented that climate change would be much easier to deal with if we could see carbon dioxide. The second was with Claus Dahl who observed that Second Life is a great platform to prototype large scale augmented reality applications as every object in Second Life has an Id and you can give away free augmented reality glasses in the form of heads up displays (HUDs).

A year later I started to experiment with the latter idea with SLateIt, an augmented reality application that can be used to find, tag and rate virtual objects in Second Life. Although I think tagging, rating and recommendation systems have a bright future in navigating the vast quantities of people, places and stuff in Second Life, SLateIt mostly came about as a way to demo augmented virtual reality in Second Life without a large data set to associate with objects in SL.

Finally, last week, the awesome team of Max Williams, Ryan Alexander, Andrew Conway, Simon Willison, Natalie Downe and Chris Waigl helped me bring the two ideas together by mashing up SLateIt, SecondLife and Gavin Starks’ new AMEE emissions data base to create Carbon Goggles. Instead of mapping Second Life object Ids to tags and ratings, Carbon Goggles maps Second Life object Ids to AMEE URLs. The HUD queries carbongoggles.org for emissions data for nearby objects and, if found, overlays a sphere on the object with a volume corresponding to the monthly carbon emissions of the object. In 24 hours we managed to hack together a working system to demo at Mashed and 2 days later added an annotation interface that allows new objects to be annotated with emissions data.

Carbon Goggles has had some great coverage over the last week, but I really hope the story doesn’t end there. The goal is to annotate objects across Second Life to produce a collaborative user generated ambient augmented virtual reality scientific visualisation the size of Denmark. Together we can add an extra layer of information to Second Life allowing people to learn to make more informed decisions in real life while living their Second Life. If you’re part of a group in Second Life that would like to help annotate objects, host Carbon Goggles vendors in world, create videos or images of Carbon Goggles visualisations or would like to help in any other way, please join the Carbon Goggles group in Second Life and get in touch.