While in Hong Kong on a business trip recently, Oliver Goh was on his laptop playing around in a virtual world, when he realized he’d left the water running in his home back in Switzerland. He noticed this because the virtual world contained a recreation of his Swiss residence that pulled information about the home’s energy and water consumption in real time. The gauge that measures water use was blinking. No problem: After his avatar hit the right button, the real-world water valve in Switzerland turned off.

That’s one of the applications of the OpenShaspa Home Energy Kit, available starting tomorrow from the startup that Goh co-founded, also called Shaspa. Created with open-source components like Arduino circuit boards, the kit comes with a system that can monitor and control home power output with wireless sensors, and connect this data to mobile phone and Internet applications. (After reading Katie’s story on another open-source energy tool, ACme, Goh says he plans to add an OpenShaspa device driver that supports it.) Sensors for gas, water and other utility resources can be integrated into the control system, as well.

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Every day, millions of car owners drive home, fire up their video game of choice, and devote more time and energy trying to win gold coins, magic swords, and other virtual rewards than they do behind the wheel. So what if their cars also came with game-like challenges, with virtual rewards linked to their real-world driving behavior?

That’s more or less the premise of the “Eco Assist” dashboard features on the 2010 Honda Insight hybrid. Much the way many video games have heads-up displays that change color according to the condition of a character’s health; the Insight’s speedometer readout has a crescent icon that changes hue based on the driver’s acceleration/deceleration rate, glowing green when it’s most fuel efficient, but turning blue as it becomes wasteful. Like a role-playing game, the driver’s behavior is also tallied over time, and displayed symbolically — here, in the form of an ivy-ringed trophy achievement that a driver can gradually unlock with green-friendly driving. It’s sort of like Wii Fit, but for cars.

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Call it World of Greencraft: At a recent climate change conference at sponsored by Stanford University, Byron Reeves, a professor there, proposed an unlikely marriage of online gaming and consumer smart meters. Instead of just displaying incremental changes in energy consumption on the homeowner’s PC as raw data, what if it were incorporated into an MMOG (for those non-gamers that’s a massive multi-player online game)?

In such a game, your energy consumption in the real world would be linked to the game world — the more energy you save, the more points you get. This demo video produced for the conference demonstrates how that might work, showing different home owners competing to have the most energy-efficient house in the virtual world.

While still a hypothetical game, it’s based on real research of human behavior. As an expert in psychological processing of media, Professor Reeves has studied the high levels of engagement people invest in games like World of Warcraft, which are avidly played by tens of millions worldwide. Players feel an emotional investment in their character, which they want to improve by achieving game goals, but the biggest rewards require a team effort.

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Every time I log into Facebook lately, I’m barraged by friends offering me cutesy virtual plants from something called (Lil) Green Patch; at first I dismissed them as yet another apparent Spam-esque app of the Zombies variety. But the plants kept coming, so last week I finally broke down and looked it up on Facebook’s Applications page. Which is when my mouth dropped.

Damn! This (Lil) Green Patch thing has nearly 5.5 million monthly active users. (Making it among the very most popular Facebook apps.) What’s more, all those virtual plants have raised nearly $55,000 for the Nature Conservancy’s Adopt An Acre program.

Created by David King and Ashish Dixit, (Lil) Green Patch cleverly leverages roleplaying game mechanics for ecological good. Once you install the app, you find dozens of insanely adorable plants and creatures. To collect them, you need to first earn points by sending other plants to your friends. (Who in turn must install the app, to get them.) To keep you playing, there’s a leaderboard tracking how many square feet of rainforest you’ve personally saved, as well as which of your friends are playing and how much rainforest they’ve saved. Think World of Warcraft meets Friends of the Forest.

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Carbon offsets have been available for purchase for avatars of the user-created world Second Life for some time. And now, thanks to a cool educational heads-up display, you can literally see the carbon emission levels of all the virtual cars, planes, and appliances around you, too.

Carbon Goggles is a personal side project of Jim Pubrick, a programmer with Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life. He developed it last month while at a London mashup fest. His Goggles combine a virtual object tagging system and real-world carbon data gathered from AMEE, the open platform that measures global energy consumption.

But what’s the point of associating real-world emissions with virtual objects?

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Worrying about your household’s carbon emissions is so last month ago– have you given any thought to your avatar’s carbon footprint?

That’s actually a serious question: the larger virtual worlds and MMOs require thousands of servers to run, and that expends enormous amounts of electricity. I mentioned this concern in a previous Earth2Tech article about green applications for virtual worlds, especially the user-created world of Second Life, which runs on a huge server grid.

Well, there may be a solution now. Second Life Carbon Offset Exchange is an offshoot of carbon offset retail site 4offsets.com, and if you have a Second Life account you can visit the company’s SL headquarters (direct teleport at this link.) Then if you have enough Linden Dollars, the world’s official currency, you can start buying the offsets.

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What do you do if you’re a dedicated eco-preneur and want to attend the latest conference on global warming? Do you jump on a carbon-belching jet for Bali and hope that the carbon offsets you buy afterward also offset the irony of using air travel at all? Or is there a way that’s significantly less impactful on the planet (not to mention the budget)? Indeed there is — a video simulcast of the Bali climate change conference is being held in Second Life on an island owned by the Nature Publishing Group.

There you can catch some of the keynote talks from the virtual beach resort isle on Second Nature and chat with other avatar-based attendees. Cisco metaverse evangelist Christian Renaud is so passionate about promoting virtual worlds as an eco-friendlier alternative to air travel, he recently joined fellow technologists to choose this and other tele-based systems over flying.

But are these really a viable alternative to face-to-face meetings? While most of my writing career is centered around Second Life, I have to say, in all honesty, “Sometimes — but in the near future, not so much.” Why?

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Holiday shopping for eco-conscious gamers just got more complicated. Earlier this month, we lauded the energy efficiency of the Nintendo Wii, especially when compared to their power-hogging competitors, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3. But as is often the case, that’s not the whole story.

Greenpeace, in a new report, rated tech manufacturers on their use of toxic materials and recycling policies, and Nintendo received the lowest score. It scored zero in the four categories related to recycling and zero in the five related to the use of toxic chemicals, offering, as CNET points out, “no list of banned or restricted substances and no policy regarding the use of vinyl plastic or brominated flame retardants.”

The lack of information, it turns out — not proven eco offenses — was largely responsible for the low score. “No information on how Nintendo communicates with its supply chain,” the report grouses at one point. And “[N]o mechanism for identifying substances for future elimination or examples of these substances.”

If I’m reading this report right, it’s actually not clear how environmentally friendly (or not) Nintendo is; lacking data, Greenpeace has assumed the worse. I asked a Nintendo spokesman for an official response to the report, but so far I haven’t received one. At the moment, then, the only thing about Nintendo that we’re sure is green is its relentless profit.

Katie just passed me word that the latest Playstation 3 model is getting a chipset that’ll greatly reduce its power consumption, from 200 watts to 135. Some Diggers are calling this an eco-friendly move: “By reducing power consumption on the new play station, Sony is trying to attract the Green crowd,” one proclaims. EcoGeek concurs: “PS3 Gets Green(er)“. While I cover games for GigaOM, this is an angle I haven’t given much thought to until now. With the PS3 so far behind in the next-gen console wars (currently owning just 17 percent of the total console market, according to VGChartz), can Sony boost its appeal with environmentally sensitive gamers?

Hard to believe, because even with that reduction, the PS3 is a power hog. It’s like installing a low-wattage light bulb in the glove compartment of a Hummer and calling it eco-friendly. Which game platform provides the real green alternative?

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What does a virtual world have to do with making a real world businesses more eco-friendly? Potentially a lot. Here’s a cheat sheet on noteworthy green development projects in Second Life, the user-created world I’ve been writing about over the last four years on my blog and at GigaOM.

R&D/Data Modeling Platform

In early beta, Linden Lab’s world was conceived to be a model of the real world, with weather and a working ecosystem of flora and fauna. Just before its 2003 launch, however, the company altered its focus to turn it into a user-created content platform, adding features to its internal scripting code (similar to C+) and 3D modeling tools. Its original intention to create an immersive simulation of the earth has now shifted into the hands of the ‘private sector,’ i.e. the users.

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