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.

Other energy management systems can be controlled via cell phones or the web, but in what could be a first, OpenShaspa can be hooked up to a virtual world created with OpenSimulator, an open-source spinoff of Second Life, to a simulated recreation of your home. Not just a cool widget for MMO geeks, Shaspa’s developers believe that modeling energy consumption data in 3D could make it more comprehensible and easier to manage. (It could even be used for a “World of Greencraft”-type game envisioned by a Stanford professor.) And Goh noted an additional benefit of running OpenShaspa from a virtual world: You can ask an avatar friend to look after your real-world house while you’re gone.

The kit includes a “Social Energy Meter,” which as the name suggests, makes all this energy consumption data publicly available online, where it can be collectively analyzed, tracked and compared on Twitter, Facebook, Google and other systems. Shaspa also has plans for a corporate version. Goh tells me 17 residential homes in the UK will launch an OpenShaspa pilot program this June.

Image courtesy of Shaspa.

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.

These elements are the brainchild of Yasunari Seki, chief engineer for the new Insight. In previous projects, he discovered that a car’s fuel consumption varied by about 20 percent in real-world conditions. “The variance came from different manners of acceleration by individual drivers,” Seki-san told me via email through a Honda publicist/translator. That inspired his idea for a system that not only provided fuel-efficiency feedback, but could “actually help drivers to learn a better way of driving through instruments and electronic indications.”

This general idea took on game-like features after he explained it to his Insight development team, comprised of many younger engineers “who had played with computer games since infancy,” as he put it. They went on to manufacture displays that leverage “the human instinct of taking up a challenge.” If this works as planned, it will translate into hybrid cars that are even more fuel efficient and cost effective than they are now, and an environment that’s even greener.

Hat tip: Jeremy Liew for Lightspeed Venture Partners’ blog.

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.

As he noted, “In Warcraft you don’t win unless your team wins.” This creates an alignment between personal goals and larger social goals, an important step when it comes to achieving real and lasting energy consumption.

Reeves said his concept has attracted interest from utility companies and the Department of Energy. Since utilities are already mandated to spend money on advertising to encourage energy conservation, he reasons, why not convey the same message in a game? The biggest challenge now is finding a game developer who can actually make the project appealing to consumers.

Disclosure: Reeve’s proof-of-concept demo video was developed on commission by virtual world marketing studio Millions of Us, formerly a sponsor of my Second Life blog.

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.

All this activity generates heavy pageviews — and revenue, which comes from the advertising panel the duo has installed on the app. The developers donate a portion of that money to the Conservancy, which to date has “adopted” more than 1,100 acres of Costa Rican rainforest. They make donations on the first of every month.

I asked Dixit ‘how much of the ad revenue is donated, after expenses?’ “Wish that was an easy question to answer,” Dixit wrote me. “All we can say is that what is promised to every user as their contribution is what is definitely donated. We try our best to juggle the rest to make this happen.”

Dixit told me they intend to release three new features in the coming weeks; he thinks both the gameplay and the rainforest cause make their app so popular. “Difficult to tear them apart,” he described it.

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?

“The nice thing about doing it in Second Life,” Pubrick told me, “is that there are already lots of models of real-world objects that can be overlaid…so you can learn about real-world emissions, get a feel for the relative carbon cost of a kettle or car, without reading a spreadsheet.” Here’s a video of the process in action. Among the SL objects already tagged are virtual versions of Scion and Honda cars, and a Boeing 737.

It’s an intriguing project that could become a compelling educational tool– assuming, of course, Pubrick can get enough volunteers willing to learn how to tag the millions of objects that remain.

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.

Jorel Rau, the Second Life Resident who manages the metaverse side of 4OffSet’s business (pictured here with Alexi Mizin, land manager for their Second Life location) said:

“Since we already had the real world business set up, linking the SL end was fairly easy after making some conversions of the SL resources usage.”

The cost is L$400 per avatar (about $1.50 at current exchange rates) and L$50 for a 512 square meter plot of SL land (about 18 cents.) That’s “based on the cost of offsetting the carbon generated by a server which is 1.7 tons,” he explained to me.

The company buys offsets in 1000-ton contracts in advance, then resells that to end-users (or in this case, end-avatars) taking a commission from each sale. “This is NOT a non-profit organization,” said Jorel acknowledged wryly. “At least not by choice. With what I am spending setting it up it will be for a long time.”

Setting aside the debate on whether offsets are an effective way to address climate change for the moment, this is a very clever leveraging. There are already numerous existing green organizations using SL for education and tele-conferencing.

And Linden Dollars are exchangeable on the open market for US dollars, and the community has a proven history of spending their cash for real social good, for another. (Last year, for example, the American Cancer Society raised over $100,000 in Linden Dollars.) Given all that, Jorel Rau fully expects SL users to buy carbon offsets not just for their avatars, but for their real world footprint, too.

(Hat tip on this find to SL blogger Nobody Fugazi.)

Wagner James Au covers online games for GigaOM and is the author of The Making of Second Life (HarperCollins).

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?

There are certain advantages to virtual world conferences. Since you can dynamically and collaboratively create 3D-scripted objects in Second Life across the Net, you’re able to convey information in ways that would be unfeasible in the real world. This is one of the reasons that companies like IBM have been pushing a “3D web” model in Second Life and other virtual worlds. And thanks to a trick of the brain, we come to associate our avatars with ourselves, causing us to follow our unwritten rules of personal space and eye contact — a sense of presence that teleconferencing can’t readily replicate.

But while it’s possible to use voice communication in Second Life, this quickly gets confusing in a group setting. More effective, I think, are multicast meetings in text chat, including group IM and person-to-person IM, making it possible to have several (often complementary) archivable conversations going at once — a powerful phenomenon that SL entrepreneur Gwynneth Llewellyn has written about persuasively. At the end of the meeting, you have an illustrated transcript that’s a handy resource for everyone, including those who didn’t attend — as an example, check out this Second Life group chat I hosted with Judge Richard Posner.

All of the above, of course, assumes you can use Second Life at all, and that generally requires a powerful computer and an even more powerful tolerance for frustration. Even four years after launch, SL’s user interface is confusing and unwieldy, the client software and world server grid are prone to crashing, and given previous history, it’ll be a year or two before there are substantial improvements. Until then, virtual meetings are only an exciting eco-alternative for the early adopters who’ve learned to live with these drawbacks. (And that doesn’t even include Katie, who couldn’t locate her discarded SL account to join me on Second Nature island.)

Update, 4:30pm: A few hours after publication, I got news that Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, will skip the plane ride and address the UN’s Climate Change conference from Second Life.

Wagner James Au is also GigaOM’s games editor and writes about Second Life for his blog New World Notes.

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.

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? An EcoGeek reader links to a fascinating HardcoreNet article from February, investigating the power consumption of the three next-gen consoles alongside the PC, and the contrast is stark enough to make Al Gore drop his fried chicken:

According to their report, the Xbox 360 runs at a peak consumption of 186 watts, the PC at 209 watts…while the Nintendo Wii consumes a mere 18.4 watts at peak. And because it comes with wireless connection and a downloadable Opera web browser, it’s even a limited alternative to the power-sucking PC. What’s more, its wireless remote and crossover games makes it appealing to household members besides the 18-34 dude demographic which comprise the 360/PS3’s main audience, offering a low-power entertainment alternative to everyone.

Essentially, the Wii is the Prius of game consoles. But unlike the car industry, where the Prius is still niche, the Wii is the undisputed market leader, with one forecast suggesting it’ll be in one out of every three homes by 2011. So maybe environmentalists will take up the push for even greater Nintendo domination. Suggested slogan: “Plant a tree, buy a Wii.”

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.

The most compelling demonstration of this is Svarga, a self-contained island created by a British programmer, which has physics-driven rain clouds that water plants and bees that pollinate flowers. There are real educational possibilities here: it’s a simulation of the planet in action. (This is partly why NOAA and NASA have taken an active interest in SL.) Simulations can show various environmental conditions, both hypothetical and real. (It’s possible to XML data in and out Second Life, a functionality NOAA used to model national weather conditions in 3D.)

Presence and Portability

Corporations like Cisco and IBM have bought large areas in Second Life with eco benefits in mind. (There’s a great extended report on some of these efforts here and here.)

A 3D simulated space in which users interact as humanoid avatars can create a sensation of presence that’s convincing enough that we seem to replicate our unwritten rules of eye contact and personal space within it. In theory, then, you can use a virtual world like SL as a cost (and emissions) saving alternative to air travel and real world meetings.

This is one reason why some companies are experimenting with virtual world job fairs, while others are holding internal corporate meetings between their far-flung offices in a kind of metaverse intranet. There’s already some very interesting early prototype technologies that merge 3D building in SL with 3D printers in the real world—another means of saving on transportation and portability costs, and possible business opportunities with an eco angle.

But is SL itself ecologically sustainable?

I’d be remiss not to mention a somewhat interesting debate on the power consumption of Second Life: the data for every 16 acre region of the world’s virtual land is housed on a server, with new servers added to the SL grid in proportion to new users. The power to run the servers and these worlds is immense, and destined to grow.

Inspired by game blogger Tony Walsh and doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math, writer Nick Carr estimated last year, “[Y]our average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.” This provoked a fascinating extended back and forth in his post’s comments, with Linden CTO Cory Ondrejka and others weighing in.

In response to the debate SL user Markus Breuer recalculated the numbers, and came up with considerably smaller consumption figures. He estimated that it is less energy than is needed to drive an average US-made automobile 100 miles.

Still, this debate is sure to come up again. In the end, it’s safe to say Second Life, like any other Internet service that requires a larger server farm (i.e. Google, YouTube, etc.), requires a lot of power. So perhaps the more fruitful question for the ecologically minded is whether the gains (as above) are outweighing the costs.

Wagner James Au is a writer, game developer, metaverse consultant and former Linden Lab’s “embedded journalist” in Second Life