DIY: easy winter trips to warmer places

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After the chilly, snowy surprises of this winter, a desire to be someplace warmer is understandable. You can go to sunny, calming places with a few clicks of your mouse and relax. No airport security, no sardines-in-a-tin-can plane seating, and no serious dents to your wallet.

To remind you what you may be slipping away from here's a video by the Weather Channel's Brainstorm Team about wind chill.

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Places I'm suggesting that you visit are in the metaverse, namely Second Life and Landmark (the game).

Second Life is virtual world like no other. There you can build, script (hopefully your build and not to grief other players), form social bonds, dance, outfit and shape your avatar--the list is virtually endless. There's an emphasis on creativity. You can play for free, but membership has its perks. Getting started can be a steep learning curve, but that's true of many MMORPGs as well. Sign up at the Second Life website.

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Landmark is currently in closed beta, so if you want to get in you'll have to acquire a beta key. Walmart and GameStop may still be offering them--I'm not sure. You can also gain access through Steam (a Settler pack is $19.99). If you belong to a guild, it may be offering give-away keys; a friend who plays may have extras. Landmark interests me in several ways, but mostly I continue to want to see how the voxel-based world develops and what the developers come up with next. BTW, the developers interact directly with the players, a refreshing difference from many MMORPGs I've seen. The blog Procedural World discusses voxel development in detail.

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You can also find these last two videos in my YouTube channel playlists under the title De-stressing in virtual worlds.

-- Marge

Science: Grasping reality through illusion

Think Second Life, OpenSimulator, and even World of Warcraft.

Grasping reality through illusion: Interactive graphics serving science is the catchy title of a paper written by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. in 1988.  The link given here points to a marked-up PDF found at http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/, "Provider of DoD Technical Information to Support the Warfighter." A similar paper, Task-Oriented Collaboration with Embodied Agents in Virtual Worlds, by Jeff Rickel and W. Lewis Johnson is an excerpt from an book published by MIT (Embodied Conversational Agents, 2000).

These publications were likely precursors to applications such as DI-Guy (now a part of VT MÄK) for team-building and ECOSim for modelling community ecology. Below is an introductory video showing how simulations work in DI-Guy.

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Another video shows how crowd scenarios can be set up in the software.

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Another function of virtual world training applies to medical teams. This abstract from the paper, Simulation for team training and assessment: case studies of online training with virtual worlds, explains:

Individuals in clinical training programs concerned with critical medical care must learn to manage clinical cases effectively as a member of a team. However, practice on live patients is often unpredictable and frequently repetitive. The widely substituted alternative for real patients-high-fidelity, manikin-based simulators (human patient simulator)-are expensive and require trainees to be in the same place at the same time, whereas online computer-based simulations, or virtual worlds, allow simultaneous participation from different locations. Here we present three virtual world studies for team training and assessment in acute-care medicine: (1) training emergency department (ED) teams to manage individual trauma cases; (2) prehospital and in-hospital disaster preparedness training; (3) training ED and hospital staff to manage mass casualties after chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive incidents. The research team created realistic virtual victims of trauma (6 cases), nerve toxin exposure (10 cases), and blast trauma (10 cases); the latter two groups were supported by rules-based, pathophysiologic models of asphyxia and hypovolemia. Evaluation of these virtual world simulation exercises shows that trainees find them to be adequately realistic to "suspend disbelief," and they quickly learn to use Internet voice communication and user interface to navigate their online character/avatar to work effectively in a critical care team. Our findings demonstrate that these virtual ED environments fulfill their promise of providing repeated practice opportunities in dispersed locations with uncommon, life-threatening trauma cases in a safe, reproducible, flexible setting.

Here are two samples of training videos posted on YouTube by Designing Digitally.

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While the video samples above are not real-time, live interactions, they do give an idea of how virtual worlds can be used in real world applications.

-- Marge

Virtual Reality: Oculus Rift vs. CastAR

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While gamers eagerly await the release of Oculus Rift in July (you can preorder Oculus Rift DK2, a developer kit, now), problems have been identified with its use.  Wagner James Au at New World Notes asks "Does Virtual Reality Literally Make Most Women Sick?."  His article was based on another one "Is the Oculus Rift sexist?"

According to Livescience "Men and Women Really Do See the World Differently." The report is based on research by Israel Abramov and others.

Today I'm looking at two candidates for VR (virtual reality)/AR (augmented reality) wearable consumer devices--Oculus Rift and CastAR.  (There are others, such as Sony's CES2014.)  From what I can gather Oculus Rift projects the images onto your eyes, while CastAR projects the images onto a screen in front of your eyes.  Both are headsets. And both projects were presented on Kickstarter (and have been funded).

Here's the trailer for Oculus Rift:

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And here's a video that explains the CastAR technology and contains elements of the Kickstarter video:

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There's a much longer video about CastAR featuring developer Jeri Ellsworth that has some interesting details about how the project got started. You can also preorder the CastAR.

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-- Marge