Museum Virtual Worlds

Recently, Paul Doherty and I met in SL with New York Hall of Science (NYHOS) curriculum developer (and Museum Virtual Worlds contributor) Ray Ferrer, along with some adventurous high school Explainers.

The Hall is working with their first cohort of high school Explainers to envision, design, and facilitate the virtual space that will be the new Virtual Hall of Science (VHOS). The meeting/tour participants had a look at what the Exploratorium has been doing with exhibit development in virtual environments and got an introduction to some of the environment and object building processes in Second Life. We played with different exhibits and chatted about things the Exploratorium has learned in developing exhibits there, including the interaction benefits of putting the avatar into the exhibit as much as possible and of moving the avatar as part of the exhibit experience. I’m looking forward to seeing how the new VHOS develops!

Visitors from NYHOS check out some exhibits on 'Sploland in SL

Trying out Dance Floor Color Mixer

NYHOS Explainer avatars being moved in an exhibit

Douglas Gayeton said to crowds both corporeal and digital that Fabricated Realities,  the mixed-reality screening of his film, Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey, was “surreal.” Not just because the simultaneous screening occurred at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and on Exploratorium Island in SL, but also because SL creator Phillip Rosedale was in the (real) audience.  40 people at the Exploratorium watched the film as well as projected views showing the same number of  avatars, gathered in an amphitheater in SL for the screening and opportunity to dialogue with the filmmaker. The audience in SL enjoyed seeing the live scenes from their world streamed to the theater in real life, then back again into avatar space. After the screeniing, Doug spoke about his own odyssey making the film, collaborating with a SL resident who he’s never met IRL (in real life), and shared his insight about the continually changing virtual world medium.

www.flickr.com more images from Fabricated Realities

NASA has had a long time interest in the application of virtual worlds technologies for space exploration research and mission planning. Over the past ten years, there have been many wonderful simulations and 3D virtual worlds which have been created by NASA and NASA partners and made publicly accessible via the Internet.

Recently, the NASA Learning Technologies Project office submitted an RFI for the creation of a Massively Multiplayer Online Learning Game (MMOG). This has stimulated a lot of interest in the commercial and education worlds. It will be interesting to watch this MMOG exploration and development process and see what kind of game engine and content platform NASA will get behind. However it works out, it may prove that a viable and scalable virtual world / game engine platform will emerge –one that the museums and educators can benefit from.

In late January 2008, a group of scientists at NASA Ames Research Center, along with 3D simulation industry visionaries, organized a weekend workshop called Virtual Worlds and Immersive Environments. Paul Doherty and I participated and I was invited to give a presentation about the Exploratorium’s recent work in Second Life. It was a really interesting workshop. There were great presentations by NASA, innovative technology companies, game content developers, educators, and researchers. The major themes of the workshop and discussions were “We all get to go,” “Remote Exploration,” and “Become the data.” We saw several new 3D game engines, got a good update on the state of open source platforms and applications, and saw Will Wright demo the latest developments for Spore, the much anticipated MMOG about the evolution of species.

One of the take-away points of the event was for the virtual worlds community to develop greater awareness of and partnerships with NASA CoLAB, a NASA program which supports online and offline communities collaborating with NASA. NASA CoLAB has a great presence in Second Life.

Presentations from the workshop are in the process of being archived on the NASA Virtual Worlds Workshop Wiki site that NASA Ames has developed.