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

Creating objects and experiences that tell the multifaceted story of the number Pi is nothing less than serious fun.  Now in it’s third year being celebrated by the Exploratorium community in Second Life, and in it’s twenty first year being commemorated world-wide, Pi Day is a unique opportunity to be amazed by the relevance of the ever repeating number yielded by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter.   Exploratorium staff and SL community members  have created  unique exhibits that let avatars experience, learn about, and contemplate Pi.  Exhibits on display all month with a special event on Pi Day 3/14/2009 from 1:00 – 3:00 PM PDT on Exploratorium Island and at Sploland.

Pi Day 3/14/2009 in Second Life

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

I’m using the term “porting” since it speaks to the process of creating versions of a multimedia museum floor exhibit for online web and virtual world.  The Exploratorium has several examples of interactive exhibits that were designed for the real museum which have subsequently been translated into a form that works in our virtually real museum spaces including our website and in Second Life.  One of the latest additions to these virtual spaces is the exhibit, “Divided Attention.”  A perception exhibit that’s part of the Exploratorium’s Mind exhibition, it explores our ability to pay attention to several things at once.  In the exhibit, you follow a number of colored balls that move randomly and slowly change color to the same color as a set of colored balls that the balls are mixed in with. You can vary the number of balls you must keep track of. Exhibit developers designed a version of the exhibit for the exhibition website that I think faithfully reproduces the physical exhibit, sans the shared social interaction affordances of the museum floor.  This version works great as an individual experience and is fun to use.

SL resident and Exploratorium fan Patti Ceawlin, a builder and scripter focusing on physics exhibits, decided to adapt the Divided Attention exhibit for SL.  She got the essence of the exhibit concept and built a dynamic, interactive 3D version which can be seen on Exploratorium Island.  Visitors to the exhibit have commented that it’s a lot harder to keep track of a greater number of balls moving in 3D space as opposed to 2D space like the versions of the exhibit on the website and in the museum.  The SL exhibit allows the avatar to control her/his position in relation to the plane the balls are moving in by moving the avatar or a camera POV.  I’m not sure if or how this affects a visitor’s ability to keep track of the moving balls, but that presents an interesting twist and something we’ll have to observe.

Divided Attention Exhibit on Exploratorium Island

A new event involving virtual worlds currently being planned at the Exploratorium is Fabricated Realities.  This will be a mixed-reality event that takes place at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and on Exploratorium Island in Second Life.  The Exploratorium’s Cinema Arts Program will present a screening of Douglas Gayeton’s machinima documentary, Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey at 2pm PST on January 24, 2009.  Doug, who will be part of the public program at the museum, will also appear in SL via live webcast.  The idea is to bring the film, speaker, and audience together from the two spaces.  We hope the interaction will work and are planning to include a projection screen in the physical theater that will show the audience in the amphitheater in SL.  We’ll encode and stream the movie into SL in real time so that the audience there will see the same thing as the audience at the museum, with just a slight delay.  We’ll plan to allow the SL audience to ask questions of the filmmaker and to have live video of his reponse streamed back into SL.  The technical setup to manage the video streams and two-way communication between the real and the virtual is a little dicey (more on that in a follow-up post), but we’ll be leveraging our experience with routing audio/video signal for presentation and live video encoding/streaming.

On August 1, 2008, the Exploratorium will webcast a total eclipse of the sun as seen from remote Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China near the Mongolian border.  Our scientists and media development crew will capture dramatic telescopic images of the eclipse, which will be webcast via the Exploratorium’s website and in Second Life. The program will be hosted by Exploratorium scientists Dr. Robert Semper and Dr. Paul Doherty and feature NASA Heliospheric physicist Dr. Eric Christian who will show some of the latest imagery of the sun from NASA’s SOHO and STEREO missions, and explain how the solar wind can impact us here on Earth.

On Exploratorium Island in Second Life, we’ll host an eclipse viewing event featuring the live webcast, interactive exhibits, and music.  You can view the eclipse webcast in the amphitheater on Exploratorium island as well as other sims including Sploland, Spindrift, Nanotechnology, UK Future Focus, Science School, and SciLands.

Avatars watch a total solar eclipse in Second Life

Putting on this event in SL is presenting some different challenges than the first time we brought a total solar eclipse webcast there in March 2006.  It’s a great opportunity to continue to learn about putting on museum events in a virtual world.  I’ll be sharing more details of the event as well as details of those challenges in the coming days.