The Mediverse team have been busy migrating to OpenSim over the past few months. We are still maintaining a presence in Second Life, on Nemesis sim, but the lower cost of operation in OpenSim, and some of the additional advantages – like 45,000 prims per region, and the ability to spawn bots, have led us to experiment with OpenSim, like many colleges and Universities have already done.
We’ll make more announcements as we bring things on stream.
Virtual worlds and virtual reality are in the news more and more nowadays. Gradually, the real world is waking up to some of the uses of the virtual, and more and more projects are running in virtual worlds.
After their experiments in causing out-of-the-body experiences in 2007, Olaf Blanke at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, has been experimenting with avatar experiences in virtual worlds, projecting people into avatars of the opposite sex, and projecting people into virtual environments and getting them to explore. The Guardian says that Blanke reported that, even when moving in a virtual scene, volunteers felt as if whatever happened to the avatar happened to them.
“They start thinking that the avatar was their own body,” said Blanke.
This is a very strong illusion, as reported earlier by Anthony Steed, a computer scientist at University College, London, who has studied the rubber hand illusion, and how it works in virtual worlds.
In the illusion a false hand is placed on a table, while the person’s real hand is not visible. Both are stroked at the same time, and people gradually come to feel a sensation in the rubber hand, even when it is the only one being stroked. People relate so strongly to their avatar in virtual worlds, that much of the set-up work normally needed to make the trick work is unnecessary, as the New Scientist reported last year.
This has been extended to using a similar illusion to trick the brain into believing an arthritic hand is better than it really is – by showing a different hand in place of the arthritic one. Maybe that, too, could be extended to the virtual world.
It may be that we are hard-wired to regard the things that we see as “real” even when they are on a screen. As Byron Reeves, professor at Stanford University pointed out some time ago, if stone age man had paused to wonder “is the flint arrow coming towards me real or not?” before reacting, he’d have been killed pretty quickly. For millions of years, our lives have depended upon us reacting to the things that we see in the world about us and not questioning whether they were real or not.
Now that we can operate in virtual worlds which are not real, our consciousness is having a hard time catching up – something which can assist us in making immersive environments and engaging games, and which makes virtual environments compelling places to learn.
The Internet Week Europe event at Kentish Town Health Centre last night seemed to be a great success. I enjoyed the other presentations very much. After introductions from Simon Brownleader and Roy MacGregor, there was a fascinating introduction to “Today I learned that…”, as new twitterish service which is mainly aimed at Doctors, which enables them to write short messages telling their followers what they have learned.
Jon Brassey explained that the messages are not restricted to 180 characters, unlike Twitter, although doctors can hashtag their tweets to TILT if they wish to, and they will be incorporated into their TILT archive. It offers other functionality too; doctors can choose to follow others, and if they learn from other people’s TILTs, they can flag them up and store those in their own archive.
It seems like a simple but brilliant idea. One of the doctors involved in the pilot said that she had, for example, learned that it may be dangerous to do the hip dysplasia test on a baby over three months old, and decided to TILT that. Obviously if that is something that a lot of GPs don’t know, it could be very useful to have it flagged up.
The talk marked the official launch of the service which can be found here.
Ann-Marie Cunningham, from Cardiff, gave a talk on the changes to our ideas of what is private and what is public, with the coming of the internet, and how doctors and medical staff need to consider their responsibilities for keeping the confidentiality of their patients. I knew that doctors must avoid identifying a patient and revealing information about them, but I hadn’t realised that they had been instructed not to reveal information that does not identify an individual. It’s hard to see how tv and radio doctors can survive if they aren’t even allowed to say “I had a patient once, who…”!
The conclusion is that we are still learning what public and private means in terms of the information on the web.
I (Fee) was the next speaker. I had to give my talk seated because my back was giving me some problems. I covered the role playing builds, simulations, information displays and explanatory builds, and the many collaborative projects. The audience seemed to enjoy the whirlwind tour of the medical builds in Second Life, and came up with some interesting questions. I was asked if there were any builds for dyslexics in Second Life. I don’t know of any specific builds, but I am sure there will be a support group.
I’ve since found a couple of links. One is to Elouise Pasteur’s website, who is a well-known scripter and developer in Second Life, who has information on her website about working with people with dyslexia although… it’s a lot of words!
Also there is some information for teachers on the use of virtual worlds for working with dyslexic children, by Shiv on Education. I will search SL later, and add SLURLs to any builds I find which may be of interest.
One of the visitors from BT health asked if the role playing and simulations could be adapted for local protocols, which was a tough question to answer succinctly (they can). A patient representative from the surgery asked if there was a possibility of using Second Life for patients, to enable them to gain advice about whether to go to the doctor or not. That is a difficult question to answer, because although there is a lot of information in Second Life, most of the medical information is currently aimed at medical students or doctors and not the patients.
Finally, after my talk the resident artists at the Kentish Town Health Centre gave a quick insight into their work. Sybella Perry who has been working there since July, told us about her blog, and how she is recording things which often the public don’t see; the process of creation and the steps towards a finished work of art. She played us a short sequence of sound which hd been recorded at an origami workshop, which was transformed by being recorded with special contact microphones on the tables. Then she played us a work in progress which matched video of a cliff face of warm sandstone and of footprints in sand on a beach with the audio from a dance workshop for Parkinson’s patients, at the centre. You can see the same film on her blog here.
It is a work in progress, and currently doesn’t have any visuals from the dance workshop, and so it had a dream-like quality, confusing image and sound. Sybilla talked about the process of creation, and how it was necessary to gain the confidence of the people she was recording, and to ensure that she had their trust before she tries to take images of the group to mix into the end result. I thought it was very interesting that blogging is allowing her audience to see the creative process as it happens, and I think that must make it easier for the patients in the classes she is observing to feel that they are part of that process, too.
Two of the artists in residence at James Wigg, are Magda Segal & Bunny Schendler. One is a stills photographer, and the other is an animator, and together they are working on a fascinating project to record 24 hours in the life of Camden High Street from Camden Town tube station to Kentish Town tube station, called Timelines. They are using stills photography to record the journey, and the animated film will be about 12 minutes long, which is more or less the time it takes to walk from one to the other.
They showed us a clip of the work in progress, which is currently about two minutes long, which was very absorbing, and so interesting that the audience asked to see it again. It’s an animated film created from stills, and it works very well. People wait outside the tube station at 5.30am for the gates to open, and litter covers the streets. The darkness lifts and a canal boat is guided through the lock, the barge owner carefully closing one half of the lock gate behind him…and we watch it open again as he descends the steps and jumps onto his barge. I can see that a year’s filming is going to capture things that people don’t normally see in the course of a journey up the High Street and many things which happen every day. The project is going to make the residents of Camden look at their High Street in a whole new way, and it made me hungry to see the finished film. I think it will be a great success.
It was a very interesting and stimulating evening, and one which I was glad to have attended as part of the first Internet Week Europe. There are still two day to go, so you may find other interesting events as part of the week here.
Fee Berry writes: This week is the first Internet Week Europe, and events are being held all over London to celebrate. Tomorrow evening, I will be giving a short introduction to the uses of Virtual Worlds for medical training at the Kentish Town Health Centre. They have a number of different activities going on in the fantastic building which is their home, which are collectively called “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”.
I have been exploring the medical builds in Second Life to get up-to-date pictures and to look for new uses for virtual worlds in Education. There are some old builds which are still going strong, like Ohio States innovative fly-through fairground ride of a testis, and the virtual hallucinations build which lets one experience schizophrenia. I notice that many builds have disappeared, or in the case of the heart murmur build, are living on borrowed time on abandoned land.
I’m wondering how many of the builds have been transported to OpenSim, and how we are going to be able to locate favourites once they have ported over there. It’s an increasing problem inside SL and outside it, and can only get worse as Hypergrid communication becomes more and more practical: finding the things and the people you want.
I’ll be writing about OpenSim and going on a detective trail to see if I can find the builds, in the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, back to writing my talk!
Good, bad and indifferent research is being done all the time into the uses of virtual worlds and their comparisons with the real world. Much of the research which is quoted in articles about virtual world builds is anecdotal and wouldn’t pass the rigorous tests that scientific research has to undergo, but is interesting none the less. For example, when Dr Dobbs compared the attendance and engagement in their virtual world conferences with the attendance and engagement in their real-life conferences, it seemed that people were willing to spend several times more hours in world than in real life.
In some ways this seems to be illogical… people have travelled long distances often and invested a lot of money in a real-world conference, and so one would expect them to make the most of it. But maybe this is the point: people feel that they have already invested a lot of time and effort in a real world conference before thy even get to it, whereas those who attend at a virtual conference will be ready to devote all their spare time and energy to engagement in the business of the conference.
There are other differences too. At a real-life conference, you are a passive receptor of the information and structure of the conference. In virtual worlds, it is possible for people to share information, to chat in text while someone is talking without interrupting them, and to put up boards with powerpoints, video, web pages or still images if those reinforce what they are saying. It can become a very rich experience indeed.
Although computer games have a bad press, the importance of games for learning and the importance of enjoying what you are doing is also the subject of many research projects.
Companies who are looking to use virtual worlds for training for many different things are examining the ways in which virtual worlds can be harnessed to achieve their aims. The advantages for them are that it is possible to offer training around the clock, people can spend as long as they feel they need, to be trained and they may engager more fully in the virtual world with the training than would be possible in the real world.
A trivial example which was recently reported by Hypergrid Business, is the use of Second Life for lifestyle training. They conducted research with two comparable groups undergoing training in the virtual world and training in the real world. The drop out rate for the virtual world was lower and the success of the training in the virtual world appeared to be higher. This was repeated again and the results were the same.
One interesting aspect that was reported upon was that the dropouts in the virtual training came at the beginning when people were unable to cope with the technology, but the retention rate was high after that hiccup, whereas the dropouts in the real life version were steady throughout the course.
Another project which reports much higher retention rates in virtual worlds is the subject of another post here today, the Missouri substance abuse project, where teenagers were three times as likely to complete the course with good results in the virtual world than in the real world.
I will add information and links to this posting in the future.
A Mediverse video about our nurse education project in Second Life, is now available on Youtube. What distinguishes Mediverse’s project from other nurse education projects is the integration of head-up display in world, and web-based assessment tools, in one seamless whole. Please feel free to contact us to ask questions!
Hypergrid business blog is a useful and interesting blog about the use of Open Sim, and reports that a big grant has been given to a treatment centre in Missouri for developing a project for substance abuse treatment. They report that while 30-35% of people successfully complete the program in real life, in the virtual world the number rises to 90%. In fact the engagement for teenagers is so great that they are completing more hours and time in world than they are required to do. It’s a long and detailed article with a lot of information in it.
This is the new Mediverse blog, in which we will post about developments to the Mediverse training system, and items of interest to anyone interested in using virtual worlds for medical training projects.
