Comments on: Scientific Research in Virtual Worlds

By: Michael Vallance

Michael Vallance — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 13:00:33 +0000

Interesting summary. There’s a conference in Middlesbrough you may be interested in.
CALL FOR PAPERS. Immersive Technologies for Learning: A multi-disciplinary approach
First Annual Conference of the International Virtual Worlds
Research Group (iVERG)
28-29 June 2010, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK
Conference Website: http://www.tees.ac.uk/schools/sssl/sssl_events_details.cfm?event_id=2851

By: Joe Rigby

Joe Rigby — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:34:40 +0000

Please check out http://ec3v3.projectchainsaw.com for a showcase of AVAYA’s web.alive. It is based on the UNREAL engine and is capable of accomodating models with millions of poygons, is web-embedded with VOIP spatial communication.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcU1Cwlnu6I

http://www.calebbooker.com/blog/2010/02/10/an-early-adopters-quick-guide-to-webalive/

By: IEEEVirtual

IEEEVirtual — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:40:04 +0000

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is developing the Artificial Intelligence Learning Center (AILC) to showcase the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in virtual worlds, robotics, web, and smart phone applications. The AILC is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, which is the world’s leading membership organization for computing professionals.

The IEEE’s AILC is about more than just sharing AI knowledge though; it’s also about helping to shape its future use. The center will include information on a wide range of AI technologies from free open source solutions to high-end AI used by government, academia, and commercial industry. The IEEE hopes that virtual world AI applications can help AI to be better understood and its potential more fully realized.

Contact Joey Aboma if you’re interested in helping out with the Artificial Intelligence Learning Center (AILC) project in any of the following areas:
* Architectural Design
* 3D Modeling
* Texturing
* SL Building
* Linden Scripting Language
* SL Particle effects
* Artificial Intelligence (AI) research
* AI integration into SL

http://ewh.ieee.org/r2/wash_nova/computer/cms/

By: tomas bouda

tomas bouda — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:30:10 +0000

Great erticle, thats what researchers need to see and know. Good job.

By: aduffy70

aduffy70 — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:55:27 +0000

Randall,
It sounds like you have a fairly specific idea of what you’re hoping to find being done in virtual worlds. From your bio, it also sounds like you have access to some challenging datasets. Why not jump in yourself and see if the kinds of things you are imagining are possible using one of these platforms? We are doing things using opensim today that weren’t possible 6 months ago, and the fixes that allow it to happen would never have been put in place if people weren’t intentionally pushing the limits of the technology.

Setting up an opensim server isn’t difficult – or I think there is still space available in the ScienceSim landgrant program…

By: Randall Hand

Randall Hand — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:04:15 +0000

@George Djorgovski Glad to hear from you :) I heard of MICA and went to check them out, but again I was unable to find anything in the realm of people doing actual scientific analysis. Even in your linked journal, I see only one article that I would consider inworld simulation work (the N-Body simulation), and that's only a research project with no actual applications (yet).What I'm looking for is inworld simulation analysis and visualization of real product, not graduate research or theory. Computational steering, weather model visualization, blast code visualization, even crowd behavior modeling visualization, I've been unable to find anything beyond people theorizing that it's possible.

By: George Djorgovski

George Djorgovski — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:51:22 +0000

Hi, Randall, you may be interested in MICA, http://mica-vw.org , the first (real) scientific organization based in VWs. And yes, we do some real research. Check out some of our publications, which you will find linked at that website. Visit us in SL at StellaNova, and come to some of our regular events. We are now moving to OpenSim, including ScienceSim.

There is a lot of VW-based research going on. Check out http://jvwresearch.org/ for some examples, in addition to our own publications linked at http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Publications

Perhaps you should have done a bit more research? :)

By: Graham Mills

Graham Mills — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:59:29 +0000

I think it’s important to have a reason for using a virtual world rather than some other tool. If it’s a matter of shared presence because you want to bring a team, class or conference together to chat, do some planning, view some computation run off-world, etc then fine. Expecting a general purpose VW like SL to suddenly develop unique and unexpected dataviz capabilities is otherwise a little unrealistic. At the present time there’s also a need for individuals with the ability, time and motivation to put in the dev work and share the outcomes. The community is small and somewhat fragmented. Educators get publications from this, scientists in many cases can find faster routes short-term to the same end. That said, did you work your way through this database https://sites.google.com/site/slscgroupsite/places , this wiki http://sldataviz.pbworks.com/ and read this paper http://www.journal.chemistrycentral.com/content/3/1/14 or this blog http://network.nature.com/people/joannascott/blog/2010/01/22/virtual-conferencing-solo-09-retrospective ?

By: wizard.gynoid

wizard.gynoid — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:17:20 +0000

Thanks for mentioning my E8 Polytope and displaying the video we produced on the Second Life platform. You might be interested to know that I have since concentrated on building the E8 Polytope object in the Open Sim Reaction Grid http://reactiongrid.com/default/Register.aspx and was able there to increase the size of the object to 200 meters in diameter. This is because the Open Sims don't have some of the building size constraints that Second Life does. This object is so BIG that you can fly around inside it, and even explore the tunnel that runs vertically through it. The ease with which the object can be accessed then allowed me to identify the facets that make up the outer skin of the object, and thus I identified a new polyhedron. Even as we speak I'm working on a 3,000 piece "Klein Bottle" and hope to put a skin on that as well. The Open Sim allows me to make this object BIG, and more importantly, allows me to "link" all of the pieces together to make one object. This is something that Second Life can't do. My use of the Open Sim platform in Reaction Grid is continuing to reveal advantages over the Second Life platform, and I keep looking for new problems or applications where the Open Sim can be applied. Wizard Gynoid Avatar http://www.linkedin.com/pub/wizard-gynoid/19/6b8/615

By: Randall Hand

Randall Hand — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:56:26 +0000

@ aduffy70 Thanks for stopping by! :)Yes, I saw your islands during SC09 and was in attendance during the Justin Rattner Keynote where it was demonstrated, very impressive stuff! I fully understand them not running constantly, and I'm glad to hear that the entire project hasn't ended :)

By: aduffy70

aduffy70 — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:53:55 +0000

Randall,
Thanks for visiting my regions on ScienceSim… I wish I’d been around or had an experiment running while you were there. I think you’ve stumbled onto one of the curses of these great persistent virtual environments…. they are persistent. People can log in anytime, day or night, weekday, weekend or holiday. So using random visits to virtual world regions to gauge whether they are being used for scientific research might not give meaningful results.
Try transferring that idea out of the virtual world… in the building I’m sitting in there are about 25 active research labs. If you went door to door, at any given time, in some you’d find people “doing science”, but most would be empty and it would be difficult to tell what type of research happens there. The one I work in is empty today because I’m in my office (surfing the web apparently) and my labmates are off doing field work, analyzing datasets, writing research papers, preparing for conferences, planning future projects, or teaching classes. And this is the middle of a workday. If you stopped by in the middle of the night (or at 11:27am on a Sunday) the building would be deserted – and closed to the public.
I think there is more research happening in virtual worlds then you’ve uncovered in your search. Unfortunately we don’t have a great way for people who are interested to find it, or even really for those of us who are doing it to find each other. That is one reason why I was drawn to ScienceSim… I could do my work on any public opensim grid or keep it all behind a firewall, but there are benefits to being part of that community.
Anyway, stop by anytime… there may not always be active science happening, but I am trying to develop interpretive/interactive displays explaining what I’m doing.
Aaron Duffy
Biology graduate student
Utah State University
http://fernseed.usu.edu

By: Kevin Lowey

Kevin Lowey — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:35:49 +0000

You mention the limitation in having to work with prims and the low number of prims available.

You should read about Second Life “sculpted prims”. This takes a normal prim (say a sphere), and lets you add a special “texture” to it up to 32×32. The “rgb” in the texture is then mapped to “xyz” offsets to make very complex shapes of up to 1024 vertices per prim. A region can have 15,000 prims so intheory you could have an object with up to 15,360,000 vertices in one region by placing multiple sculpted prims beside each other.

NASA used this approach to simulate the Mars Victoria Crater(Explorer Island, 19,61,635) created from satellite data.

The sculpted prims can also have normal colour textures too, so you can colour them the way you want.

By: Baloo Uriza

Baloo Uriza — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:34:39 +0000

It should be noted that OpenSim isn’t a grid, but rather the software that open grids such as OSgrid run on.

By: Maria Korolov

Maria Korolov — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:24:48 +0000

Randall –

With ScienceSim, you just saw a tiny tip of the OpenSim iceberg. OpenSim is free to download and run. If you want to have your OpenSim world professionally hosted, it’s less than a tenth the cost of SecondLife — with more functionality (giant prims, mega-regions, server-side software, etc…). You can hypergrid teleport between different worlds, and have no age restrictions — and no avatar name restrictions. (Unless you want them.) And no adult content (again, unless you want it).

You can run a world behind your firewall, and only have your own staff and researchers access it, or run it in public mode, or have it run by a third party as either a private or public world. You can attach it to an existing world — like ScienceSim, OSGrid, or ReactionGrid, or run it as a standalone grid.

There are several hundred OpenSim worlds currently registered with either the OpenSim community or the MetaverseInk search engine (run by Christa Lopes, the UCI prof who invented the hypergrid teleport system — the 3d version of the World Wide Web). And there are estimated thousands of worlds run in private or quiet mode. It’s impossible to tell how many of these there are since there is no official central clearinghouse for this.

To find researchers working in OpenSim, probably the best starting points would be the forums and discussion lists focusing on particular topics of interest. There s a large OpenSim educational community, for example — centered on ReactionGrid, but much of it running private, behind-the-firewall worlds for their own students and educators.

I track the top 40 grids or so, and their region counts. Just these grid alone are already a quarter the size of Second Life by land area — even though OpenSim only became stable and usable, and only became hypergrid linked, last year. The technology still hasn’t hit the alpha release. And there’s still no decent user-friendly browser. Once it hits alpha and becomes more stable — and a 3D version of Netscape comes out which makes it easier to access — I expect the growth rate to get even steeper.

List of largest OpenSim grids: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2010/01/opensim-continues-to-gain-in-january/

– Maria Korolov
Editor, Hypergrid Business
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com

By: Randall Hand

Randall Hand — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:43:33 +0000

@ Eric Hackathorn Would help if you gave me a way to reach you :) Drop a line to tips@vizworld.com, I'ld love to talk.

By: Eric Hackathorn

Eric Hackathorn — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:35:49 +0000

Hey Randall,
Thanks for stopping by, I wish I had of run into you. If you’re interested in hearing what government agencies are up to in virtual worlds give me a shout!
Eric Hackathorn / Hackshaven Harford
NOAA’s Virtual Worlds Program Manager