we had our third luna philosophie on july 30th with bruce damer. he gave a great talk about the history of virtual environments and all the amazing work his company Digital Space has done with NASA over the years. It’s interesting to see how closely coupled that evolution has been to supporting the simulation of space environments. Ames Center Director Pete Worden attended the salon, and afterwards requested a briefing on virtual worlds and where we thought the Center should and could be directing research to move forward state of the art in this area. I’m organizing an in-world (Second Life) open meeting tomorrow (tuesday, august 7th) to have a discussion about this, and will follow up with a meeting at Ames. this work is also expected to go towards a director’s weekend workshop at Ames about virtual worlds, likely sometime in december.
more info about the meeting (copy and pasted from announcement email):
my rough intention is to discuss the future of virtual environments as a platform and their role in human society (think: next 100 years) and key trends that this will leverage and extend. i think this is useful because as virtual worlds in general grow and mature, the opportunities for supporting space exploration will also grow and mature, hence thinking beyond where we currently are to where we see things going in the future.
from there let’s back up and think about how these capabilities do/should relate to space exploration, where any gaps are in terms of ongoing research/development, and where NASA and the space community have a comparative advantage in contributing to these areas. let’s discuss both underlying platform development issues as well as activities within these environments.
our goal here is to propose a cutting edge research program that will both help to advance the state of virtual environments as well as leverage those environments to support exploration and settlement.
some food for thought. feel free to contribute to this agenda. we will aim to start right at 10am and finish by 1130am.
visit the NASA CoLab salons page for the SLURL and details on getting to the meeting.
August 21st, 2007 at 1:23 am
[…] 21st, 2007 I’ve finally compiled a report on the open discussion we held a couple of weeks ago in Second Life to begin brainstorming where virtual worlds are going, […]