PC Mag have an interesting article by Sophia Stuart : Inside NASA’s Version of the Holodeck. What makes this article interesting is that NASA’s version of the Holodeck looks like OpenSim and it seems like there may be a very good reason for that.
The crux of the article focuses around an interview with virtual world and virtual reality legend Dr Jacquelyn Ford Morie, founder and chief scientist of All These Worlds LLC. I’ll use just part of Dr Morie’s bio to exemplify her credentials :
Dr. Morie has 25 years experience in developing innovative techniques for rich, emotionally evocative virtual reality (VR) environments. As part of this pioneering work, she invented a scent collar to bring the emotional power of smell to immersive experiences, and developed new types of functions for VR, such as connections to multiple sensor and feedback systems to make VR more effective. Dr. Morie spent 13 years as a Sr. Research Scientist at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), which she helped found. While there, she created novel VR telehealth care activities using her deep understanding of art, computer animation and human behavior to enhance patient engagement with these programs.
Impressive stuff, and from the PC Mag article we learn about some things that are a little closer to home for this blog. Dr Morie is quoted as saying :
“In the early 90s, I was participating in networked VR like Dactyl Nightmare, BattleTech, and Virtuality, but they weren’t totally open worlds, they were applications. But I could see the potential, even then” Morie explained. “So, the first virtual world that I really took part in was Second Life.”
However Second Life is of course closed in many ways itself, so, yes I’m getting there, OpenSim comes into the equation. Dr Morie’s work had came to the attention of none other than NASA. They asked Dr Morie to write a technical document on how virtual worlds could be used in space. Two companies were asked to work on a prototype of this. One was Dr Morie’s All These Worlds LLC and the other was Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT). However they didn’t just build a protoype, they built the whole damn thing.
The article quotes Dr Morie as saying :
They were blown away—in six months we built a whole virtual world, on the OpenSim platform, with a number of the activities we thought a crew in isolation might need. We demoed it via an Oculus Rift, provided a book, and made a video explaining how it all worked.
There are challenges to a virtual world in outer space, for a start, you’re a long way from home, welcome to the pleasure dome. This means real time communications with friends and family on Earth is not feasible. However this doesn’t mean that communication isn’t feasible at all, it just won’t be real time.
However the astronauts can engage with a virtual world that has bars, libraries, games, NPC’s who dance in a club, stand up comedians and more.
ANSIBLE will be tested at Hi-Seas in Hawaii before boldly going where no virtual world has gone before.
Whereas the interview in PC Mag is with Dr Morie, All These Worlds LLC also have Edward Kip Haynes and Eric Chance on their staff.
Edward is the lead technologist and has done a lot of work in the past with military simulations and immersive technology, including TOPSS (Transitional Online Post-deployment Soldier Support in Virtual Worlds).
Eric is Virtual Worlds Lead Designer and is a Second Life oldbie, he joined all the way back in 2004. He has also done a lot of work in OpenSim.
Dr Morie was interviewed by Draxtor Despres for episode 35 of The Drax Files Radio hour.
This is a pretty fascinating use of virtual worlds and I’ll be interested to see how it all plays out. I’ll end this post with a video about ANSIBLE.
ANSIBLE is an interesting concept. I covered it back last year as a part of a broader article on the use of VR and AR in human spaceflight applications – see: Why we’ll take VR and virtual worlds to other planets.
More recently, of course, NASA has started implementing Microsoft’s HoloLens in ISS maintenance activities – see my Space Sunday update for June 28th, 2015 (although the first sets of HoloLen headgear were lost in the CRS-7 explosion).
Jacqui’s work with ATW LLC is fascinating, and includes considerable support for US military veterans dealing with PTSD.
Ta for reminding me I’m overdue for a follow-up 🙂 .
Links scare the living daylights out of my spam filter!
The work is fascinating, the enthusiasm is marvellous.
I think this is a wonderful example of the ways in which Opensim can be used. It’s very much Star Trek! but does go to show the power of the Opensim platform that someone has used it to demonstrate how a virtual worlds could be used to provide astronauts with personal and shared space in an otherwise confined environment on a long deep space mission.
I noticed quite a lot of the free Linda Kelly content in the video so all credit to her but I’m sure in the final contract, if ever, NASA will demand more sophistication. This is just a demo though I guess and meant only to show what could be done for a space crew to fill their spare time with Earth-like spaces, entertainment and education. Nice to know about.
By the way. This not Opensim inspired as stated in the title. It is an Opensim world even down to the Linda Kelly content being used. Just thought I would mention that, lol
As I haven’t spoken to the creators directly I felt it was safer to say it was OpenSim inspired.
I’m not sure what they’ve tweaked so I did not want to speak out of turn 🙂