I’m having a busy week with birthdays and visitors from the emerald isle, so I’m a bit behind on virtual world news but I will highlight a few interesting looking stories that are doing the rounds.
Hypergrid Business report : Daden awarded £230,000 for virtual field trips. I might need to acknowledge some bias here. I come from the same city as Daden. However I won’t allow that to cloud my judgement. The Hypergrid Business report article informs us :
Daden Limited – a virtual reality specialist based at the Innovation Birmingham Campus – has been awarded nearly £230,000 by Innovate UK for its Virtual Field Trips as a Service initiative.
The funding has been awarded in phase two of Innovate UK’s Design for Impact Competition, which aims to identify and then support innovative technology that has been proven in pilot projects in education, but is yet to have a national impact. Daden, working with The Open University (OU), the Field Studies Council and Birmingham-based Design Thinkers UK, has been awarded the funding to develop its Virtual Field Trips as a Service concept as a national service for schools and universities.
The article further states :
From November 2014 to April 2015, Daden worked with teachers and students at Washwood Heath Academy in Birmingham, virtual world educators in Second Life, university lecturers at a Royal Geological Society workshop, and a range of other stakeholders to understand the potential, challenges and key features of any virtual field trip service.
David Burden added: “Virtual Field Trips as a Service is intended to support, not replace, physical field trips. It will help students and staff better prepare for a field trip, can provide additional context and gives a focus for post-field trip data analysis, revision, virtual visits to comparative sites, and provides a catch-up for those who may have missed the physical trip. Whilst this funded project is focused on UK education there are obvious opportunities overseas, particularly for virtual ‘exchange’ field trips.”
The issue of virtual field trips keeps coming up. Field trips are certainly seen as a good use case for virtual worlds and virtual reality so it’s encouraging to see a company who are embracing the concept.
Meanwhile the University Herald are telling us that; The Sims May Help Boost Real World Health, Exercise Habits. Don’t be put off by the title, indeed the title is pretty misleading because it’s Second Life that is the main focus of the article in terms of using a virtual world to study whether virtual worlds can boost exercise habits :
For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from more than 130 people. They had the participants customize an avatar in Second Life, a popular virtual reality environment that allows users to customize their avatars in a number of ways. They were then assigned to build either a same-sex avatar, or an opposite sex avatar. Another group of participants could see their own image on a small separate screen as they customized their avatar.
They found that people who customized their avatars to match their offline gender — a task the researchers used to test the similarity of the avatar — were more likely to have better exercise intentions and choose better health behaviors than ones who created an avatar of the opposite sex.
I really wish I had more time to look into this! Maybe next week.
Finally I want to look at a very interesting video regarding the size of Second Life. The video has been covered in New World Notes; Watch This: The Size of Second Life Even Now and since then the video has been picked up by Motherboard; This Video Shows Just How Big ‘Second Life’ Really Is. The video was created by Luca Grabacr and I will embed the video at the end of this post. The video has some staggering figures about Second Life, including, according to the Motherboard article :
If these numbers are correct, it would take some 23 days of walking to get from end to end if all the regions were laid flat. As you can imagine, that pales in comparison to the Earth’s girth, which measures 24,901 miles. To walk around the Earth, assuming it’s all flat land and you’re walking non-stop at an average 3 mph, it would take about 345 days.
Still, for an in-game world that’s not Minecraft, Second Life is fairly huge for a mostly settled, mostly player-created universe.
Second Life, is that still around?