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.
Continue reading “ANSIBLE – An OpenSim Inspired Virtual World That NASA Might Take To Outer Space”