NASA – Ciaran Laval

Whereas some people were disappointed about NASA’s Mars Announcement yesterday, I was bloody well excited :

New findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.

Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times.

“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.”

I mean ok, it’s not like Ripley’s Alien has been found but it’s exciting enough. Indeed I was so excited that I went looking for Martian artifacts in Second Life and popped along to Reddit to read an AMA (Ask Me Anything) between Reddit Users and NASA scientists.

Now if you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last few years you may be forgiven for thinking that Second Life and Reddit are wretched hives of scum and villainy where no decent person would set foot. However if you scratch beneath the surface you find two platforms with some bloody great content.

My first space port of call was Hanna’s Martian Colony, which is a user created area with a very good science fiction vibe. I then went to the SL Planetarium which is next to the international space flight museum and also has a section about exploration of Mars from previous missions.

However, alas, I realised that despite Second Life having shows such as Virtually Speaking Science and indeed, just Virtual Speaking (which is more about politics), the NASA scientists would not be coming to Second Life to talk. I’m not sure anywhere in Second Life would be large enough to house them. Therefore I had to go to Reddit, a place I’m not really that familiar with, other than reading that it’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Continue reading “Second Life & Reddit Are Not The Hives Of Scum And Villainy Droids You’re Looking For”

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”