The pre-conference event organized by Ben Sawyer showcased a number of commercial and university efforts dealing with virtual environments for training in health care. John Lester from Linden Labs presented through his avatar in a live Second Life session. He took the opportunity to illustrate various data mashup opportunities in Second Life. While not new to many of those familiar with Second Life, the examples were well chosen. The first was about a virtual representation of air traffic control data that avatars can fly through and interact with. Clicking on the planes would also reveal information about the flight. The other example illustrated the generation of ball and stick models of molecules. Then John Lester proceeded to navigate through a model of a hospital that will be built in the real world in a couple of years.
This was followed by presentations by other major players in training in virtual environments including Forterra, Virtual Heroes and others. The claims about the cost for developing virtual environments by contemporary standards have been quite stunning at times. For example, the Virtual Heroes project which was dealing with emergency preparedness training from a single user perspective was priced at 3 million USD, and the CEO of Virtual Heroes also stated that the product was actually worth 10 million USD. It was a fantastic experience to hear from James Mason Bower CEO and Chairman of the Board of Numedeon Inc. a company he founded in 1998 to develop educationally related virtual worlds (Whyville). His take on usage metrics and why it is important to consider those when designing virtual communities is very convincing. We also think usage metrics are important but it is also easy to get misled by them as well especially in cases where the factors impacting the usage metrics are not well understood. For example, we will be cautious to derive best practices about virtual environment/community design just by looking at the usage metrics of 2D chat rooms or 2D virtual communities.
There were a number of people in the audience who represented the 'high end VR' camp and who, during the panel session, voiced their concern that educators should be talking to them more seriously and go for their 'high end' solutions and avoid wasting their time 'reinventing the wheel'. This view is ironical in the sense that they would rank plastic virtual environments such as Second Life as a 'lesser solution' than dedicated virtual worlds built on expensive high end game engines or their in-house APIs. In particular, one person was almost jokingly referring to environments such as Second Life nothing more of a place for 'throwing in virtual objects' and pointed to the space navigator as nothing but a rehash of very old technology. Actually I felt that a number of important points were being missed here especially when considering Second Life: one, the plasticity of the persistent virtual environment, two, the inherent knowledge networking and community building functionalities within the virtual content production environment itself.
Other members of the audience were concerned about the large number of simulations very similar in goals being funded repeatedly and generously by the government and one in particular wondered about why virtual environment contents are not re-used. We believe that 're-use' can happen more easily in platforms that are by default multi-user and support a wide range of customizations from 'deep to surface levels modifications'. Most importantly, re-use to a large extent depends on the ability of the platform to facilitate communication and knowledge networking between stakeholders in addition to the platform's ability to facilitate the sharing of content and the monetization of the sharing. It is clear that in the coming years we will see a shift in the way virtual environments for training will be developed and some of the major players we see today will have to evolve to survive.
The two links to our presentation are available here
Part 1
Part 2
