Virtual Worlds Scientific Collaboration

Normally, virtual worlds are the setting of many online games and entertainment applications, but now they’re becoming a place for scientific collaboration and outreach, as well. A team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Princeton, Drexel University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed the first professional scientific organization based entirely in virtual worlds. Called the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the organization conducts professional seminars and popular lectures, among other events, for its growing membership. As MICA’s founders explain in a recent published paper, MICA is currently based in Second Life where participants use avatars to explore and interact with their surroundings, and will expand to other virtual worlds when appropriate. As of this past March, MICA had about 40 professional members and 100 members of the general public interested in learning about science, specifically astronomy. MICA is also establishing collaborative partnerships with the IT industry, including Microsoft and IBM, and plans to further develop industrial partnerships. In addition to getting people together in a free and convenient way, virtual worlds can offer new possibilities for scientific visualization or ‘visual analytics’. As data sets become larger and more complex, visualization can help researchers better understand different phenomena.

Virtual worlds not only offer visualization, but also enable researchers to become immersed in data and simulations, which may help scientists think differently about data and patterns. Multi-dimensional data visualization can provide further advantages for certain types of data. The researchers found that they can encode data in spaces with up to 12 dimensions, although they run into the challenge of getting the human mind to easily grasp the encoded content. MICA members from around the world can participate in informal discussions in virtual worlds. In the future, virtual reality will become more synthesized with the Web by serving as an interface and replacing today’s browsers. One part of this possible next generation application of virtual reality is an open source program called “OpenSimulator” (or “OpenSim”), which enables users to create their own 3D virtual worlds and applications. The authors predict that the synthesis of the Web and virtual reality could involve individuals managing their own virtual reality environment in a way that is analogous to hosting and managing websites today. Researchers also plan to conduct a series of international summer schools on topics including numerical stellar dynamics, computational science and others, in an immersive and interactive virtual world venue.

More information:

http://pda.physorg.com/_news168608901.html

http://www.mica-vw.org/