MMO Virtual Real Worlds (VRWs) are a breakthrough technology that will
forever reshape learning, entertainment, and business. You'd have to
try very hard to avoid exposure to the virtual real world phenomenon
these days. Virtual Real Worlds are going to be the new-big thing. VRW
enthusiasts spend many hours a day surrounded by 0's and 1's. It's not
out of bounds to ask how much of this virtual stuff is real. After all,
we don't want to find ourselves in the position of the chairman of the
company who passed up the option to buy Alexander Graham Bell's
telephone, saying, "Who wants to hear people talk?".
VRWs
have too much potential to ignore. But Virtual Real Worlds should not
be used to just automate existing learning approaches and models: A
virtual classroom with virtual students and a virtual PowerPoint
presentation for learning in VRWs is not the answer. To avoid these
pitfalls, let's explore how VRWs work, how they are being used in
education and learning, the major players, and what the future holds.
What do people do in VRWs?First,
VRWs will replace other forms of learning. We believe the thoughtful
application of VRW technology will significantly enhance the experience
and transfer of knowledge, learning, education, training, etc. We
encourage you to examine this technology with fresh eyes and begin by
asking what sensibilities it can bring to the learner that aren't found
in traditional educational technology. So instead of asking "How do I
build a virtual classroom?" we might ask, "What can this technology do
that will enhance the experience that my current learning technology
portfolio cannot?".
Here are the VRW salient points that have been identified so far:
- * The Sense of Self. First, a bit of terminology. Your virtual representation is called an avatar.Your avatar is your persona, totally under your control and with preprogrammed body language.As opposed to games or simulations where people have limited freedom to set their own
course,your avatar can walk, run, swim, drive wherever he or she
chooses within the 3D environment.This experience occurs in a real time
3D environment with true perspective. More importantly, the more you
experience a VRWs the more you and your will avatar bond. In short, you
are youravatar when in a VRW, and your emotional attachment to that
avatar will surprise you!
- * The Death of Distance. Avatars reside in a boundless virtual 3D landscape in which they can teleport through cyberspace from one place (VRW) to another. There is no absolute distance in VRWs except when necessary to enhance the experience. VRWs 3D landscape can be home to
stores, museums, businesses, shops, houses, office buildings, campuses,
playing fields, etc. all constructed using high resolution textures and
constructional detail. The 3D landscape in a VRWis persistent; shut
down your computer and the VRW will be there when you return.
- * The Power of Presence, Sense of Space. Avatars interact with one another through the actions of their real-life masters. Avatars converse, collaborate, attend concerts, and meetings, listen to presentations, explore, visit virtual buildings, museums, art
galleries, or sculptures, VRWsencourage social groups to form. People
often treat computers as they would other people. They like a computer
that praises them. If humans treat beige boxes as kin, surely they can
identify with animated humanoids in a VRW.
- * The Pervasiveness of Practice. Walk around a VRW for a while and you'll come to the conclusion that it's not only a virtual social world, but a world that fosters a culture of collaborative learning through experience;
- * The Enrichment of Experience. Another sensibility VRWs provide is the enrichment of experience. In saying this we don't just mean that VRWs are better. We are saying that it is possible to have experiences in these spaces that are just not possible in the real world. VRWs
provide the ability to exist in an augmented reality or dream like
state. Maybe you are confined to a wheelchair, or bedridden and bored
and suddenly you can virtually dance the night away or re-visit
memorable places, or perhaps you want to interact with your design
colleagues around the world to check out a virtual prototype of a car,
a new chip design layout, a battlefield situation, or a crystal
molecule structure. This platform enables people to experience life in
new and engaging ways irrespective of their location, creed, color,
age, ability, etc. The possibilities are endless and only limited by
your imagination.
Major corporations are creating a lot of buzz around VRWs. It's new,
and compared to the alternatives, it's cheap. However, VRWs answers our
initial questions about how to improve learning and education in
general using VRWs.
How are corporations using VRWs for learning?
Corporations are actively exploring virtual real worlds, drawing on the VRW capabilities for:
- • A new level of always-on 24/7, real time connectivity for collaboration and social purpose;
- • Empowering both customer and employee groups;
- • Making informal viral learning a core mechanism of transformation.
A few organizations are betting VRWs will evolve to enable for much
broader change by experimenting with training, media communication,
conferencing, medicine, and specialist education.
As with most breakthrough/pioneering technologies, VRWs are somewhat a
solution looking for a problem. VRWs provide a platform for
collaboration, community, education, and e-commerce. Aside from the
obvious entertainment appeal, what's new here?
The most
powerful learning technology ever invented is conversation, VRWs entice
people to converse naturally using surround sound and a simulated
atmosphere. Time has brought EAX voice, more expressive avatars, and
even higher texture and mesh resolution, AI, and physics to the VRWs.
At the end of the day, VRWs will afford more freedom as we think about
how to apply them to make learning more engaging and memorable. Much
more than training, VRWs enable self learning. They are
learning/working ecosystems that by their very nature embrace:
- • Flow, balancing inactivity and challenge in just the right proportions to keep people moving through the experience;
- • Repetition, which allows learners to try-and-try again as many times as they choose;
- • Experimentation, encouraging learners to try new things and learn in the process;
- • Experience that is much more engaging in many ways than other digitally mediated technologies;
- • Doing, because practice makes perfect and VRWs are the big practice fields;
- • Observing, because if you're not ready to act now, you have plenty of opportunities to observe others and learn from them;
- • Motivation, because all of these factors culminate in an environment that cultivates teachable moments at every turn. Motivation is built into the context as people want to learn within it.
Where are we headed?Humans evolved to pick nuts and
berries and hunt (hunter gatherers), not to strain reality through
text, words, concepts, and computers. In many ways, knowledge workers
already live in a fantasy world. VRWs herald a more intuitive metaphor
for communication and interpretation of our real world.
The
industrial-revolution approach to learning put a wall around schools
and training departments (remember another brick in the wall). This
"protected" the learners from outside interference and distraction.
Children were kept at school rather than sent out into the community to
communicate and discover 'why' thing are as they are. Workers left work
for training and instilled with a strict work ethic to enhance
productivity. Talk about artificial life! It's so much more effective
to learn from the real thing (3D), and VRWs are the closest we have got
for practicing without any customer consequences.
Next step.It's
neither expensive nor difficult, and it will give you an appreciation
for the fresh viewpoints and concepts that are emanating out of VRW
innovations. It will change your perspective on what is possible today
in informal and generative learning. By using a pre-programmed data
base of 3D objects or artefacts and textures we can greatly reduce
costs and project time-scales by reusing items once created.
Imagination
and novelty will be at a premium when creating these VRWs. The new
teachers will be able to manipulate VRWs into icons of learning using
the 3D to 3D paradigm.
The 3D MMO Revolution.The
magic behind this effect is a series of 3D libraries. Computers have
had some of these routines in their architecture years ago, but never
made much use of them. The interesting application of 3D acceleration
technology is to produce real-time Virtual Real Worlds. The OS has the
ability to back up the 3D libraries with lightning-fast power.
Well,
if you look at the specifications for the video cards included with
most Computers today, you'll notice that they too have 3D acceleration
in hardware and controlled by a programmable graphics processor.
Remember also that CPU manufacturers have been producing them with an
enhanced set of MMX extensions. So it's not just the video technology
that they have been upping the graphics power available on a PC.
Windows
doesn't provide a true set of GDI-like extensions for 3D effects.
Instead, DirectX (basically a games API) and Open GL are supported.
Open GL is the cross-platform 3D API.
The interesting thing is that
all this 3D power has quietly infiltrated the installed base of PCs
over the last few years with nary a notice from anyone but 3D Game
addicts. The fact is that very powerful 3D cards can be had at your
local computer store, so there is no reason every user can't have a
3D-enabled box on their desk in no time. All that's holding things back
is a killer 3D application.
Maybe the video card companies ought
to be out there seeding a few start-ups. They have done a great job
getting a critical mass of 3D hardware in the boxes being shipped
today. What remains is to have that killer 3D application appear, which
will prompt the installed base of hundreds of millions of PCs to
upgrade their systems. This 3D revolution could be good for everyone.
So, who out there has that killer idea?
Tele3DWorld and
MellaniuM Design have a patented technique which creates a 'Virtual
Real World'. Virtual Real World (VRW) environments can be persistent or
semi-persistent. What you create, leave, or place somewhere remains
there unless moved or destroyed as in the physical world.
Tele3DWorlds-Immersive virtual real worlds are inhabited by so-called
avatars (manifestations of the user), that is the virtual
representations of a human or other artefact that can act in six
degrees of freedom inside the digitized virtual real world. Avatars can
be created to emulate persons and as good or bad looking as you desire
them, they can be neat, shaved, and
alert; no matter what happened
the previous night. Vehicles can be driven on virtual roads and in
virtual environments that are realistically the same as the real world.
VRWs can be created for any application; Architecture, Education,
Entertainment, GIS, Medical, Engineering Simulations, Social
Networking, Virtual Conference, etc.
Learning experiences within
a 3D virtual environment can be organized around a script themed to
promote understanding. ("The ultimate goal of the educational system is
to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his or her
education". Each virtual environment can be designed to fit a specific
task or learning process with flexibility and immediacy impossible in
real life. You can set the optimum and most appropriate setting for
each activity that you want to perform. Environments, scenes, and
objects can be resized, moved, and placed virtually anywhere you like.
VRW Environments can ported to and from enabling virtual travel to
anywhere in the simulated real world planet earth or moon.
Exploration
and discovery are enabled and encouraged as in the real world. Ideas,
prototypes, simulated interactions can be explored and tested with much
greater confidence; as the possible damage, risks, costs, and time
required are truly non-existent. A digital world can be used over and
over again; the environment and artifacts always remains constant or
return to their initial condition. Risk can be the guide. Dangerous and
unorthodox exploration of new environments, approaches, methods,
processes, and tools can be given maximum support in a virtual
environment where everything can be tried and no-one gets hurt.
Physical attributes such as friction, gravity, buoyancy, mass, etc.,
can be applied to the 3D Models and materials. Although we are not used
to thinking in these terms, think of applied arts, technology,
electricity, physics, biology, and even sports training. Realize the
benefits?
Fantasy, and imagination can be unleashed. Could you
do so in your traditional classroom? How much opportunity has today's
students got to venture into real imaginative environments to explore,
and prototype new ideas, tools, processes, artifacts, and
architectures? Intelligent design can be realized and tested. Virtual
Real World 3D environments allow the potential for full recording of
any activity, interaction, or exchange whether they are verbal,
physical, or implied.
As a result, such recordings enable the
ability to re-experience or re-use past events for many different
purposes. Recorded artifacts and the ability to manage them at a fine,
granular level will greatly expand our abilities to learn from other
peoples experiences, and to re-use them effectively to achieve our
aims, goals, and aspirations more rapidly. Time navigation is now
possible due the fact that the virtual world environment keeps track of
people, events, objects, and relationships between them. Creed, age,
skin color, and sex orientation will not be a factor in these virtual
real world environments as they allow individuals to be credited for
their true value or input and not for the dress, bearing, or how they
look.
People who carry major physical handicaps or disabilities
will appear as capable and normal as everyone else. Bed-ridden and
infirm people will be able to explore past experiences and join in
tele-immersive groups. The ability to select any type of body and to
customize your own appearance gives many people the opportunity to
express themselves as they truly feel and not as society forces them
to. From past experience the best learning environment is to visualize
the world as it is or create 3D metaphors (3D artefacts) to explain
non-tangible activities and processes. By using precise and realistic
3D Models and animations; learning becomes much easier and less
stressful. The three-dimensional virtual real worlds are the first to
educate, inspire, entertain, and inform, in a world where the students
can learn in a 3D environment.
The emerging Virtual Real World
global economy will have to include resources, products, and services
managed through 2D and 3D virtual reality environments. The 'Global
warming' crisis requires that we stop producing heat trapping gases. So
we must reduce travel to essential journeys using more emission
efficient transport and electricity generation systems. The digital and
physical environments are becoming increasingly intelligent, automated,
networked, and transparent, major new developmental emergences or the
fabled 'concept crisis' will occur if nobody promotes and manages these
virtual real Worlds now. Emergence of the fabled Ouslem bird will
return if no one sets the rules.
We are in the early years of an
unprecedented transformation in our relationship to 3D virtual real
world information technology and the applications. As we are
predominantly visual-spatial and linguistic (right brain and left
brain) creatures, we use the complex visual-spatial and language
interfaces to communicate with each other. Our 2D+ (geo-spatial,
augmented reality (video, etc., etc.) and 3D online virtual real worlds
are as visually, sound, materially, and data rich just as in the real
physical world, this now makes virtual worlds virtually
indistinguishable from the real world. We have also gained the ability
to talk to our computers and their AI helpers, and for them to talk
back in increasingly natural human language with unnerving reality.
These
developments have now produced profound new individual, social, and
collective abilities, as well as new challenges and risks that need be
mitigated. The task of producing Virtual Real Worlds is an enormous
challenge but the products will be persistent and easily accessed by
all; they will be used in the future to record history, define the
planet, and the sum knowledge of human beings. However, the process
must be standardized to realize a cost effective method from the start.
Standardized 3D metaphors will be a task that needs addressing.
Economic
theory, charts development from resources, to products, and services
sectors over time. Structural change occurs when GDP (or for the world,
GWP) or employment in one sector grows to exceed another. Use of these
Virtual Real Worlds will greatly increase the global productivity and
awareness not just of industry but the social interaction between
people, politics, education, and their aspirations.
Although
expensive to generate and potentially very valuable in many product
related activities, 3D models are now being exploited to support
product management, documentation, collaborative review, and promotion,
because they are accessible to trained designers equipped with graphics
workstations. Intra-net access, popular 3D exchange formats, and
affordable 3D graphics hardware permit the download and view 3D
environments and models using a personal computer. Although these basic
capabilities are revolutionizing the entertainment and marketing
industry and have reduced the cost of a design station, they are of
enormous help to non-designers in the creative design and manufacturing
industries. We can now visualize where 3D data is available and
exploited at all phases of a product or service life cycle. The current
technology, identifies the fundamental research issues, and reviews
recent advances in 3D data compression, in the automatic generation of
levels-of-detail for 3D interactive rendering, and in the innovative
exploitation of 3D input devices for an intuitive and effective
navigation of the real-time Virtual Real Worlds environments.
See http://mellanium.com for detailed information and supporting articles for additional
anecdotes.
Skype id joe133952 for live demonstration.
Copyright © Ken Rigby for Tele3DWorld and MellaniuM Design. 2008
