At the DLF Fall Forum, we unfortunately missed a presentation from NASA’s Daniel Laughlin, who wound up stuck in traffic on I95 for way too many hours (not the worst travel incident of the Forum, but in the top 5). Nonetheless, Dan kindly sent his slides, which we are making available via SlideShare.
Dan and I first met at a conference at the Hewlett Foundation, sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation and the Federation of American Scientists. When I saw Dan across the room, sitting in front of a large Windows laptop with a very impressive-size screen, with a back littered by WOW and gaming stickers, I thought Kaufman had found a gamer to attend the summit. They had; I just didn’t imagine he worked at Goddard Space Flight Center.
NASA is interested in immersive synthetic environments (ISEs) because they have the capacity of providing greatly enriched educational opportunities and outreach. The organization maintains an Immersive Synthetic Environment Research (NISER) team that has members from NASA sites across the country; it meets monthly. NASA uses SecondLife for much of its internal collaboration; as Dan notes, there were virtual environments others before SL, and others will follow, but right now Second Life is the best commercial, widely available ISE for education, training and collaboration.
The power and intent of NASA’s vision became more real to me after I watched a YouTube video that Dan forwarded entitled “NASA’s CoLab Second Life Mission.” The vision of earth-bound avatars being able to converse in real-time with a next-generation Moon- or Mars-mission astronaut, asking questions within an ISE about what rests on the surface or is flowing across the skies of a distant body in our solar system is an incredibly compelling one, all the more so because it is not beyond the realm of possibility in the next decade.
Dan says:
When NASA returns to the moon in 2020, the people of Earth will be able to share that experience. Not just through the passive medium of television like the last time we went to the moon, but through the virtual experience of a persistent immersive synthetic environment. Kids are starting to use PISE at a very early age already. Nickelodeon and Disney each run their own online worlds. The children who play in those worlds are going to expect more from both their work and play as adult than 2D interactivity. They will expect 3D the same way people today expect cable television and those in the 1970s expected color television.
Dan’s slides point out that there are probably between 20-30 million Americans who are involved with a ISE, whereas only around 26 million play golf (I would personally wager there is not a lot of overlap between those communities, but who knows).
Immersive environments are inherently social; they provide a sense of place and togetherness that more closely approximates the “real” than any other technology we have been able to generate, and yet their evolution is just beginning. We are on the threshold of being able to generate new virtual environments with alternative physics engines, flexible representations, radically different bandwidth requirements, and interoperability.
NASA will generate a Learning Technologies call in FY2008 to help deliver on their eEducation roadmap. Integral to the roadmap is a set of components that will help build a firm foundation for an immersive, synthetic 3D Web application for NASA science education: a Massively Multi-player Online Game (MMOG) that acts as a front-end to a larger synthetic environment; a developers toolkit to support expansion; and a powerful physics engine to support accurate science and engineering concepts and challenges. These components are intended to support both formal and informal education.
This is a great thing to see come out of NASA; they are to be applauded for their continuing embrace of distant horizons that will be our near-lying shores before we can possibly imagine.