2008 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition

One Year or Less: Virtual Worlds

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
We have watched as hundreds of educational institutions have chosen to enter the virtual arena over the past few years. Early projects that drew heavily on real-world forms and practices gradually have given way to more experimental ventures that take advantage of the unique opportunities afforded by virtual worlds and other immersive digital environments. Now we are seeing increased use of these spaces for truly immersive forms of learning and for a level of collaboration that is erasing traditional boundaries and borders rapidly. The technology that supports virtual worlds is advancing at a rapid rate, paving the way for more realistic environments, connections between different platforms, and new ways to enter and use virtual spaces. As participation and development both continue to increase, these environments are becoming ever more interesting spaces with obvious potential for teaching, learning, and creative expression.

Overview

Virtual worlds are richly immersive and highly scalable 2- or 3-D environments. Most, but not all virtual worlds are multi-user spaces, meaning that many people can be in the same virtual space and interact with one another in real time, generally through a representation of themselves as an avatar. While many popular games take place in virtual worlds, virtual worlds are not themselves games. They are social environments over which a physical context can be laid. The most successful in an educational context are flexible spaces, and as such, it is quite common to find professional development activities like conferences and meetings taking place in settings such as Second Life®, Project Wonderland, OpenSim, Qwaq, Active Worlds, and other immersive environments.

Over the past few years, as hundreds of colleges and universities have begun to experiment with these spaces, and as more educational, professional, and commercial activities have taken place in such environments, our understanding of how these spaces are used and why they are effective has grown apace. While some immersive platforms are essentially analogs to physical spaces and thus primarily used for modelling and prototyping (SketchUp or Maya, for example), the greatest growth by far has been at the intersection of virtual worlds and social networking. The most successful spaces capitalize on this trend, and include common social networking tools such as profiles, the ability to locate friends within the environment, customizable personas (avatars), and methods for communicating both synchronously and asynchronously. Tools like these support projects and educational gatherings in virtual worlds by enabling people to share space at a distance, which in turn facilitates the formation of social groups.

It has become evident that people generally return to virtual spaces because of the experiences they find there, not because of the spaces themselves. While the physicality of the space may excite initial curiosity and interest, the ongoing attraction of any virtual space is its community — the people that use the space. The space itself, while important, is a secondary attraction. Part of the reasons for this is that convening a group in a virtual world is a palpably different experience from participating in other real-time communication forums, and people find they like the feeling of connection. When people choose to simultaneously inhabit the same space at the same time, as happens in virtual world gatherings, meetings take on a deeper dimension, with a great many parallels to face-to-face gatherings. As a result, it is very common to see the average time per visit to a socially focused virtual space approach 60 minutes or more. This is true even when measured over tens of thousands of visits.

Sophisticated toolkits are being developed to support collaboration at a distance within virtual environments. Specially designed immersive workspaces are emerging that combine familiar collaboration tools with virtual spaces, integrating the comparatively new activity of meeting in virtual worlds with long- established patterns of working at a distance. A product developed by Rivers Run Red and Linden Lab, for example, offers an immersive workspace environment that uses the web and the virtual world of Second Life to integrate productivity applications, online meeting spaces, and communication tools (http://riversrunred.com/immersive-workspaces/). Similar efforts are underway at Sun Microsystems and other organizations, indicating that virtual worlds are likely to continue to grow as a platform for distance collaboration.

With more widespread use has also come increased demand for content and for tools to create content. Since this topic was first addressed in the 2007 Horizon Report, we have witnessed enormous development in building tools, climate simulators, physics engines, and the overall capability of these platforms to simulate reality. There is increasing activity in this space; Gartner, Inc. has estimated that by 2011, 80% of Internet users will have an avatar in a virtual world, and hundreds of platforms are already available or in development. Interoperability is the next major goal for the industry; work is underway to connect different worlds with one another for seamless transition between them; prototypes of virtual world clients are emerging for mobile devices and the web. The market for virtual worlds is undergoing tremendous growth, and we can expect considerable improvements in system capability, interoperability between systems, and interoperability of development tools in coming years.

Increased capability goes hand in hand with increased demand for processing power and bandwidth. In Australia in particular, the policy implications of these requirements have hampered acceptance and use, and are likely to continue to be a factor. Virtual worlds and immersive spaces require fairly sophisticated computers and a not-insignificant amount of bandwidth. Those requirements will continue and increase as environments become progressively more realistic.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

Among the many avenues that are now being explored and developed in virtual worlds and immersive environments are how to craft alternative learning experiences that cannot be replicated in the real world, and how to use them to stimulate critical thinking, exploratory learning, and experimentation. Infinitely customizable, virtual worlds lend themselves to detailed simulations in fields from accounting to zoology. Creative applications for virtual worlds are emerging in dozens of disciplines like literature, the arts, the sciences, mathematics, medicine, and many other areas.

Virtual worlds and immersive environments are routinely used for academic meetings, classes, and other educational gatherings. It is not at all uncommon to have someone join an otherwise face-to-face meeting from a distant location by being present via a virtual world. The benefit of being able to be present while physically located at a great distance is obvious for colleagues located on opposite sides of the continent; the technology facilitates travel-free interactions between Australians all over the country, from Alice to Ocean, as it were. Virtual worlds can be applied in distance learning, connecting far-flung learning communities with each other and with expertise that may not be readily accessible locally.

Virtual worlds provide a rich environment for scenario- based learning, allowing students to interact with — or even construct — places and objects of historical or scientific significance. They can be used to create immersive experiences not possible for students in real-life settings, like visiting the Forbidden City or a mosque during the call to prayer. Immersive environments are currently being used to visualize real time weather data, model complex mathematical functions, experiment with architectural models, and much more. Courses from dozens of disciplines are making use of virtual worlds at hundreds of colleges and universities. Flexible learning spaces, simulations, and alternative experiences allow students to take part in activities that are difficult to host in real-life classrooms, such as managing mental health or drug issues as a social worker, or touring a working industrial plant.

A wide range of interest groups has sprung up around teaching and learning in these environments, offering opportunities for networked and informal learning both about the spaces themselves and about discipline-specific content. Research is being conducted on topics like creative identity play and exploration, consumer behaviour, and emerging social norms in virtual spaces, all of which will inform the development and use of immersive spaces as well as broaden our understanding of the ways people interact in immersive environments.

A sampling of applications of virtual worlds and immersive environments across disciplines includes the following:

• Literature Immersive environments have been created that replicate the author’s world, or that of the characters, for students to explore; more interpretive spaces allow students to explore the psychological space of a character, broadening their understanding of the work. A truly unique project conceptualized at the University of Sydney, “Virtual Macbeth,” is one such space that gives students the opportunity to explore and deeply experience Macbeth’s descent into pathos in an environment that simply could not be created in any other medium.
• Medicine The Second Health project used a detailed build in a virtual world to tell a visual story about a unique vision for the near-term future in real life. Created by the medical school at Imperial College in London, the National Physical Lab (NPL) in the UK, and NMC Virtual Worlds, the in-world model of a new type of health care centre was used as the set for a series of videos describing the vision.
• Religious Studies. The Religion Bazaar, developed at the University of Queensland, is a space in the virtual world of Second Life where students can explore places of worship, see artefacts and regalia associated with different re- ligions, and even witness religious rituals. The project gives students the opportunity to learn about religious experiences that they are unable to experience firsthand.

Examples of Virtual Worlds and Immersive Environments

The following links provide examples of virtual worlds and immersive environments in educational settings.

Australian Film TV and Radio School
http://www.aftrs.edu.au/aboutus/NewsEvents/News/gamesandvirtualworldsanewfrontierof experience.aspx
The Australian Film TV and Radio School (AFTRS) has created new Graduate Diploma courses in Game Design and Virtual Worlds that explore the link between virtual worlds and cinematic story.

Koru
http://arwennastardust.wordpress.com/ Several New Zealand institutions share an island in Second Life, Koru, that is populated with native plants and animals and is used for teaching. Koru is owned by the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology; participating institutions include Weltec, Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, Universal College of Learning (UcoL), and Massey University.

Skoolaborate
http://www.skoolaborate.com
Skoolaborate is providing a safe environment for schools from around the world to experiment with virtual worlds and learn from each other in order to transform learning.

VideoTrace
http://www.acvt.com.au/research/videotrace/
Developed by the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at the University of Adelaide and the Oxford Brookes Computer Vision Group, VideoTrace is a tool for quickly making 3-D models by tracing objects in video footage.

Virtual Classroom Project
http://jokaydia.com/jokaydia-projects/ virtual-classroom-project/
The Virtual Classroom Project at Jokaydia in Second Life is providing a platform for educators to experiment with designing spaces for learning. Participants create their ideal learning spaces, which are used in the virtual world and/ or become the basis for a real-world prototype.

Virtual Macbeth
http://virtualmacbeth.wikispaces.com/
An immersive experience set in the virtual world of Second Life, Virtual Macbeth takes learners into the psychological space of the title character. Themes from the play are explored through firsthand experience in surreal settings that evoke the emotions and actions of Macbeth.

For Further Reading

The following resources are recommended for those who wish to learn more about virtual worlds and immersive environments.

2008 Metaverse Tour Video: The Social Virtual World’s a Stage
http://www.personalizemedia.com/2008-metaverse-tour-video-the-social-virtual-worlds-a-stage/
(Gary Hayes, PersonalizeMedia, 5 August 2008.) The author visited over fifty virtual worlds; this blog post includes a video with clips from many of them and a summary of a few observations.

The Future Will Be Better Tomorrow
http://www.christianrenaud.com/weblog/2008/05the-future-will.html/
(Christian Renaud, Christian Renaud’s Weblog, 9 May 2008.) This blog entry makes eight predictions about developments in virtual worlds over the next 3-5 years.

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
http://jvwresearch.org/
This online journal launched in July 2008 and features topics such as Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present and Future; Consumer Behaviour in Virtual Worlds; the Culture of Virtual Worlds; and Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in 3-D Virtual Worlds.

The Metaverse Journal
http://www.metaversejournal.com/
The Metaverse Journal is devoted to reporting news, projects, events, and other items on the subject of virtual worlds — with a uniquely “down under” perspective.

Second Classroom
http://secondclassroom.ning.com
Second Classroom is an online community dedicated to exploring the ways that educators can use immersive media such as Second Life, multiplayer online games, and social networks with students to create authentic learning.

Second Life in Education Wiki
http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/virtualworlds
The Second Life in Education wiki, maintained by Jo Kay and Sean Fitzgerald, features a list of nearly 100 virtual worlds (active or in development) and links to a wide range of virtual world projects and resources.

del.icio.us: Virtual Worlds and Immersive Environments
http://del.icio.us/tag/hzau08+virtual_worlds (Australia-New Zealand Horizon Advisory Board and Friends, 2008).
Follow this link to find additional resources tagged for this topic and this edition of the Horizon Report. To add to this list, simply tag resources with “hzau08” and “virtual_worlds” when you save them to del. icio.us.

Related Tags: MMOG, simulation, 3-D worlds, immersive workspaces