What MellaniuM and the 3D MMO Virtual Real Worlds can do for you,

[Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)]

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