Knowledge Transfer Innovations

One of my favorite Science shows is the Naked Scientists podcast by Dr Chris Smith so last November I contacted Dr Chris and asked him if he would be interested in having a studio audience in the SciLands. By happy coincidence Chris had been thinking along the same lines and so the idea of Naked Scientists in Second Life was born. This weekend Gordon Clark and I headed to Cambridge while colleagues in Second Life tested the audio link. The resulting podcast included an interview with us both. I described the ISM’s tour of the planets and our joint nuclear experiments with University of Denver while Gordon spoke about his recent trip through a biological sim. You can read the transcript or download the podcast here. During the show I said that innovations often come out of different disciplines meeting and having corridor discussions. Whereas there aren’t corridors for the podcast audience to meet up in the real world we’ve built new corridors in Second Life. I had that firmly in mind when we established the SciLands in late 2006 - that we could create a place for International science and technology communities to meet and cross disciplinary boundaries. For example, two organisations that don’t often cross paths in real life, the University of Denver and the UK National Physical Laboratory, but are neighbors in the SciLands decided to build a nuclear reactor in Second Life. That’s an Anglo-American collaboration I first mooted in June 2007 and started whilst at NPL and will be the subject of another blog article. Please listen to the podcast and if you decide that you like it why not join the studio audience at this slurl every Sunday at 6pm UK time (thats 10am SL time). 

This is a great introduction to Second Life and its serious applications, including information on my NanoLands and Second Health projects, and features the SciLands, NOAA’s Second Earth and Oliver Goh’s Eolus One. Produced by Stephanie Gerson at University of California Berkeley and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Second Life Eco Tour Further Information

The SciLands Skyditorium is host to Metaverse U, Stanford University’s first Metaverse conference this weekend (Feb 16th and 17th). Full details here: attend-all-of-metaverse-u-virtually-free and see the agenda here. As described in New World Notes virtual attendees can save travel time, money and the climate! Speaker Christian Renaud has pledged not to use RL air travel for any meetings this year, or to pay $1000 per flight to the Nature Conservancy Council if he does. I’m following his lead by staying at home to attend this mustn’t miss conference. That means I’ll also save on car emissions as I won’t be travelling anywhere this weekend.

If you don’t yet have a Second Life account now is the time to get one. Register for free at the SciLands site and take our 10 minute orientation experience, directly adjacent to the Skyditorium.

Sir Liam Donaldson, Chief Medical Officer, winding up the first day of the Clinical Summit.

We just completed two events in SL at the same time. On a wednesday ….. starting at approximately the time that Linden Lab used to schedule maintenance downtime. Second Life behaved perfectly while the central London region and venue we were holding the RL event in suffered a complete power failure! Luckily the conference organisers managed to find another venue and the conference got underway but late. We were due to run one of the conference workshops at the Future Focus facility in the same London region and simultaneously on UK Future Focus island in the SciLands. Our venue had a brief power outage just before I arrived to help set up our equipment - but that was all. Both events ran smoothly and I am delighted that NPL’s staff took both markedly different types of event in their stride:

• A Fine Balance: Privacy Enhancing Technologies comprised a morning of presentations from the European Commission, the British government, technology developers, data controllers, guardians of civil liberties and representatives from consumer associations. In the afternoon working groups discussed and recommended areas for future research, as well as strategies and activities to advance the technologies and their necessary safeguards. We ran the Web 2.0 workshop in RL and SL at the same time, chaired by Jan Camenisch of IBM, Zurich in London and including a keynote speech delivered in Second Life by IBM’s Paul Ledak in the USA. The objective was to extend participation beyond those who could readily attend an event in London and the SL participants certainly did that. Ugotrade blogs about this event here.
• NHS Next Stage Review: International Clinical Summit  hosted by Health Minister Lord Ara Darzi in London’s docklands, brought together leading figures from a wide range of clinical specialities and backgrounds from the UK, US, Canada and Europe. Discussions focussed on sharing their experience and learning with approx. 1500 NHS staff and stakeholders who are involved in shaping the future of the NHS through the Our NHS, Our Future review. We screened the keynote speeches and discussion sessions in the Second Health auditorium where the audience were also joined in SL by clinicians at the summit and some of the keynote speakers for a sidebar discussion. Perplexity Peccable (SL name) has posted some images of attendees on Flickr. If you missed the Summit the keynote speeches are still available for viewing at the website and the Second Health Campus previews patient-centred care in the form of a multimedia experience we modelled on the principles and recommendations outlined in the recently published Healthcare for London: Framework for Action. The virtual Community Hospital incorporates many movies including Lord Darzi’s guided tour of the Polyclinic - a new style of hospital incorporating Primary and Secondary Care that was widely discussed during the Summit.

Second Life is prettier, especially with the release of Windlight, but Sun’s Darkstar project gives us another glimpse of the collaborative workspace we’ve all been waiting for. Daily builds of Sun’s new shared office environment (called MPK20) can be downloaded and run on a local server behind the corporate firewall. The key capability of sharing applications is something many users want for their intranets and extranets. Above is a picture of me (as a default avatar) standing inside Sun’s virtual project room.

According to Sun’s Immersive Education wiki: Project Wonderland is a 3D scene manager for creating collaborative virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and streaming media services. MPK20 is an acronym for Sun’s 20th building in Menlo Park, California and the first example world created for internal collaboration at Sun and is now available as open source for knowledge enterprises to build and operate their own private, safe and secure 3-D Web platform.

Here is another screenshot from my Vaio laptop. Whilst there are other avatars in the world inside my laptop they were all simply bots. Documents around the walls were created with OpenOffice applications which are open source and run inside the shared space.

A spatial sound server is included in the package but I was unable to test it. 

Sun have produced a good video introduction and here is a link to Sun’s resources for Project Wonderland.

Sun’s Project Darkstar is an online games server, in the process of researching which I came across another Sun project codenamed ‘Neuromancer’ after William Gibson’s seminal cyberspace novel (on which I shall write more at a later date).