Inside Penn State's Virtual Palmer Museum

Inside Penn State's Virtual Palmer Museum
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Thursday, March 24, 2011

Second Life: Virtual World Special


The following article was written by John J. Meier, the Science Librarian at Penn State's Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library. John introduced me to Second Life as a quick and free way of being immersed in a virtual world through the use of an avatar who shares this world with millions of avatars controlled by millions of global immersed participants. Penn State has a virtual island in this astonishingly large 3D universe.

My avatar's name, above, is Speedy Przhevalsky. Speedy is getting ready to change his appearance. I once spent two days trying to decide among a startling number of options regarding the size and shape of his ears, nose, eyes, and so on until there was too much to decide and I decided to send him off to walk, run, fly, explore, buy, create, receive virtual therapy, and eventually convince me that he is more real than I am. The story of how John came to write this article and how his enthusiasm for the joy of play and the real world practicality of doing so is not yet ready to be told.

Second Life's Virtual World Includes a Detailed Alternate Reality at Penn State
by
John J Meier, Science Librarian, Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library at Penn State


The future has made a great deal of promises, mostly through the voice of science fiction films and books, but we have yet to see flying cars or man on mars or The Matrix.  Or maybe we do have that last one after all.  In the eponymous film, The Matrix was a fictional world generated by computers, a virtual reality where every living person existed and some could fly and dodge bullets.  There is actually a computer generated virtual world where anyone CAN fly and interact with other people in another Earth, it is Second Life.

Second Life is a computer program available for free download, which allows anyone to enter and interact in the virtual world of Second Life via broadband Internet access.  Unlike some online worlds, such as the popular World of Warcraft, Second Life has no monthly fees for the basic user.  The money used in game, "Linden dollars", can be purchased with real money and provides the company behind the game with a source of income.  They also lease the virtual real estate to individuals and organizations on a monthly basis.  You must be 18 years or older to play Second Life, though there is a Teen Second Life is a similar virtual world for 13-17 year old users.  Second Life has considerable "adult content", which has areas specifically set aside in the game recently.

Each user sets up an avatar to use in the game, which is a representation of them in the game world.  These avatars are often human looking, but can be anything such as an animal or fantastic creature or even an inanimate object.  The avatar acts as the person controlling
them:  conversing with other avatars by chat, sometimes known as instant messaging; walking, flying or teleporting around the virtual world; or interacting with other objects in the world, such as chairs or buildings.  Objects are created for the world by the users of the game and through a special programming language called the Linden Scripting Language these objects can also move and operate on their own.  This allows for creation of items like cars, clothing with moving images, or almost anything imaginable.

While Second Life could be called a computer game, there is no winner or official goals.  Success is measured in some similar ways to real life, such as money and property as well as respect in the community.

Creativity is highly prized and since the cost of creation is mainly time it is possible for anyone to be successful.  Interactions in the game can even be recorded as videos, which spread outside the game as movie shorts or music video remixes.  Since avatars can also be customized, the appearance of other users in itself reflects a dramatic diversity and can challenge the expectations of a novice user.  Despite the seemingly limitless possibilities, Second Life seems more like the real world than many other virtual worlds and online games.  Most avatars look human and objects are often those found in the real world at their normal scale.

Much of the real estate in Second Life is the property of organizations or companies, which often purchase one or more of the standard "island" sized properties.  They often use this land to create a virtual presence in the world as a way to engage customers, interest potential employees, or to conduct meetings and informational events.  In a global economy and worldwide commerce distance is often the limit, though it has no meaning in a virtual world where travel is instantaneous.

Penn State has a number of islands in second life: two main islands, an island for the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), an island for the Penn State Berks Campus, an island for the Penn State World Campus, and an island in Teen Second Life for the Penn State Admissions Office.  Since almost any object can be created in second life for only the cost of time, it is often used to create a presence for a real institution or service.  It can also allow users from across the world to interact in a similar environment to the real world.
Research projects in Second Life can also take advantage of the large scale social and economic interactions going on between the millions of registered users.

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Copyright © 2011 by John J. Meier. This is the author's unedited blog posting. An edited version originally appeared in Voices of Central Pennsylvania with the title, "PSU's Second Life Encourages Students to Get One."

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Aging Baby Boomers Like Me Need Housing—An Evolving Introduction to this Blog

I have been reading about my childhood and contemplating my old age (which has already begun). Especially noteworthy is the Baby Boom generation. of which I am a part (at 63) born two years after the end of World War II.
Some questions are: Where will we live and die?
It is possible that if I take my pills, follow my doctors other recommendations, exercise regularly, and take advantage of astounding advances in medicine that did not exist when I was born (such as kidney transplants and hip replacements) I could live another 30 years and maybe even live a satisfying and productive life.
This essay (call it a blog posting if you please) is about housing primarily. It is about the kind of housing which my generation will have, the largest generation in the history of the United States. Baby boomers have also had sizeable impacts throughout the industrialized world, a thought worthy of concern at the least when one considers the physical and economic disasters taking place in Japan and Europe, for example.
One out of every four Americans is a part of the Baby Boom generation which the U.S Census Department defines as those 76 million Americans born between 1946, the year after World War II ended, and 1964 when prodigious use of birth control and other factors caused the annual birth rate to fall below 4 million.
The first baby boomers have already begun to retire despite the fact that most jobs in the United States are held by baby boomers. When the members of my generation give up their jobs a whole slew of disaster scenarios appear—whether you go to the U.S. Census Bureau’s excellent website or consult Google’s index and find:
Before we get too caught up in the pessimism, which certainly has cause for rational concern, the purpose of this blog is to suggest that solutions are already being put into place, that these solutions use sophisticated technology ranging from sensors in apartments which tell (the apartments talk) seniors when to take their medication and the world of virtual reality where off beat tools will dramatically change the way housing for the elderly is designed, reduce the cost of construction, and offer hope.
I am awfully fond of hope. I have been reading David Halberstam’s marvelous book about the 1950s (called The Fifties) Many of us in my generation were born nine months after our fathers returned after winning the war in Europe and Japan. These veterans returned confident in themselves, eager to make their wives pregnant as quickly and often as possible. They returned in great swarms—hundreds of thousands of them suddenly crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (let out of military service far more quickly than many generals thought prudent).
Much has been written about what made these veterans (primarily our fathers) so confident that they could support large families, educate them, and create levels of affluence undreamed of in our history—levels that economists had failed to predict, creating societal changes that literally transformed our country.
For example, the year I was born most Americans lived in cities. There were no suburbs. Less than a quarter of the population lived in rural areas (the figure now is less than 3 percent) either on farms or in small towns that served the farm community.
By the time I was 23 not only had the suburbs been created, but most Americans lived in the suburbs.
Why do I go on and on about suburbs? Because the same techniques that created suburbs dramatically, often overnight, will be needed to solve the housing, health and other needs of aging baby boomers. This blog will be looking at the post-war factury-like house building phenomenon known as Levitown, a company which transformed the 1950s with techniques that may very well be duplicated and improved upon by Blue Roof and others for housing to age in.
Right now, most domestic non-discretionary money the United States government spends is on the elderly and disabled—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid being the principal examples. Whether there will be money left for the healthy and the young very much depends upon how we answer the question: Where will retiring baby boomers live and who will pay to support them as they live for decades?
Right now, the country spends about 17 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if current trends continue, our economy will go from spending one out of every 4 dollars for health care in 2025 to one out of every two dollars by 2082.
This blog will focus primarily on two interrelated experiments and the tools they use. There is the “smart housing” (a term to be defined) Blue Roof Technologies experiment in McKeesport, near Pittsburgh There is ICon Lab at Penn State, a 3 hour drive to the east of Blue Roof, where members of the architectural, engineering, and construction industries, end users (the unavoidable word for people like me who actually live in housing for the disabled and aged) and students will be able to review and even change the design of new health care and aged housing facilities before the foundations are dug
In many ways I am an advance man—a sort of scout, looking at the new territory called Old Age and reporting back to other people my age on what it will be like in the decades to come. Other people my age have dominated our society since we were born, changing everything to suit the tastes our parents gave us.
I have had the advantage of being unable to walk for the past 15 years, able to take advantage of the liberating scooters, power chairs, and other durable medical equipment that make a life of independence possible for those of us with serious physical disabilities, equipment that can save the country a fortune by keeping the disabled out of breathtaking expensive assistive housing.


Think of this blog posting as a centerpiece for this blog (to be revised, changed, updated, and robustified). One task requiring consideration is what will happen to the generations after us who will be supporting us, working long hours in jobs where there are too few workers. We must consider the necessity to harness the productivity of my generation and to free our children and grandchildren from having to spend large quantities of the country’s resources while their lives suffer.
Remember hope; we’ll get there.

In the interim, enjoy the work John J Meier, Science Librarian at Penn State’s Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library who describes the virtual world of Second Life in a posting coming to this blog before you can ask What is a virtual world and why do I want to be in it?