Human Mosaic Systems Blog

"Wicked Problems and MUVEs"

"Wicked Problems and MUVEs"

vimeo link to video presentation: http://vimeo.com/27602406

In designing instructional virtual worlds, there are 3 levels of instruction that are geared to address the “Wicked Problems” in Multi-User Virtual Environments : those unpredictable consequences of human interactions that *are* complex systems!

Learners today need to learn skills they can utilize in ever changing contexts that they have never seen before or even imagined, and be able to utilize those skills in collaborative environments.

Today, learning environments need to incorporate an understanding of
* group dynamics;
* complexity (those unseen dynamics that have dramatic impact when you least expect it!);
* and collaboration skills.

Virtual Simulations and Complex Human Dynamics_Human Mosaic Systems, LLC

Video overview of Human Mosaic Systems, LLC's products and services:

  

YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBXBgnSTcOw

Who we are

• HMS is a Solution Provider in Second Life that also designs virtual environments with an eye towards the psychology of the avatar, group dynamics, and the virtual space. 
• We help clients navigate Living Human Systems and their complex dynamics through design and facilitation. We focus on the 4 core aspects of Complex Human Systems:
  • Group Dynamics,
  • Building Relationships,
  • Identity, and
  • Storytelling.
• HMS creates powerful immersive environments and teaches individuals interpersonal skills that enable self-organization/ collaboration, and a deeper understanding about their own perspectives or views of reality, as well as those others.
• We build environments that understand the underlying complex human dynamics and help facilitate the building of relationships, facilitate bonding, and greater understanding. All of which helps individuals collaborate as they make decisions in complex ever changing environments.
• HMS provides rich storytelling environments to enable individuals to build community, share perspectives and obtain greater understanding about ourselves and our views of reality. This greater awareness leads to a change in the way we think, impacting our interactions with others.

What we do

• We at Human Mosaic Systems, LLC design immersive environments and provide scalable modules that facilitate communication and group dynamics skills, enabling creativity, self-organization, collaboration, flexibility, and deeper understanding of human dynamics.
  • Our program and builds give people the opportunity
    • to practice their skills,
    • to learn as the environment changes, and
    • to adapt their perspectives and behavior to meet those changes using a scalable learning system and facilitative group process that enables greater understanding of themselves and others, expanding perspectives, and making decisions about how to proceed in an ever changing complex environment.
• In addition, with underpinnings steeped in counseling psychology principles we facilitate complex group dynamics through a simulation process that is scalable and able to help individuals and groups make decisions, develop social networks/relationships, and obtain emotional commitment while working together in complex environments.
  • The Heart of the Process is the self-organizing key found in emergency response situations.
  • It can also be used in a broad array of situations ranging from Project Reviews, Organizational Change, Individual Leadership Coaching, Community Development, to Strategic Leadership.
  • Paired with immersive 3D simulations and/or Storytelling, the process allows participants to gain a deeper kinetic understanding of their views of reality, as well as to understand and accept others' views. The module allows you to add more interactive related simulations to gain deeper understanding of the principles and dynamics at play, as well as an ability to practice what you have learned and reflected upon.

DARPA wants to know how stories influence human behavior _ By Layer 8 on Thu, 02/10/11

 

Link: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/thought-police-darpa-wants-know-how-stories-i

DARPA in a nutshell wants to know about how stories or narratives or whatever might like to call them influence human behavior.  To this end, DARPA is hosting a workshop called "Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET): Analysis and Decomposition of Narratives in Security Contexts," on Feb. 28^th to discuss the topic. 

"Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency," DARPA stated. "Ascertaining exactly what function stories enact, and by what mechanisms they do so, is a necessity if we are to effectively analyze the security phenomena shaped by stories. Doing this in a scientifically respectable manner requires a working theory of narratives, an understanding of what role narratives play in security contexts, and examination of how to best analyze stories-decomposing them and their psychological impact systematically."

According to DARPA, STORyNET has three goals:

1. To survey narrative theories. These empirically informed theories should tell us something about the nature of stories: what is a story? What are its moving parts? Is there a list of necessary and sufficient conditions it takes for a stimulus to be considered a story instead of something else? Does the structure and function of stories vary considerably across cultural contexts or is there a universal theory of story?

2. To better understand the role of narrative in security contexts. What role do stories play in influencing political violence and to what extent? What function do narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how do they influence a person or group's choice of means (such as violence) to achieve political ends? How do stories influence bystanders' response to conflict? Is it possible to measure how attitudes salient to security issues are shaped by stories?

3. To survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools. How can we take stories and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion? What analytic approaches or tools best establish a framework for the scientific study of the psychological and neurobiological impact of stories on people? Are particular approaches or tools better than others for understanding how stories propagate in a system so as to influence behavior?

Whether or not STORyNET goes beyond deep discussions at a workshop remains to be seen, but DARPA is certainly interested in developing such thought machines.  In 2008 it said it wanted to build avant-garde artificial intelligence (AI) software known as a Machine Reading Program (MRP) that can capture knowledge from naturally occurring text and transform it into the formal representations used by AI reasoning systems.

For example, all of the text in the World Wide Web will become available for automating the monitoring and analysis of technological and political activities of nations; plans, rhetoric, and activities of transnational organizations; and scientific discovery within various disciplines, DARPA stated. As digitized text from library books becomes available, new avenues of cultural awareness and historical research will be enabled. With truly general techniques for effectively handling the incompatibilities between natural language and the language of formal inference, a system could, in principal, be constructed that maps between natural and formal languages in any subject domain, DARPA said.

DARP also has its Cyber Genome Program it hopes will develop technologies that will help law enforcement types collect, analyze and identify all manner of digital artifacts.

The objective of the four-year program is to produce revolutionary cyber defense and investigatory technologies for the collection, identification, characterization, and presentation of properties and relationships from software, data, and/or users to support law enforcement, counter intelligence, and cyber defense teams, DARPA stated. Such digital artifacts may be collected from computers, personal digital assistants, and/or distributed information systems such as cloud computers, from wired or wireless networks, or collected storage media.  The format may include electronic documents or software to include malware, DARPA stated.

The role of embodiment in student success in virtual worlds by Mark Childs

 

The focus of the study presented here is how learners’ individual experience of virtual worlds contributes to the success or otherwise of virtual worlds as a learning activity, and particularly the role that presence and embodiment play in learning and teaching. It is based on a series of five case studies which ran from 2008 to 2009, with some additional information from learning activities conducted in 2010. These were all at different higher education institutions, across a range of subject disciplines. All took place in Second Life.  Firm conclusions about the role of learners’ experience are difficult to justify, due to the small numbers of students from whom data were gathered (a total of 35 across all the cases). However, (to the extent to which conclusions can be drawn) factors such as institution, subject, sex and age appeared to be less influential than the time spent inworld, and the nature of the activity.

The article here can only present the barest outlines of the work, for the full descriptions of case studies, methodology etc.; the full study is available for download. The work presented here will also form the basis of a keynote at the SOLSTICE conference at Edge Hill University, Liverpool, on 8^th June.  ..........More

Our Virtual Self_ implications of the Avatar

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Video Link: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/virtualself.jsp

Your avatar may be just a virtual identity, but it can also affect how you are in the real world

"In this world of new media, people spend a lot of time interacting with digital versions of one another." --Jeremy Bailenson

If you spend a lot of time online, you may even have an electronic alter ego--an avatar. An avatar is a movable image that people design to represent themselves in virtual reality environments or in cyberspace.

"For some reason, I always pick really short people," says Stanford undergraduate student and avid video gamer Oliver Castaneda.

"I have multiple variations," says Michelle Del Rosario, another gamer and undergraduate student at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) at Stanford University. "Sometimes I choose to look like a really fun and bubbly character. Sometimes I want to look very serious."

Sounds like avatars are for fun and games but could avatars actually change us? Jeremy Bailenson thinks so. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he created the VHIL to study, among other things, the power avatars exert on their real world masters.

"As a lab, we've gone a bit out on a limb and argued that the reason you have an avatar is because an avatar makes you more human than human. It gives you the ability to do things you could never do in the physical world. You can be 10 years younger. You can swap your gender. You can be 30 pounds heavier or lighter. Any behavior or appearance you can imagine, you can transform your avatar to embody," explains Bailenson.

Sometimes, avatars are designed to be ideal versions of their creators, and there's now evidence that the virtual reality persona begins to influence the real life persona.

"Remember, in the virtual world--height, beauty--these things are free. We've demonstrated that if I increase the height of your avatar by 10 centimeters, you'll win a negotiation compared to if I decrease the height of your avatar by 10 centimeters."

Bailenson gives another example. "I use algorithms to age a 20-year-old undergraduate's avatar and then I give that undergraduate the opportunity to save money or to spend it frivolously. The undergraduate will put more money in savings as opposed to go out and spend it on partying."

Your avatar also may affect your fitness. In another test, Del Rosario puts on a head-mounted display that reveals an avatar that looks just like her. As she runs in place, her avatar runs, too, and visibly loses weight. When Del Rosario stands still, her avatar stops, and gets fatter. As you might suspect, it is important that the avatar resemble its creator.

"So, the power comes from seeing yourself in the third person gaining and losing weight in accordance with your own physical behavior," says Bailenson. "Twenty-four hours later, people exercised more after being exposed to watching themselves run than watching someone else run."

And, as it turns out, Bailenson and colleagues say we also tend to prefer others who resemble us. The researchers reached that conclusion in 2004 when they subtly morphed students' faces with those of the presidential candidates. The students favored the hybrid candidate that included their own features.

"Even though nobody consciously detected that their own face was morphed inside the image, people whose face was morphed with Bush were more likely to vote for Bush in terms of their self-report on the survey. People whose face was morphed with Kerry indicated they'd be more likely to vote for Kerry. It's very powerful stuff," Bailenson says.

He believes avatars will soon play an even bigger role in our lives online. How we shape our own avatars and how we interact with others could have profound influences on our behavior.

"People like things that are similar to them whether it's verbally, non-verbally or an appearance. We like people that look like us," Bailenson explains. "We wanted to ask the big question in a world where I can make myself look more like you--how does that affect my ability to influence you?"

"Yeah," says Castaneda. "I think we're just beginning to explore all the potential there for, you know, re-imagining yourself in different worlds."

And the line between reality and virtual reality gets blurrier every day.

Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Ann Kellan, Science Nation Producer

The Predictive Power of Virtual Worlds by Dusan Writer

Virtual worlds didn’t so much predict the future as provide a giant sandbox in which to explore the different ways that the future could unfold.

In presentations, I often say that I could have learned about social media from Facebook, or user-generated content from youTube, but I ended up in Second Life instead – and by ending up there, was able to see that the future isn’t necessarily what the conventional wisdom says it will be.

I can’t imagine having any particular interest in things like on-line governance, privacy, identity, virtual commerce, law, economics, or 3D content development if it wasn’t for Second Life. By thinking about these things I started to realize that there were wider implications – that these weren’t just digital communities, these were pathfinders to a broader cultural change that might awaken us to the challenges in the way we organize our lives and enterprises.

And, through Second Life at least, we come to realize that the responsibility for how technology turns out is in large measure our own. We have the right and the obligation to lend our voice, energy and passion to whatever vision we have for the ways in which technology informs our lives, whether we view it simply as a tool or extension of who we are, as a site for culture, as platforms for enterprise and governance, or as just another gadget that we struggle to learn and adopt.

Through our often frustrating relationship to the companies who have their hands on the controls of these digital domains, we can learn that it is our personal responsibility to come to informed decisions about whether to invest our time, passion, and identity within someone else’s sandbox, or whether we prefer to strike out on our own.

We start to realize that the idea of the ‘State’ has an increasingly tenuous tie to government because we start to realize that the places where we derive value are controlled by non-state actors. As a result, we also start to rethink the nature of the enterprise and the interdependence we have on platform owners, communities, and wider ecosystems of value. Companies, schools, and organizations are no longer confined to geography or to the walls that contain them. (... More)

 

ScentScape system adds an olfactory dimension to gaming and home videos

 

http://www.gizmag.com/scentscape-system-adds-smells-to-games-and-videos/17615/    

Retailers, hotels and real estate agents have been using aromas to entice us to part with our cash for years now and there have even been a few attempts to transmit smells via the internet and mobile phones.    

California-based company  Scent Sciences is now looking to bring an olfactory dimension to computer games with its ScentScape personal digital scent delivery system.

Scent Sciences’ President and CEO, Bill Wiles, told Gizmag the ScentScape system uses a combination of hardware, software & algorithms and chemistry – all covered by patents – to produce the smells. The system consists of a unit that plugs into a PC or gaming console via USB and generates smells using scent cartridges....    Wiles says that gamers will also be able to use the company’s SDK along with the ScentEditor application to create their own scent-enabled games. Players will even be able to share the code they have created with other gamers who have their own ScentScape system to allow them to enjoy their creation. (will enable more immersion in the simulation space)

Microsoft Kinect on WoW: evolutionary steps

This post comes from Metaverse Health,  devoted to everything related to health and virtual worlds. 

" Here’s a great video showing the use of the Kinect to play World of Warcraft using a software framework called FAAST. After the initial demo there’s some useful discussion by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies on its potential applications. Those applications are something discussed here regularly: rehabilitation and physical activity. Imagine the impact of the technology shown in the video for someone who plays a dozen or more hours of an MMO each week? Let alone someone with a chronic disease or multiple lifestyle risk factors. "       

Or returning veterans needing physical therapy. And can more cheaply create muscle memory for soldier training than PointMan can currently. ( PointMan: http://www.nrl.navy.mil/content_images/09_FA1.pdf  )

 http://www.metaversejournal.com/2011/01/02/microsoft-kinect-on-wow-evolutionary-steps/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sloz+%28The+Metaverse+Journal+-+Australia%27s+Virtual+World+News+Source%29    

Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1KJAXM3xYA

http://www.ted.com Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

A Brief Explanation Of Why Minecraft Matters by Devin Coldewey

A Brief Explanation Of Why Minecraft Matters by Devin Coldewey on January 15, 2011

On Wednesday, it was announced that a game called Minecraft had hit a million sales. This probably isn’t the first time that you, a denizen of the internet, have heard that word. But unless you’re in the habit of following up on every indie game mention you happen to see, there’s a good chance this particular title might have slipped under your radar. So what is Minecraft, and why is everyone talking about it? ....

(rest of story:  http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/01/15/a-brief-explanation-of-why-minecraft-matters/  )

conclusion: 

.... With gaming threatening to unseat cinema and TV in terms of time and cash invested, this change from a top-down to a bottom-up development process isn’t just a curiosity, it’s a momentous change. The time has come when not only are the tools for creation available to the dedicated independent developer, but also the means of distribution and popularization. The heavy hitters in the industry will find themselves much more under threat soon from the proverbial two guys in a garage. Minecraft’s success may seem a lark born of big-budget backlash and social media, but pretty soon, that kind of success won’t be a lark, it’ll be a back door to a billion-dollar market.