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.

Our Virtual Self_ implications of the Avatar

---

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

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.

In Cybertherapy, Avatars Assist With Healing

 
NY TImes article on the use of virtual worlds in psychotherapy: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/science/23avatar.html?_r=2&hp

Virtual World Learning and Training Partnership Formed

Cranial Tap joins forces with Innovative Decisions and Human Mosaic Systems to deliver comprehensive human understanding and solutions to virtual learning environments. www.prweb.com  ; http://lnkd.in/QT2g4T

Round Hill, Va., November 16, 2010 — Cranial Tap, Inc., a leading developer of virtual world solutions, announces a partnership with Innovative Decisions, Inc. and Human Mosaic Systems. The partnership will bring new capabilities and technologies to the virtual world learning, training and simulation fields.

Backed by proven cognitive decision-making technologies, students and trainees will benefit from critical thinking systems based upon dialog theory. Training no longer needs to be a series of static steps. The new partnership will offer dynamic processes that evolve to reinforce subject judgment. Training variables can dynamically change to accommodate choices made by individuals, and groups.  Simulated scenarios can be played out in endless configurations as driven by data, interactions, dialog and choices made. Virtual characters, or bots, will be programmed to interact intelligently and be capable of reason. Through these solutions, trainees will receive a realistic exposure to life situations.

Through the new partnership, a deep understanding of human psychology and social behavior will be applied to virtual learning simulations. Using scientific approaches, learning scenarios will anticipate human behavior to deliver maximum educational benefit. The introduction of the human element into complex training creates a more meaningful and rewarding learning experience for individuals and groups alike.

 Global corporations, institutions of higher learning and organizations are using virtual reality systems at an increasing rate. Virtual environments are effective in connecting dispersed team members, reducing travel costs, minimizing the need for physical space and high rates of subject matter retention. Visual learning and training environments allow individuals to experience situations without risk to human life or property.

Examples of learning and training scenarios in virtual world environments include nurse and technician training, commercial safety, group critical thinking exercises, product and facility orientation, scientific and academic research, workplace relationships and emergency preparedness.

“We are excited about this new partnership and the value it will deliver,” said Dave Levinson, President of Cranial Tap. “Organizations are seeking more effective and engaging ways to train their staff and students. This new joint relationship offers deep insight and knowledge that will take learning environments to new levels.”

Dennis Buede, President of Innovative Decisions, added “Our intelligent agent technology can dramatically improve the effectiveness of virtual training and education applications. We are enthusiastic about applying this technology, Dynamic Decision Networks, to the critical task of dramatically increasing the productivity and value of an organization’s most critical resource, its people.”

“Human Mosaic Systems is very excited to be a part of this partnership with Cranial Tap and Innovative Decisions”, said Beverly Gay McCarter, President of HMS. “The unique combination of each of our companies’ skills will help to move the field forward in realizing the incredible power and potential of 3D immersive environments, especially with regard to facilitating individual and group learning and interactions.”

About Cranial Tap, Inc.

Cranial Tap, Inc. is a leading virtual world development firm located in the metro Washington, DC area. The company supports corporations, universities and organizations around the world in the development of 3D environments embedded with productive technology solutions. With a focus on virtual learning and training solutions, the company designs and constructs highly interactive spaces with effective results. More than 500,000 people have been trained using their innovative solutions geared specifically to virtual world environments. As denoted by Linden Lab, parent of Second Life, the firms is recognized as a Gold Solution Provider. Cranial Tap’s clients include Corbis, Cognizant, AOL, 1-800-Flowers, Michigan State University College of Nursing, NIC USA, and University of Virginia. Website: cranialtap.com.

About Innovative Decisions, Inc.

IDI specializes in using analytical methods and models to bring insight and closure to decision makers. Our methods include decision and risk analysis, modeling and simulation, systems engineering, performance measurement, and facilitated group decision conferencing. Our Dynamic Decision Network technology has been implemented for dozens of applications associated with the Army’s Future Combat System. IDI’s analysts have decades of successful experience applying these methods to agencies in the Intelligence Community, the services and agencies in the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and government contractors. Website: www.innovativedecisions.com.

About Human Mosaic Systems

Human Mosaic Systems facilitates human systems through designing robust 3D immersive environments with the complex dynamics of individuals and groups, their avatars, and the virtual environment in mind. We are architects who understand how individual and group dynamics in the physical world extend into 3D immersive or virtual environments and design spaces and courses/workshops with a deep understanding of how these complex dynamics impact organizations, teams, and individuals. We can help organizational leaders develop greater understanding and abilities to help meet the new challenges facing organizations in today's fast paced complex world. Website:  www.humanmosaicsystems.com.

Contacts

 For Cranial Tap:

Nancy Ritchie
703- 879-8499
info@cranialtap.com

 

For Innovative Decisions:

Dennis Buede

703-861-3678
dbuede@innovativedecisions.com

 

For Human Mosaic Systems:

Beverly Gay McCarter

 731-431-1596
bgmccarter@hmsystems.net

 

 

A 3D virtual training scenario using programmed dialog

The Psychology of Virtual Worlds

 

Welcome to the brave new world of understanding the power of virtual worlds: not only is it a great place for learning, for collaboration, for R&D, for prototyping, and data analysis, … but,  it is also able to impact us psychologically, behaviorally, and physically.

It is a medium where we truly extend ourselves and meld into the environment. As a result, organizations that use this environment need to begin to pay special attention to the psychology of design involved with the avatars used, as well as the interactive space of the virtual world. The psychology of the avatar and our interactions with others in the space is what creates presence… that all important and elusive element that builds trust and cooperation enabling collaborative efforts that transcend time and place in this hyper connected world.

This is an area that has not been focused on in the past in research, but one which is gaining importance and attention.

One paper on this issue was recently published in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Who am I - and if so, where? A Study on Personality in Virtual Realities by Benjamin Gregor Aas, Katharina Meyerbröker, Paul M. G. Emmelkamp (http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/download/777/707 ). This paper examined the stability of personality traits in virtual worlds and found that personality traits remained stable as users entered virtual worlds.

However, another study seems to suggest that attention needs to be paid to how we design our avatars, as their results seem to suggest that how we represent ourselves in virtual worlds affects our  behavior  in our physical world. (The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.134.6224&rep=rep1&type=pdf ) 

We become or behave like that which we “put on”, much like our behavior may change depending on the type of people with whom we associate. If we are affected by the behavior and life styles of friends of friends of friends (3 degrees of separation http://tinyurl.com/7fpamh ), how much more easily affected are we by stepping into an avatar that is an extension of ourselves with inherent feedback loop capability?

Another study published in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research , The Effects of Avatar Appearance in Virtual Worlds, supports this idea and points out that one’s avatar’s appearance does indeed affect our behavior. (http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/download/843/706 )

Further evidence of the mind seamlessly embracing virtual worlds and that possible feedback loop is the success and increased applications of psychological therapies in virtual worlds.   Psycho-therapy and various physical therapy treatments dealing with pain and burn patients would not be so successful in a 3D immersive environment if the mind did not reach out and immerse itself in the environment. In fact, the video “Snow Worlds” talks about how immersing the burn victim in the virtual world during therapy and bandage change is able to reduce the pain because the virtual environment is able to physically dampen the pain centers of the brain. In addition, Club One Island has done research to prove that engaging in a weight reduction and physical fitness program in a virtual environment actually leads to behavioral changes that result in weight loss.

Virtual worlds or 3D immersive environments are a powerful medium that is not a brick and mortar space that does not touch who we are. Virtual worlds are nebulous spaces that allow our minds to extend themselves as never before. The mind wants to reach out into its environment as known by any who have ever used a stick to explore a dark hole and can “feel” what the end of the stick touches. Virtual environments and the avatars that inhabit them are extensions of ourselves and we need to be mindful of this as we design these incredibly powerful spaces that are becoming more commonly used in today’s educational, organizational, and personal lives.

Much more research needs to be done in this area, and it is not one to be taken lightly.

 

Beverly Gay McCarter has her M.S. in Counseling Psychology and Human Systems, her M.F.A. in Fine Art, and is published in the field of complex systems.  Working in virtual environments, she focuses on the psychology of creating the avatar and designing virtual environments.

Additional Resources:

• Online Therapy Institute's Trainings Receive BACP Endorsement! - http://shar.es/0PMV8
• New research on use of online resources by male adult survivors of abuse - http://shar.es/0PMTq
• Info about impact of avatar on individual  http://www.onlinetherapyinstitute.com/second-life/
• Coming Home _ Veteran’s Healing Space: www.cominghomecenter.org
• Telehealth and Technology_Psychological applications: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqr_BygETSs
• Not a Game: Inside Virtual Iraq  (READ THE STORY: http://tinyurl.com/5npux5)    Some scenarios from Virtual Iraq, a virtual-reality simulation used to treat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Virtual Iraq is adapted from the video game Full Spectrum Warrior. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6kl2BuhKmM
• Snow Worlds – pain management through immersion in virtual worlds; Article and video: http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/11/snow-world-virtual-reality-used-to-treat-burn-patients.
• Club One Island Weight Loss: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SswlXujVUxk .  Club One Island is a virtual health world focused on changing behavior to improve lives. Club One Island combines cognitive behavioral, gaming and social-networking elements with a rich sensory experience for the greatest impact on personal habits. Club One Island is the first of many immersive digital environments from Club One, one of the premier fitness club networks in California. Learn more about Club One Island at www.cluboneisland.com or Facebook.com/cluboneisland .

The Virtual World Revolution

 (map of technological change over time)

I ran across this blog post today that echos what I said at a meeting  at the National Defense University last year: we are indeed in the middle of a major revolution!  "Of Grids and Webs" http://bit.ly/b8hU46

I do feel the 3D immersive environment (virtual world) movement we are currently experiencing is a major revolution that will impact our society and culture globally as dramatically as did the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions. Complexity has grown as our world has become hyper connected and collaboration in decentralized environments has not only grown, but become necessary to cope with the speed and cost of this constantly dynamic and changing environment.

User interfaces that are intuitive are moving at an incredible speed as demonstrated by the successful hacking of Kinect within only 3 hours of its release! ("US$3,000 bounty claimed for open source Kinect drivers - http://gizm.ag/cM4QkO" )  This unleases the potential for incredible creativity regarding applications of the program.

Intuitive user interfaces going mainstream is the key to mass adoption of 3D immersive environments. UIs like Kinect and Emotiv are speeding us towards that intuitive interface.

This blog article that discusses decentralization and the internet (my presentations on this the past 2 years raised sooooo many eyebrows here in DC, especially among those in DoD….) explains this very nicely.

More articles the past two days continue to point out the direction we are going:

1. "Thanks to technology, it’s an increasingly digital world" http://bit.ly/bl6ddc talks about how “smart systems” or sensors are being used in ever increasing places gathering data and helping individuals and cities become more efficient in the use of resources;
2. Complex adaptive systems_Robot musician jams with humans http://pulsene.ws/hSep - robots are now being designed to recognize and interact with musicians as it joins in playing jazz… Jazz is a dynamic changing and unpredictable musical form. No two performances are ever identical;
3. Mergence of physical world and virtual world_“"MIT Media Lab builds game space of the future" http://bit.ly/bxToPk”. Playtime Computing combines computer graphics projected on a wall and floor, motion-capture sensors and a robot to let children (it's build for kids for now) interact with characters that move between the projection screens and the physical world.  This is taking Kinect a step further, blurring the lines between our physical world and the virtual one;
4. And combined with the incredible applications of presence and transference in virtual worlds as demonstrated by the host of psycho-therapeutic applications, especially where Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder  (PTSD) is concerned we begin to see its power to change not only the way we work, but the way we think and experience life. The latest neurological research into the way the brain imprints horrific events that cause PTSD and the effects of the computer game, Tetris, on nullifying it, begins to look at this component. (When it comes to traumatic flashbacks, Tetris blocks http://pulsene.ws/habA)

 We are in the middle of an incredible revolution! And we are changing not only culturally, but perhaps neurologically as well. All of this continues to point to the importance of paying attention to the avatars we create and the design of the 3D immersive environments we utilize and explore. We affect and change technology, and through using it, we affect and change ourselves and our culture.

The avatar revolution: Here come the new humans - 02 June 2010 - New Scientist

 

The avatar revolution: Here come the new humans - 02 June 2010 - New Scientist.