Anxiety Therapy

For years now, virtual environments have been used to treat anxiety problems with exposure therapy. Psychologists treat phobias and post traumatic stress disorder by exposing the patient to the thing that causes them anxiety and letting the anxiety dissipate on its own. But this proves difficult if your stressor is a battlefield in Iraq.

Enter virtual reality. Military psychologists use simulated Iraq war situations to treat soldiers. Other therapeutic VR uses include treating a fear of flying, fear of elevators, and even a "virtual nicotine craving" simulator for smoking addiction.

VR Training Programs

Virtual reality environments have also been used for training simulators. The earliest examples were flight simulators (most of us probably remember "Microsoft Flight Simulator"), but VR training has expanded beyond just that. There are many modern military examples, including Iraqi cultural situations and battlefield simulators for soldiers. Other examples include counter-terrorism, paratrooping, welding, and mining training sims.

Multiplayer Online Gaming

One result of virtual-reality research is the existence of entirely separate virtual worlds, inhabited entirely by the avatars of real world users. These worlds are sometimes referred to as massively multiplayer online games, and the World of Warcraft is the largest virtual gaming world in use now, with 11.5 million subscribers.

Another example is Second Life. The world of Second Life can't really be classified as a game, since the goal seems really just to be to wander around and interact with people, much like the real world. There is even a Second Life Shakespeare Company that performs Shakespeare's works within Second Life.

(Image: The Second Life Globe Theater, from Pathfinder Linden)

The Nintendo Wii

Probably the most successful cousin of virtual reality on the market today is the Nintento Wii. The Wii owes its motion capture and intuitive interaction concepts to the virtual reality technologies of the past. The controller is basically a simplified version of the "virtual reality glove." Both the Wiimote and the Wii Fit offer users another way of interacting with their virtual environment without having to wear any bulky equipment.

(Image: a new take on Wii tennis by Mesq)

Medical Procedures

Modern medicine has also found many uses for virtual reality. Doctors can interact with virtual systems to practice procedures or to do tiny surgical procedures on a larger scale. Surgeons have also started using virtual "twins" of their patients, to practice for surgery before doing the actual procedure.

(Image: the Karlsruhe Endoscopic Surgery Trainer)

Project Natal

The latest entry in the virtual reality inspired gaming world is Project Natal, a new piece of technology under development now for the Xbox. Project Natal proposes a new way of interacting with games, and indeed with computer systems in general. In their demo video, they propose a system that requires no keyboard and no controller, where a user's voice and motions serve as their method for interacting with the system.

The demo video is impressive, but the technology has not been completed and released yet. When it does get released, however, virtual reality will take another giant step towards total immersion and common home usage.

The Cave

The term "CAVE" refers to any virtual reality system that uses multiple walls with multiple projectors to immerse users in a virtual world. The first CAVE was built in 1992 as a method of showing of scientific visualizations. Now, many universities have their own CAVE systems. The CAVE is used for visualizing data, for demonstrating 3D environments, and for virtually testing component parts of newly developed engineering projects.

Linden's CEO, Mark Kingdon, is eager to change the perception of the company's product:

Enterprise is a really important growth vector for us because (Second Life is) a really compelling platform for learning and collaboration. Especially today in large enterprises that are distributed (around the world.

He's not the only one who's making SL sound a lot less fun these days. Executive director of enterprise marketing, Amanda Van Nuys, is sounding confident and hardcore:

Based on the level of the interest we're seeing, we are poised for explosive growth. This is not a game. We're ready for business.

This repositioning of Second Life, coming so soon after the perceived clean-up of SL's virtual sex trade activities, suggests that Linden are continuing to try to find ways to make Second Life more than the niche pastime it's become; if nothing else, this corporate take will be more profitable - Linden will be charging companies for access to the private corporate server.

Second Life's Linden Lab sells virtual realities to businesses [San Francisco Business Times]

Legal blog FindLaw finds itself pondering how Second Life creator Linden Lab is going to try to do to take back its virtual world from the virtual fucking, with three widespread moves:

First, it will allow for the geographic separation of adult content and activities to a specific part of the "mainland" for accommodation. Second, it will filter search results. As such, people who do not want to view adult results can choose not to view them. And third, people who do want to access adult virtual content will have their accounts verified to make sure that they are of real world adult age.

For their part, Linden says that the changes aren't censorship, but just trying to improve Second Life for everyone. Interestingly enough, they're seeking Second Lifers' input into what constitutes "adult content":

During the next six weeks, we will seek input from many segments of the Second Life community. We will introduce guidelines and define what "Adult" means, we will explain how to designate and "flag" this content, we will introduce the "Adult Continent," and we will implement technical changes to make this process as efficient as we can.

(Some of the discussions have been archived; you can find them by following the links here.)
However, some - including the Hollywood Reporter's Eriq Gardner - are concerned by the changes... but not for the reason you may think:

The move is being seen in some quarters as a serious step to address some of the problems with the virtual sex trade while also allowing those who are into that sort of thing to still find it in Second Life. And while some might cheer the development, and others might complain that Linden Labs has violated some virtual First Amendment by censoring its users and requiring them to verify their age, we can't help but be a little more cynical. Is it possible that illicit sex in Second Life is being tacitly blessed in the interests of growing the business?

With Second Life's non-sex business possibilities seemingly falling apart, will these changes stop the one-time virtual utopia from becoming just another cyber circle jerk, or are Linden just covering their ass in preparation of things becoming a little hotter over there?

The economy in Second Life exists without external regulation, which enabled the creation of Ginko Financial, a bank set up inside the vitual world. The bank accepted Second Life’s virtual Linden dollars at a 40 percent interest rate, then charged extremely high interest rates for its loans. Thousands of investors poured their money into Ginko, but when people started pulling their accounts en masse, the bank was unable to pay its promised interest rate, and it folded. Because of the relationship between the ongoing US financial crisis and banking deregulation, some researchers have drawn an analogy between Ginko and the US banks.

"I don't view 'Second Life' as a game," said Robert Bloomfield, an accounting researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "I view it as a market space."

"The 'Second Life' financial markets have pretty much been unregulated…There are accusations that people are doing everything from questionable behavior to outright fraud."

Because Ginko’s virtual collapse had real world implications for Second Life users who paid US dollars for their Linden bucks, Second Life creator Linden Labs no longer allows banks to pay interest on deposits. But financial researchers still have plenty of reasons to examine Second Life and other virtual environments to look at the ways that entrepreneurs and consumers operate in their virtual test tubes.

[MSNBC]

Group leader, MIT Professor Joe Paradiso, and his students are installing 45 "Ubiquitous Sensor Portals" in the Media Lab building. Each of these portals has a touchscreen, camera, and array of sensors that are wirelessly connected to the active Second Life universe. Through these portals, Second Life users can interact with real-life people, and real-life people can enter and experience Second Life without even having to download the software. As the group itself puts it on their Media Lab project page, in this way "events in the real world drive phenomena in a virtual environment that is unconstrained by time, space, or the constraints of physics." Sounds like the best kind of futurism to me.

Forbes.com quotes Paradiso on the nature of the Second Life portals:

"These devices are designed to be like wormholes that let you tunnel through to a second reality," says Paradiso. "Second Life is detached. We're tying it into the real world."

X-Reality group member Josh Lifton, the mind behind the Shadow Lab project, offers plenty of application ideas for such technology:

Lifton argues that the "Shadow Lab" setup could be expanded to a more complex scenario like a building's emergency response system. In a fire, for instance, responders could map out the building's temperature and even find inhabitants in the virtual world before risking their lives in the real one. Paradiso offers the more prosaic example of a factory floor outfitted with ubiquitous sensors that lets any executive monitor its manufacturing in the virtual world.

After a bit more development on projects like this, it will be hard to tell where the real world ends and Second Life begins — looks like it's time to start lecturing your real-life friends into accepting your Second Life girlfriend. And while teleportation might not be on its way, you'll certainly be able to beam yourself virtually to a business meeting in Bangkok, just like Will.i.am did at CNN; with X-Reality's technology, though, you might one day be able to toss a paper airplane to your colleague at the other end of the table.

A Realer Virtual World [via Forbes.com]
Ubiquitous Sensor Portals [MIT Media Lab]
Dual Reality Lab [MIT Media Lab]

Terdiman writes:

My take was that the film—which focuses mainly on three distinct stories, a gamer who is so deeply addicted to World of Warcraft that he loses almost everything in his life; a household of gamers who spend almost every waking, non-working hour playing; and a couple in the early stages of a relationship that bloomed in EverQuest II—depicts these people as largely dysfunctional, out of touch with the world around them and not very capable of dealing with that world . . .

We're introduced to the film's main redemption figure, Dan, when he is vastly overweight and tells us his WoW addiction cost him his relationship, his business and his home. Now, he's living as what amounts to a patient in the home of a woman who runs a video game addiction support group . . . Another major story line is that of a group of grown-up adolescents who live together in a house in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and who play WoW almost every minute they're not at work or asleep . . .

That leaves us with our lovers, Heather and Kevin. After meeting in EverQuest II, the two began to fall in love, even though Heather admits that she knows Kevin was also flirting with several other women in-game at the same time . . . Over time, they meet in person, consummate their love and eventually move in together. And while it's never fully spelled out, my take on their relationship was that both of them were passive aggressive, immature and that if they somehow managed to make it past a year living together, they would begin to hate each other.

My problem, I guess, is that the stories presented in this film did not present anyone living a life enhanced by their experiences with MMOs.

Imagine a movie about people who watch movies which introduced us to movie-watchers with broken relationships, addiction problems, and difficulty with socializing. Would these problems be traced back to their movie-watching, or to something else? Probably something else, because we think of movies as such a natural part of our lives that we hardly blame them for neurosis (except in extreme cases). And yet entering virtual worlds is still demonized, still held up as something terrifying, despite the fact that its as ubiquitous as movie-watching.

Second Skin is a kind of antifuture movie, which characterizes people who enjoy pop culture that is currently ascending as pathological. So what do we fear more? Virtual worlds or the future? Or is it really the same fear in the end?

Second Skin documentary bleak [C|Net]

You don't think of virtual worlds like Second LIfe as sensual — after all, there's no sense of touch at all — but watching the lush footage in Second Skin and hearing people talk about their hunger for Worlds of Warcraft may change your mind. Immersive virtual reality might never live up to the hype, but already more and more people are pouring so much of their hearts and minds into virtual worlds that they seem to "feel" their experiences in them.
Director Juan Carlos calls it "An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris," which sounds like he's swinging for the fences. If Carlos was on death row, he'd pick Weird Science as his last movie to watch:

I've always really loved that comedy. I mean John Hughes is great, and he's made a bunch of good movies, but Weird Science to me gets the fan favorite award. The idea behind that movie was so inventive and hilarious. Plus there is just something awesome when aliens come to crash a party in the middle of a teen comedy. So I'd laugh to start, and then get a little Zen.

- When Boston gets humid, the SL chair gets misty.
- When SL gets windy, the fan blows stronger in Boston.
- When someone sits on the chair in Boston, the chair in SL gets foggy.
- When someone sits on the SL chair, a mist machine turns on in Boston.
- When Boston gets hot, the SL room lamp turns red.
- When avatars linger around the SL chair, the lamp in Boston gets brighter.
- The SL chair gets taller the more times you sit on the chair in Boston.

How does it work? I actually don't know. Images by Haque Design + Research

Remote main page

The future is a moving target, and what we thought would be cool a decade ago isn't as cool any more. Sure, virtual worlds are always going to be with us, especially as entertainment. MMOs like World of Warcraft and their inheritors are here to stay. But will we be venturing into places like Second Life for our social lives? Probably not. We're much more likely to see a system of augmented reality, where people use wearable computers to create a virtual overlay on the real world. Why? Because reality just works better, so why not bring the VR-style tech to it?

The Second Life sex industry consists of the following categories: fashion, accessories, genitals, clubs, escorts, toys, furniture, and animations. An explanation of each follows.

Second Life escort Andrea Faulkner tells Terdiman:

Set a realistic price for yourself until you build a stable of regulars . . . Don't get into a relationship. It's going to be drama eventually, no matter what he says. No one wants to date a hooker . . . Don't be afraid to say no to a request. If you start degrading yourself and hating the job, you'll burn out.

And then we also learn about why there's a brisk trade in genitals. Writes Terdiman:

Second Life avatars don't come with genitals . . . people can buy a wide range of penises and vaginas in various sizes . . . genitals can also have sophisticated scripts added . . . [one such genital was a vagina that] creates a private room and sex poses on demand, on the spot . . . There is also a market for parts that would have pleased Catherin the Great (i.e., animal penises).

There are a lot of books about virtual worlds and Second Life, but Terdiman's is perhaps the best introduction to them because he manages to capture the strangeness of a world where everything goes because nothing is real except money. Image by DeeDee Deepdene.

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life exerpt [C|Net]