December 9, 2011

Recent Adventures in Virtual Reality

About a month ago, I announced publication of the paper "Virtual reality in neuroscience research and therapy", published in Nature Neuroscience Reviews by myself and two other colleagues. The paper actually inspired the cover art for the December issue [1], which is now online. A closeup of the cover art (below) is entitled "Virtual Reality Reaches New Heights" by Kirsten Lee.


Also, I have been revisiting Second Life as a venue for scientific research [2]. I gave a lecture to the Embryo Physics course on 12/8 (Thursday). Topic: Cellular Reprogramming. Aside from some glitches [3] due to bandwidth issues, the talk went well. Pictures [4] from the venue can be seen below. The first picture is the meeting space, while the second is a picture of virtual horses (no kidding!) in a stable, and the third is a screenshot of my alternate avatar [5] presenting.



Notes and References:
[1] issue 12(12).

[2] this link is a photo-log of my forays into "virtual science".

[3] I did the entire lecture using text chat. Using a tablet PC, I was able to review the slides in the real world, and type (e.g. speak) to the slides being presented in Second Life.

[4] my avatar -- biodroid -- is in the foreground of the first two pictures.

[5] apparently, the "skins" of my robot were taking up too much bandwidth. I switched to a human form, but I still couldn't speak in-world.

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