Thursday, May 10, 2007

Second Nature, Joanna Scott

Joanna Scott is from Nature journal.
She had team meetings with remote colleagues to begin with which were 'unmitigated disasters'.
  • Enhanced 3D visualisation - good for natural history
  • Rapid development potential - not a major risk. they were prepared to give it a go and if necessary, cut their lossses.
  • International communication potential
  • They have created a molecule creation tool (M4) (visualisation potential) Staic representations of molecules, but some people have come together to make the molecules interactive.
  • They have a tool to convert VRML to SL 3D. they used it to try to repliacted 3D models of cells, but the resolution available in SL prims was not adequate to produce meaning representations.
  • They take content from other scientists and let them develop it in SL.
  • Blue Obelisk Cemetry - a quiz tool (this could be done on the web, but the academic has found a lot of people turning up. They're turning out to be interesting).
  • Multimedia: RSS, Powerpoint, translation pavillion
  • Virtual Desk - a library
  • Research science hasn't taken off to the same extent as educational initiatives have for them. There is one group who are trying to study evolution in action.
  • "We don't really know what we're doing in SL at all. We think there's a lot of potential." They're interested in hosting other scientists.
  • They're thinking about hosting events for invited spekers and have invited authors of popular science books to get them started.
  • "Why would we put our PDFs in SL when we can put them on the Web?" she asked. SL is different to the Web.
  • Communication is the big thing that SL offers.
  • SL will impact on RL conferences - especially Environmental Science conferences (for obvious reasons).
  • A question: how do you justify the expense of spending so much time in SL and buying land? That's her job (an AI-er!) to horizon scan and take risks. It's better to be ahead of the curve, taking risks, and lerning before the mainstream wave that will come in 3 years makes Nature redundant.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Brian said...

If SL is different to the web, then will there be a "web" in SL as well?

7:38 AM  

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