Dr. Maged Kamel Boulos, the journal’s Associate Editor and professor at the University of Plymouth, UK, summarizes the issue:

Though Second Life has existed since 2002 and there are even other virtual worlds that predate it, most in the health sector are only recently starting to migrate to such platforms, as the technology is gradually maturating and rapidly becoming more affordable and popular. This special issue of JVWR on the theme of ‘3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare’ provides a good sampler of how healthcare organizations, groups and individuals are currently using virtual worlds…for a range of clinical and health-related purposes. Topics covered in this issue include: the use of virtual worlds in healthcare higher education, including in ‘virtual patients’ game-based learning simulations, with examples from both the UK and the US; the growth and direction of healthcare support groups in virtual worlds; the development of a virtual worlds’ coping skills game to prevent post-hospitalization smoking relapse in tobacco dependent cancer patients; and an examination of how the attitude and appearance of an individual’s avatar might result in positive changes in her/his real life in relation to obesity, which is one of the most serious public health problems of the 21st century.

Though I’m delighted to see so much work being done within academia, I am most excited to see the transition from research to real life application in a field that will surely witness exponential growth in the next several years. It cannot be long until we hear an announcement of a well-funded professional venture that tackles one or more specific healthcare issues using virtual world and other emerging technologies. At a time when our nation is facing a healthcare problem of gargantuan proportions, we need to turn to innovative technologies that can streamline medical care and shed billions of dollars in costs. However, beyond electronic medical records, there hasn’t been much discussion in the mainstream media about emerging healthcare technologies nor any serious and dedicated provisions in Obama’s proposal. The challenge of bridging the gap between cutting-edge academic findings and real-life social policies is one that spans every field, yet if we don’t figure out innovative and cost-effective solutions soon, healthcare costs will become the straw that finally breaks America’s back.

Readers interested in this topic who might have missed it previously, check out Popcha! principal and TurtleThink founder Mark Kizelshteyn’s award-winning research regarding therapeutic uses of virtual worlds for elderly, disabled, and convalescent people [link]. Needless to say we are all very excited for advancements in this field!

[JVWR Vol 2, No 2: 3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare]
image courtesy of TaranRampersad

As Tech Crunch notes ” Without a decent amount of usable layers, none of these AR browsers are going to see mainstream adoption any time soon, and Layar is the first to attempt luring third-party developers into creating layers on top of their system by means of an extensive API.”

This is a great step for AR — as the race to develop the best platform with maximum content while also supporting an array of devices. We are going to see some create stuff come out of this API opening.

The official Google Blog writes:

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010….

…Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

The OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips, and Google is working with a number of OEMs to introduce netbooks to the market next year! The architecture is going to be based on a Linux kernel.

I can’t wait to see this!

The first interesting one was a collaborative polling company called urtak, which offers different categories of user generated polling topics. From their website: “The goal of the Urtak project is to find an answer to the question “What do men and women live by?” Since no single person has the knowledge to answer this question, we propose that we must work together, pooling our knowledge and insight to learn what we all care about, what unites us, and what makes us different from each other.” It seems like an interesting company, however, what compels those people to answer the polls. This is a good idea that is lacking a sticky component.

Vocab Sushi was another interesting concept. The free service offers “bite size” vocabulary words and sources them from thousands of news and media outlets daily. The vocab words are offered in contextual examples and one can play “never ending” games with those words. The company was founded by Jeff Novich and the website notes: “VocabSushi provides thousands of sentences that demonstrate any vocab word’s contemporary usage in news articles. Compared to the brute force method of flashcard definitions, a deeper understanding of the word can be attained simply by reading several interesting sentences that contain that word.” It is an interesting replacement for flashcards, and I believe this will catch on. I would have loved to use this years ago when I was studying for the SATs. Although I subscribe to Anu Garg’s Word.A.Day, I can nonetheless see myself using this service once in a while.

Sponge Cell presented a new form of flash based interactive banner advertising. The company is using social networking tools built into ad banners to help push content directly from banners as opposed to relying on clicking through the banner and arriving at a new website. The company writes: “The best advertising gives its audience information that they want to hold onto and share. Sponge Cell lets people do just that, by pushing advertising onto calendars, social profiles, mobile devices, home pages and other permanent places, without disrupting their browsing experience.” The company is attempting to mitigate a persons aversion to clicking a banner and being steered away from their chosen website. Sponge Cell’s banner’s allow for brand interaction directly on the banner. Another interesting idea, but once again, what compels me to interact with a banner which has an added social media component? Sponge Cell did discuss their advertising algorithm (patent pending) which bases the ad not on the search key word but on the aggregated data that the search terms yields. I thought this was already built into Google’s algorithm, but go figure.

The most interesting application was Zagat’s Augmented Reality Application called NRU.

The application allows you to find restaurants, nightspots, and shops “near you.” As you rotate your mobile device (360 degrees), the location of the restaurants appear relative to you. It also syncs with Zagat’s detailed reports on the restaurants. Although Zagat reviews are not user generated and have a top-down approach, the service is still fairly compelling as a closed source offering of reviews opposed to Urban Spoon. Check out a video demo of the product here:

The product is only offered on the Android as of now, but with the release of the magnetometer on the iPhone — we should see this application at the app store shortly (as long as Apple opens up the channels for AR production on the iPhone). This is a cool app and just the beginning of compelling AR apps to reach the market.

NYTM also invited two guest speakers: Iranian technologist, Ali Amami, who discussed the recent Iranian election, consequential revolt and the role of social media. This was the 10th election in Iran after the Islamic revolution and is the first election since then to see the levels of protest. Ali Amami stated that this was a new school revolution as a result of social media. He said that cell phones were used as capturing devices, where citizens became independent news outlets. Facebook was used as a community organization tool and YouTube was a video distribution channel that major media outlets, like CNN, turned towards. The question, however, was what went wrong? Well, first off, Nokia sold wiretapping equipment to Iran’s Telecom giant (source: Wall Street Journal). Also, Iran’s internet is state owned and they intercepted and filtered content with the ultimate suspension of internet service across the country.

Amami’s message to NYTM was that as technologists, we need to think about ways to work towards solving the issues of wiretapping/filtration, interception and suspension of the world wide web. He urged companies like Google and Yahoo to not bow to fascist government requests.

And the evening ended with Douglas Rushkoff discussing his new book, Life inc., about an open source economy.

It is always a pleasure to hear Rushkoff speak — he is intelligent, charismatic and extremely articulate. Speaking to the NYTM crowd, Rushkoff offered the analogy that our economic system is like a closed source operating system, though we behave as if our role in the economy was somehow organic. He argues that although there are natural elements and emergent properties of our system, our currency and economic affairs hold a bias to corporations (which are anti-competitive) and a centralized currency (which seeks to create value from top down) — the opposite of an open source economy, which was most closely realized in the late Middle Ages. During the late Middle Ages, there was tremendous spending and abundance, where with local currency people invested and reinvested from the bottom-up — wealth was distributed to people who created value. Those who did not create value, did not make money. The aristocracy, seeing the uprising of the middle class and that wealth was no longer controlled by the centralized authority — made local currency illegal. This type of approach extends to today’s times. Rushkoff offers the solution (to the NYTM crowd) of an open source economy which is being facilitated by the internet and low start-up capital. As our economy is at a downfall, he is urging us to take advantage of the situation and create value through the net.

It was an interesting evening at NYTM, and I look forward to the next meet up! NYTM also showcased the 3 finalists of their t-shirts competition (you can vote here.)

I am a bit surprised by this statistic, but it does reveal the underlying popularity of virtual worlds, which are only on the rise. “Massively points out that the virtual world [Second Life] is also topping out over popular social networks like Facebook and Myspace.” Also noting that “This data is measured from actual homes…Almost 200,000 of them, so it isn’t just data that’s centric to the hardcore gamer. This is a random sampling of ordinary people.” Here is a summary of their analysis:

YouTube: 47 minutes per week (via Cnet)
Facebook: 84 minutes per week (via Cnet)
Myspace: 10.5 minutes per week (via ITProPortal)
Second LIfe: 760 minutes per week (via Nielsen)

These numbers are pretty shocking and show both the popularity and robustness of virtual worlds. Where will they take us? Who knows, but we still need a lot of work on the infrastructure of virtual worlds before they become as ubiquitous as social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

[Via Virtual World News and Massively]

The Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech is taking a novel approach to measuring presence by analyzing user’s physiological responses to a rational fear of heights. Subjects were required to perform certain tasks around a created deep virtual pit, which, as one can see, appears to be quite realistic. Meanwhile, the subjects’ heart rate, galvanic skin response and skin temperature were measured. The results of the study aren’t in yet, but I would bet they were positive; our brains, upon perceiving visible danger, wouldn’t take any chances and unwittingly kick-start our sympathetic system right away! Also, the subjects seem pretty convinced and apprehensive in the video – check it out.

It’s also interesting to note that this exact simulation can easily be ported to help treat patients with acrophobia (fear of heights) via exposure therapy. In fact this has been tried multiple times in the last decade, but the technological advancements developed by the lab, which lead to a greater sense of presence, will surely prove more fruitful than previous attempts using older VR technology or simply using virtual worlds.

[Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab], via [Games Alfresco]

This standard could offer a significant shift in the 3D web by breaking down the end user barriers of entry. With the increase in web applications, people are reluctant to download bulky plug ins or software, but if the 3D environment is native to one’s browser, the potential is incredible. This team of developers and thinkers are industry leaders — allowing them to trail head this initiative will undoubtedly yield industry shifting results. I look forward to the release.

Ben Goertzel, an AGI researcher and CEO of Novamente, organized the conference and provided a very good roundup to readers of h+. He explains that the AGI conference is smaller and more intimate than other related gatherings because it specifically focuses on the “big picture:” human-level thinking machines.

“Since its founding in the 1950s and 1960s, the AI field has achieved great successes – to name just a few: the AI linguistics underlying Google and other search engines; the AI planning and scheduling software used throughout the military and industry; the AI fraud detection software underlying modern credit card operations; and the AI gaming software underlying everything from Deep Blue to the bots in massively multiplayer online games. Yet all these wonderful achievements have a common narrowness of scope, which is why inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has characterized them as “narrow AI.” The grand goal of the original AI researchers – the creation of thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond — remains largely unaddressed. Many, both within and outside the AI field, have complained about this situation; the mission of the AGI conference series is to help do something about it.”

Reading Ben’s report makes one realize just how difficult it is to piece together highly-specialized aspects of learning, cognition, computer science, etc. to form something akin to a tapeworm – let alone a human mind. However, I’m confident that the eureka moment will come in our lifetime, even if we don’t fully understand how we got there, or how our creation will actually work…

[Ben Goertzel's Report on AGI-09: The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence]

The projects wiki states: “Sirikata is an BSD licensed open source platform for virtual worlds. We aim to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds.”

This seems to be a different means to a similar end with Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, where users can control the computer with their thoughts — but I have not heard much about this recently. Check out this article for some info on this. Obviously, both platforms can be developed (and will be) — there are different technological manifestations of hands free use, where we can see a disabled person using the BCI interface for navigation, while a fully-able person can use a gesture reading interface for a Virtual Immersion Room…