Virtual-space gurus build final frontier

Alien and earthly experiments
Some experiments are already under way on CoLab's island complex: The Oregon L5 Society is spearheading the construction of a lava tube habitat, suitable for the moon or Mars, while another project is focusing on Martian habitat-building and terraforming.

Even as they replicate alien worlds, NASA and space-savvy Second Lifers are replicating earthly interactions as well. "Our first few months in Second Life have really been about building community, almost above content," Cowan-Sharp explained.

That sometimes means dealing with thorny issues from real life, NASA-style. For example, at a CoLab meeting this week, Drew (that is, Hoppin) and DragonFire (Cowan-Sharp) agonized along with other avatars over whether space entrepreneurs could have their corporate logos displayed on CoLab virtual property. The verdict? Not until NASA figures out "how to jump through the legal hoops," Drew typed.

Some wondered whether the situation called for a "CoLab Research Park," analogous to the commercial NASA Research Park that's adjacent to Ames in Mountain View, Calif. "Interesting," Dragonfire typed.

When worlds collide
There'll be more collisions between the real and virtual worlds in the weeks and months ahead: On April 12, Second Lifers have planned 24 hours' worth of activities for Yuri's Night, a worldwide celebration of human spaceflight. And during May's annual International Space Development Conference, Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, is due to deliver an address in Second Life.

In addition to CoLab, other real-world organizations are building outer-space views into their own virtual-world facilities. The Second Life analog to San Francisco's Exploratorium, known as the 'Splo, has displays relating to eclipses and other scientific topics. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is focusing on climate and sea simulations. And the Second Life Observatory, modeled after the University of Denver's Mount Evans Meyers-Womble Observatory, offers views of real astronomical targets through a virtual telescope.

One "next step" under consideration is using virtual-world observatories as an interface for controlling real-world telescopes, and passing the resulting imagery back to the virtual stargazer in real time.

Future space in Second Life
Further down the line, virtual worlds could help motivate kids to stick with math and science for the long haul, said Daniel Laughlin (a.k.a. Greyark Hightower), an education researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and project manager for NASA Learning Technologies.

For example, seventh-graders might play a hybrid video game that involves creating a virtual moon base. "By the time they're in college, they're using the moon base they built as their launch point for building a very large telescope array on Europa to look for extrasolar planets," he told MSNBC.com.

Laughlin himself has been working on a NASA-based educational game focusing on the agency's vision for going back to the moon and on to Mars.

Could Second Life give residents the sense of riding a spaceship into orbit? Not yet: For now, virtual rockets that are blasted with enough force to go into orbit simply disappear once they reach a certain height, then end up being returned to the "lost and found" in Second Life. But Laughlin said there's no ironclad reason why space couldn't be simulated.

"You could certainly create an area that forces the lighting to nighttime and populate it with stars," he mused. "The tools for the physics of Second Life are fairly sophisticated, if you could do the programming that can make it do everything that you wanted to simulate. ... You would have to do the coding to adjust the gravity."

Cowan-Sharp, meanwhile, would like to find ways to standardize the tools used to transform real-life data sets into virtual environments — so that a virtual Mars created for Second Life could be easily morphed into custom-made simulations for NASA, or perhaps upgraded for a Third, Fourth or Fifth Life.

"It's clear that there's nothing out there that's even close to what Second Life is capable of ... yet," Cowan-Sharp said. "But you can only imagine what the capabilities will be in 10 years."

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