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Highlights of the Federal Virtual Worlds Consortium Conference April 23-24

1. Most business happens outside of meetings. Virtual worlds increase serendipitous meetings that would not happen on video conference, webinars, teleconferences etc…
2. New Value Proposition

Web 1.0 Access/find
Web 2.0 share/participate/collaborate
Web 3.0 co-create

3. Co-creation is the most experiential
4. Virtual Worlds provide a Cohesion of Presence (Herbeck) – this is why we often feel like we know someone we have only met in a virtual world
5. Virtual worlds provide an informal way of learning which is just as valuable as formal learning. It is generative and brings people together in 3D .
6. Gaming/Virtual worlds expand the ability to learn faster
7. Evolution of learning includes:

Telling Doing Sharing Clanning

8. In the virtual world interoperability is going to be focused on people not technology
9. Virtual Worlds are helping people rid themselves of phobias and PTSD.
By changing the story they become part of the new environment.
10. Children and adults playing the World of Warcraft are working at an extremely high level. Players acquire a better understanding of calculus and spatial data. Players become more flexible in their thinking and more sensitive to social cues. People come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower and learn valuable skills such as adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes.
11. The Air Force is using Second Life as a means of continuous learning through
MyBase. MyBase is a multipurpose virtual learning environment for recruiting and informing civilians, train cadets, and help active airmen prepare for specific missions and ongoing projects.
12. Air Force is using virtual worlds for knowledge management.
They define knowledge management as knowledge transfer.
13. IMAGINE: When you begin working for an organization you are assigned an avatar who stays with you through your entire employment. When you retire or leave the organization, the avatar stays on in the organizations virtual learning environment keeping the history. No brain drain.
14. Virtual worlds can create more engaging interactions for distributed people. Virtual worlds can deliver a far more compelling meeting experience than a teleconference, Web conference, or even video conference (as long as all participants have adequate bandwidth, video card, and PC processing power)
15. Serious games increase peoples’ engagement with their work. For example the increased engagement of an immersive video game-like work experience for task workers whose jobs are e.g. customer service in a contact center, surveillance data analysis, or any job where you are categorizing things. Improving job satisfaction and retention.
16. Other, more complex examples include soldiers learning to read the blips on submarine sonar screens (takes 6 years of training) stockbrokers trying to decipher the blips and graphs. If the real world were connected to the virtual world, with real time connectivity to enterprise data, the real world would be viewed in the virtual world and would potentially have a faster learning curve.
17. Virtual Worlds allow people of diverse backgrounds to build trust and transfer knowledge from a person who has it to one who doesn’t.
18. Military is moving to command control in virtual worlds.
19. Zillionics – Unrelenting rivers of sensory data flowing day and night from a zillion places (Kevin Kelly)
20. Virtual Worlds will be the next communities of practice.
21. Where do we need to be with virtual worlds?
Immersive experience
Hybrid between real x and delayed
Improved graphics capabilities
Sufficient broadband
22. Mental model – Visualize information and put it into context
23. Policy lags behind innovation.
24. There is a Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). It is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphics, designed particularly with the World Wide Web in mind. It has been superseded by X3D.
25. Augmented Reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data
26. Georgia Institute of Technology is working to develop a quantitative way to measure how immersed someone is in the AR experience.
27. AR object recognition was interesting e.g. if you see a movie poster and you put your phone camera over it will take you to a trailer of the movie or allow you to buy tickets.
28. AR is also helping people overcome phobias. Put the head mounted display on and the magic window appears. If you are afraid of spiders a spider might appear in the window.
29. AR can improve training effectiveness.

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