NASA Looks to Connect Astronauts to Families with Virtual Worlds
Space is a lonely place, but NASA wants to make it feel a little more like home through the use of virtual worlds like Second Life. Astronauts launching on Mars missions will spend 800 days away from their families and friends. To help make that easier NASA is looking to use immersive 3D virtual worlds. "We want to help our remote explorers 'phone home' in a way that lets them sit around a dinner table with their family, help their children with homework and analyze the latest findings with their Earth-bound peers," Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Wired.
NASA has several other virtual irons in the fire. In November the agency discussed its plans to use virtual worlds to help users across the world get a feel for what it's like to be on the Moon when astronauts return in 2010. The agency already has spaces in Second Life and in Whyville to promote its work, and it took part in the recent Federal Consortium for Second Life.
There's also the possibility of using virtual worlds "as an instructional medium suitable to present in situ training on long term space flight" according to a proposal. That, however, would be filled with automata instead of real-world trainers.
Because, as many have speculated, the problem is how to conquer lag across the solar system when most users still can't get a reliable experience in Second Life on Earth. NASA is optimistic, but right now the system just relies on email. It dodges the lag question, but some scientists think that only accents the isolation rather than solving it.
"If we were meeting in Second Life or World of Warcraft to chat, we would both have the sense of being in the same place overlaid on our sense of physical location.The experience encodes into our memories as if we were in the same place," said Daniel Laughlin, learning technologies project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
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