Back to Virtuality
It’s been a while since I last wrote on the blog, and for those of you that follow regularly, I apologize. We’ve had a lot going on in our company, and if you haven’t already heard, we re-designed our web site (go to www.avelient.com to see the new site) and released our first major product, a development platform for small town business alliances, called HOLMES. I encourage you to check out the changes that have been made when you get a chance!
But this week, we return to blogging with another entry into the virtual world of Second Life. I was excited last Wednesday evening, June 11th, to be able to attend a talk hosted by Simon Bignell, a lecturer at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom. Using his Second Life alter ego, Milton Broome, Simon gave us about an hour of his time as he told us about the research that’s being done in virtual worlds on Autism spectrum disorder and Asperger’s (to keep tabs on what Milton is up to, check out his web site).
This was my first experience using the voice features of Second Life, and I must say I was impressed by the fluidity of the lecture given that I could now hear the virtual presenter speak as opposed to just listening to text being typed on a keyboard before a paragraph appeared on my screen (to read more about the first lecture I attended, which was not voice enabled, click here). There were some technical difficulties to start (objects creating the ever-present sound of waves in the background, for example), but once the lecture began I thought things went very well; it was clear to me that Simon/Milton had done this before.
The objective of Simon’s project is to determine if Second Life, and virtual worlds like it, can be used as a medium to help develop the social and communication skills of those people who might be suffering with some form of Autism. Firstly, in spite of promoting its voice capabilities more and more, the ability to have typewritten conversations in Second life is really an advantage to people in this group; because of their difficulty at quickly and correctly interpreting social situations, the autism community has embraced this medium because it effectively slows down the social interaction to a point where they can keep pace and learn the dynamic skills necessary to react appropriately. Simon emphasized this by pointing out that the average colloquial conversation occurs at 150 to 200 words per minute; the typewritten conversation, at best, occurs at 15 to 20 words per minute, 10 times slower than a spoken conversation. Therefore, in spite of all the advances made with voice communications in Second Life, and the ability to have a real lecture in a virtual world, the autistic community might not be ready to embrace this kind of advancement as readily as some of their non-suffering counterparts.
In fact, most of the work Simon is currently doing revolves around understanding the needs and developing programs to assist the growing community of people living with Autism in Second Life and he’s clearly not alone. You may recall my blog entry in January, “Bridging Solitary to Social Via Virtual Reality,” where I wrote about Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas, who developed a virtual town in Second Life as a kind of treatment area for Autsim. I’ve posed the question before: is there a possibility that a Second Life could serve as a therapeutic instrument for a First Life?
A critical component of that is better understanding the condition you’re trying to treat. To that end, I was pretty interested to hear that Simon is working on an “Autism Simulator,” similar in scope to the Schizophrenia simulator I visited very early in the existence of this blog (see: “Schizophrenia with a Technology Twist“). With it, Simon hopes to reproduce some of the sensations someone living with Autism might experience, including alterations in light, noise, touch, and even obsessions and comorbidity. Ultimately, he hopes to use this project as a platform for collaboration among the many groups in Second Life who strive to understand more about this condition and ways to treat it.
There is no doubt in my mind that Second Life and people like Simon Bignell provide novel ways to investigate and understand the challenges associated with social conditions such as Asperger’s and Autism. While I still feel today, as I did a year ago, that things are probably not yet where they need to be in order to bring the technology to the masses, I do feel that there is progress. The greatest difficulty, perhaps, is conveying the idea that places like Second Life are more than just a platform for gaming; they are worlds that can be shaped entirely by the power of human imagination — that is, of course, if the technology can keep up.
What do you think?
