Archive for the ‘MICA’ tag
Meta-Institute of Computational Astrophysics
Previously, Ben wrote a post about innovative use of the virtual world Second Life for simulating N-body problems. One of the groups behind the impressive OpenSim mod, the Meta Institute of Computational Astrophysics (MICA), is incredibly unique in that the organization itself is an exploration into the utility of emerging virtual world (VW) technologies (e.g. SecondLife) for scientific and academic work.
A group of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Princeton, Drexel University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded MICA in the spring of 2008 in order to explore and take advantage of what they saw as a new frontier in collaboration and information dissemination. MICA’s goals are1:
- Exploration, development and promotion of VWs and VR technologies for professional research in astronomy and related fields.
- To provide and develop novel social networking venues and mechanisms for scientific collaboration and communications, including professional meetings, effective telepresence, etc.
- Use of VWs and VR technologies for education and public outreach.
- To act as a forum for exchange of ideas and joint efforts with other scientific disciplines in promoting these goals for science and scholarship in general.
In addition to the collaborative research we’ve written about before MICA also “conducts weekly professional seminars, bi-weekly popular lectures, and many other regularly scheduled and occasional professional discussions and public outreach events, all of them in [SecondLife].” A screenshot of one of their astrophysics seminars can been seen below. MICA has also begun experimenting with various teaching formats for undergraduate and graduate level courses.
MICA members attending a weekly astrophysics seminar by Dr. M. Trenti, given in the StellaNova sim in SecondLife.
What really impresses me about MICA however is their belief in the platform.
[W]e wish to lead by example, and demonstrate the utility of VWs and immersive VR environments generally for scientific research in fields other than humanities and social sciences (where we believe the case is already strong). In that process, we hope to define the “best practices” and optimal use of VR tools in research and education, including scholarly communications. This is the kind of activity that we expect will engage a much broader segment of the academic community in exploration and use of VR technologies. Second, we hope to develop new research tools and techniques, and help lay the foundations of the informational environments for the next generation of VR-enabled Web.
Hopefully MICA’s innovative use of SecondLife will prompt other scientists to follow. I definitely want to check out one of the lectures one of these days.
secoNdlife problem
If you read our last post on the N-body problem and want to try your hand at playing around with simulations of this enduring problem, then this article from Wired Science may be music to your N=2 ears. A group of developers from virtual world developer Genkii and astrophysicists from the Meta Institute of Computational Astrophysics have put together a simulation tool using the open source OpenSim (an implementation of Linden Lab’s popular SecondLife virtual world engine) to run N-body problem simulations and aim to publish their results in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.
As to why the developers chose to use OpenSim (from their ArXiV pre-print):
“From the point of view of an astrophysicist dealing with gravitational N-body simulations, virtual worlds such as OpenSim are N-body simulators, with two extra features: a surprisingly elaborate graphics module, and a bug in the equations of motion. As to the latter: whereas objects should attract each other via Newton’s inverse-square law of gravity, objects in OpenSim fall straight down. However, that “bug” is easily fixed. We have done so, and we discuss our first results in this paper.”
The most interesting aspect of this work is not only that it was possible, but that, should virtual world administrators choose to allow it, these tools can be bundled into almost any virtual world running off an OpenSim compatible setup!
We have modified the standard physics engine of OpenSim using a plugin. Server administrators can select to replace the standard physics engine with our plugin at server-initialization time, region by region … Though [the example above] shows only one avatar in view on a remote “desert island,” a similar simulation could, in principle, take place anywhere on an OpenSim grid, and any user present could collaborate to construct the initial conditions, discuss the outcome with other avatars, save data from the simulation, etc.
Now, the current simulation has a limit: it can only simulate up to 50 bodies – but I’d like to think of this as just one powerful example of how virtual world technology might be used in the future to power new types of simulations and empower scientists to collaborate over them.