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.

(Exploring Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics)