Do you think that online gaming can enhance analytic performance? IARPA wants to know.
Last Updated on Saturday, 13 March 2010 07:16 Written by Jeffreycarr Saturday, 13 March 2010 07:16
World of Warcraft screenshot
The Intelligence Community’s version of DARPA, known as IARPA, has issued a fascinating pre-solicitation (IARPA-RFI-10-04) which asks for a brief pager on how immersive games and virtual worlds can help overcome some of the common problems experienced by intelligence analysts, such as groupthink, premature attachment to early hypotheses, confirmation bias, and cultural bias.
From the solicitation:
IARPA is interested in focused, quantitative research to understand how virtual worlds and immersive games may have RW effects, particularly those effects that could positively impact individual and group analytic performance. What are the important VW (and RW) environmental variables that control the strength and persistence of such effects? Examples of variables include, but are not limited to: degree of fidelity, image and sound quality, level of immersion, amount of repetition, social effects, narrative structure, language skills, and cultural background.
Submissions should be theory-driven, and any prospective VW or game development, along with experimental paradigms to test their effectiveness, should be informed by existing or new theories. Theories may be derived from a number of disciplines, including but not limited to: education, clinical psychology, social psychology, health care, or neurology.
Submissions may also address one or more of the following topics:
1. Alternative virtual environments, ranging from Virtual Reality rooms to desktop/laptop applications to mobile handheld devices/applications
2. Quantitative methods for reliably predicting and objectively measuring expected RW effects and actual RW effects due to the complex variables, including longitudinal effects
3. Literature reviews or perspectives on research. Research does not need to be directly related to analytic processes, but may be based in other domains such as VWs for education/training, or gaming for health.
The responses to this RFI will be used to help in the planning of a one to two day workshop. The results of this workshop may justify a multi-year competitive program. The selection of topics, participants, and setting of the agenda of this workshop will in part be informed by the responses, with responders potentially being invited to participate and present at this workshop. It is anticipated that this workshop will be held in May 2010.
Instructions on how to respond are in the pre-solicitation. The deadline is April 10, 2010 so get moving on this!
The Explosion in Virtual World Development: Follow the Money
Last Updated on Wednesday, 9 July 2008 08:28 Written by admin Wednesday, 9 July 2008 08:26
Development is booming in the metaverse, and Venture Capitalists are feeding the frenzy with $345 million invested so far this year. Here are a few of the more significant investments of the 2nd Quarter 2008 (click the table to expand).
Virtual Worlds Management has its finger on the pulse of this space. You can read their full reports for Q1 2008 and Q2 2008 online. The first quarter of 2008 saw $184 million invested in 23 virtual worlds-related companies and $161 million invsted in 16 virtual worlds-related companies in the 2nd quarter. (H/T to TechCrunch)
Google’s Lively
July 8 marked Google’s Lively. VWM has an indepth review here. Lewis Shepherd rounded up a few reviews this morning from GigaOm and the New York Times. On the plus side, the Lively team is working with an unlimited budget and has made the decision to outsource avatar and other virtual customizations to some really talented 3D partners. This could knock down a big barrier for entry to the multiverse for a lot of people. With Lively, you don’t have to know how to customize your avatar or build your environment. You just have to drag and drop from The Catalog. Check out the Lively video and decide for yourself.
Will A-SpaceX Move at the speed of Government?
I posted a few days ago about IARPA and their A-SpaceX project. I like the fact that their plans are ambitious and ground-breaking (which is IARPA’s remit, after all). I’m concerned about the length of time that it typically takes a government research agency to go from concept to proof-of-concept. Based on the number of players and the capital pouring into this space, I expect to see some major breakthroughs in 3D development before the year is out. By this time next year, my personal avatar may be doing research for me on the Web while I’m composing my next blog post. And where will the Air Force Research Laboratory be on A-SpaceX? Still mired in the BAA grant proposal process.
If the IC wants the benefit of cutting edge tools, it desperately needs to adopt an agile development process – particularly for its entree into virtual worlds.
IARPA’s Virtual Project A-SpaceX won’t be another Second Life
Last Updated on Friday, 4 July 2008 10:12 Written by admin Thursday, 3 July 2008 10:08
I think there’s a bright future for virtual worlds as a platform for the Intelligence Community, as well as the Department of Defense, but it’s not going to be Second Life. Here’s why.
According to Gartner Research, there are 3 key challenges to the enterprise adoption of Second Life:
- Insufficient graphics capabilities in workplace computers. Will businesses find work in a virtual environment sufficiently productive to warrant buying gaming class computers for all of their employees? Even if they do, and that’s a huge “if”, Second Life only supports NVIDIA graphics cards and a few ATI cards.
- Complicated development environment. Gartner refers to this as “Technical Glitches”, but what it comes down to is that Linden Labs hasn’t come up with a scalable design that suits the average organization’s needs. What they have is over-kill for the largest part of the market.
- Downtime. Second Life is frequently down during business hours. This seems like a no-brainer, but even if it caught Linden Labs by surprise, there’s no evidence that it’s doing anything to remedy the situation.
Noah at DangerRoom recently posted about A-SpaceX, an initiative from IARPA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Air Force Research Laboratory:
“A-SpaceX’s analysts will be able to turn back the clock, and see how they arrived at conclusions. “We believe a key dimension of exploring changing data will be the ability to manipulate time in the synthetic worlds – in effect turning these worlds into Time Machines,” the announcement notes. And those machines ought to be able to go forward, as well. “Proactive analysis could be explored by applying predictive models that look forward in time and suggest indicators leading to future events.”
“This new effort builds on A-Space, an intelligence community collaboration tool that’s under development. When completed, it is supposed to allow spooks to instant message, blog, share documents and photos, trade competing hypotheses, and do Facebook-style social networking.
“However, A-SpaceX goes several, several steps further — designing a whole virtual world for spies, not just their answer to MySpace. Which leads some in the intelligence community to be downright skeptical of the program. “They can’t do plain old forensics right and they’re going to develop a mechanism that rolls the clock backwards and forwards based on multiple inputs?” one source asks. “It should be good R&D, but its just that: no chance this becomes operational in a meaningful timeframe.”
“An open planning meeting for A-SpaceX is scheduled for next Tuesday, July 8th, in College Park, Maryland. Originally, folks were going to be able to “attend” the meeting “via a web simulcast and via Second Life.” But those plans had to be scrapped. “
If IARPA holds true to its intention to have A-SpaceX be a part of A-Space, then it will have to be on an open platform. That might pose a problem for the handful of companies who have the experience to build it. They’re almost all hawking proprietary software rather than an open virtual platform like Second Life. One exception, ironically, is Microsoft, thanks to its recent ESP release. From a recent Gartner Research report “Microsoft ESP Marks Shift to Richer Simulation Platforms”:
“Platforms such as Microsoft ESP will slowly begin to change the nature of simulation training. Because simulations such as ESP offer more of a free-play environment, the resulting simulations will be more realistic. In the past, some high-end applications had to run on special hardware. And even today for some other virtual environments, platform configurations can be a major stumbling block (see Note 1). By providing a platform of tools that scale around a variety of hardware from large systems to laptops, Microsoft has increased the options for developers to create simulation solutions. The ability to scale should give developers from smaller organizations access to tools that previously may have been too expensive. Another feature of the approach is the ability to create content on top of the platform so that developers are not forced to start over each time. Some organizations — notably in healthcare and education — have made significant investment to create customized, immersive environments. However, with the acceptance of these environments by the intended user community still in question, only larger enterprises have been able to afford these costly experiments.”
I fully expect to see Forterra Systems submit a proposal for this project, even though their OLIVE platform is a closed (proprietary) system. They’ve got an excellent track record within the DoD and IC for their 3D training work. It’ll be interesting to see which approach wins out – Closed or Open. Personally, I think an open platform is the better choice.
For more information on the military’s use of virtual world’s, see the recent CRS report “Avatars, Virtual Reality Technology, and the U.S. Military: Emerging Policy Issues“.
Inside Cyber Warfare
