Addiction, research, health in a virtual world
Virtual Ability is an island in Second Life devoted to individuals with disabilities or chronic health conditions.
Initially funded by the USA’s National Library of Medicine, it now relies on individual contributions. It contains a number of discrete areas including training facilities for people with chronic health conditions. They even have their own orientation section which is well laid out and easy to follow.
You can contact Carolina Keats or Eme Capalini in-world for more information.
Thanks to a missed email this domain went down for a couple of weeks – all is good again now
One of the advantages of being a regular (daily) observer of virtual worlds news, is you get a fair idea of trends. One growth trend over recent months has been the interest in the health applications of virtual environments. One of the better pieces of media coverage is one by the Wall Street Journal. It’s [...]
This story originally appeared over at The Metaverse Journal. Over the past few months or I’ve followed the efforts of Dale Linegar and Stefan Schutt in establishing what is now known as The Lab. Dedicated to providing support and skills to 10-16 year olds with Asperger’s Syndrome, The Lab is already showing some great results. [...]
Over the weekend I familiarised myself with Scoop.it, thanks to the kindness of Jo Kay who provided me an invite. Basically what Scoop.it does is take a lot of the hard work out of trawling the web and social media for information on a topic of interest. Once you spend some time setting up your [...]
The ever-growing number of health-related projects occurring in virtual worlds continues to seep through to the academic literature. On the 18th December, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published an article titled Web 3D for Public, Environmental and Occupational Health: Early Examples from Second Life. The abstract: Over the past three years [...]
Via Dusan Writer, here’s an interesting piece on the use of Second Life to train pharmacists in using pharmacy clean rooms. I’ve had the opportunity to use pharmacy clean rooms myself , and I can see how a virtual walk through can be of use before doing the real thing.
Virtual Ability is an island in Second Life devoted to individuals with disabilities or chronic health conditions. Initially funded by the USA’s National Library of Medicine, it now relies on individual contributions. It contains a number of discrete areas including training facilities for people with chronic health conditions. They even have their own orientation section [...]
I spent some time in recent weeks with John “Pathfinder” Lester, formerly of Linden Lab and now Director of Community Development at Reaction Grid. The purpose was for a walkthrough of the Jibe platform, which is a merger of Unity3D and other technologies to make a more comprehensive learning experience. I hooked up with John [...]
Over the past couple of years I’ve had the opportunity to chat with Andrew Campbell on a couple of occasions. As Director of the Prometheus Research Team, Andrew is heavily involved in the area of mental health and technology. I’ve always been struck by Andrew’s objective view of gaming and virtual worlds, which he rightly [...]
I’m probably stretching the boundaries with claiming this to be a health-related post, but here goes. I’ve covered Second Life‘s Relay for Life previously, and it’s actually running over this weekend and appears it will be as big a success as previous years. One Second Life resident, Laurence Simon created a machinima called Relay for [...]
I spent some time today reading some fascinating (offline) information about the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic and later on stumbled across an interesting article by Robert Bloomfield on the recent H1N1 (Swine Flu) outbreak. The take home message: If you look at it this way, epidemics provide something of a ‘perfect storm’ for virtual worlds. They [...]
Over at Terra Nova, Robert Bloomfield has written a very interesting post on research methods and virtual worlds. You can read it in full here. The quantitative vs qualitative debate is nothing new in research, but Bloomfield posits that the current momentum toward quantitative research poses some challenges for the other side of the coin.
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