Addiction, research, health in a virtual world
A new working group looking at the psychology of immersive environments is about to launch in Second Life. The inaugural get-together is occurring Wednesday July 15th at 4pm SL time. Click here for the exact location.
The Chi-Town Daily News has a good article on The University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health recruiting public health workers to participate in emergency preparedness training, in Second Life. Why bother? Here’s why: Emergency preparedness training usually requires closing down facilities and calling people off of work—but conducting emergency drills virtually is [...]
The past couple of weeks have seen some interesting articles in the mainstream media on virtual environments and health. The first is in the Jerusalem Post, showing the benefits for the vision impaired. You can view the full article here. The second appears in Information Week and covers the use of Second Life by Chicago [...]
The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research continues to go from strength to strength, and the current edition is devoted to health and virtual worlds. I’ll be writing about some of the specific pieces in coming weeks, but you’ll see the full table of contents below: Table of Contents Editor’s Corner Musings on the State of [...]
As a Registered Nurse with a passion for the use of emerging technologies to improve health, it can sometimes be a little frustrating when things don’t seem to progress as fast as one would like. There’s also the ‘they just don’t get it’ phenomenon amongst some in health leadership and management roles, which can lead [...]
The Economist has an interesting article on the use of Second Life in training people around virtual consent. It’s an area where a virtual world has strengths (the ability to recreate a real-world situation) without some of the downfalls (lack of clinical complexity due to technological limitations). Another aspect that has struck me over the [...]
I noticed this interesting news article at the Thanh Nien Daily. Essentially, it’s an intensive course running on weekends for two months. On the face of it it seems a useful option for those with issues impacting their lives detrimentally. Looking a little closer though, and the alarm bells start ringing. Take this for example: [...]
The individual ex-addict’s perspective has always held power, no matter the source of the addiction. In the MMO gaming sphere, a recent addition to the blogosphere is ExGamer.net. Run by a 40-year old Canadian guy and 44-year old Dutch woman, it’s a blog in its early stages but it does give some interesting personal insights [...]
Virtual Ability island continue their regular health-related events. This time, smoking cessation is the focus: Moving toward wellness: Smoking Cessation Tuesday, September 9 8:00 a.m. & 4:00 p.m. SLT Virtual Ability Island This workshop is funded by a grant from the National Library of Medicine, and supported by the Alliance Library System. Nearly 8 years [...]
Erich Bremer is a computer and systems engineer who has created Monolith, “a molecular visualization system created to display molecular structures within the virtual world known as Second Life and allow real-time interaction with the displayed structures”. It pulls information from the Rutgers Protein Data Bank and creates that structure in Second Life, allowing people [...]
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 [...]
Jon-Paul Cacioli is a Doctor of Clinical Psychology student at Deakin University, and he’s currently conducting a study on body image in virtual worlds. In his words: “I am looking for participants, male and 18+ to complete a survey regarding both their real world and virtual world body images and psychological states.” He needs 300 [...]
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 [...]