Immersive realism may be the "Holy Grail" of game development, but should it be? In this opinion piece, author and designer Lewis Pulsipher argues that most players don't want "role-fulfillment," in support of the idea that strong mechanics -- and even player design awareness -- is a more suitable goal.
Primarily, we want to create a new tool that uses the unique features of virtual environments to facilitate education, collaboration, and understanding. The output of many supercomputing applications - from astronomical simulations to medical models - is complex and often highly visual. Creating a persistent, standardized environment where these models can reside will make it easier to share and explore these data sets with other researchers. Also, for educators, ScienceSim will provide an interactive 3-D environment that can be used to explain complex concepts such as gravity in a highly intuitive manner.
Primarily, we want to create a new tool that uses the unique features of virtual environments to facilitate education, collaboration, and understanding. The output of many supercomputing applications - from astronomical simulations to medical models - is complex and often highly visual. Creating a persistent, standardized environment where these models can reside will make it easier to share and explore these data sets with other researchers. Also, for educators, ScienceSim will provide an interactive 3-D environment that can be used to explain complex concepts such as gravity [see video below] in a highly intuitive manner.
ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change is an immersive internet experiment, culminating in a face-face conference.
We want to build a collective intelligence resource on the climate change debate. This is analogous to Wikipedia, but decidely not enforcing a "neutral point of view". We are going to put through their paces tools tuned for mapping the key issues, options, arguments and evidence on the different dillemmas - and reflect on how effective the current tools are.
ESSENCE is an immersive internet experiment, and a face-face conference. It invites human-centred technologists, climate scientists, policymakers, and any other stakeholder with a view on some part of the climate change debate, to experience and reflect on a new generation of software tools. Build, structure, summarise and navigate the science and policy arguments underpinning climate challenge. Think of it as a visual Wikipedia, a collective intelligence, to organise the key issues, options and arguments.