Archive for category navigation

What ever happened to SecondLife?

Posted by jasonwong in bad design, navigation, training on December 2nd, 2009

Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you’d be forgiven for asking if it’s still going.

Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype. Even those without a cartoon version of themselves couldn’t plead ignorance due to blanket coverage in newspapers and magazines.

The BBC posted a story recently asking what happened to the Virtual World known as SecondLife, created by Linden Labs in 2003. It had so much promise – finally, a 3-D immersive metaverse where we could interact with each other “face-to-face,” but the promise really did not pan out.

The article lists several reasons that you can read for yourself, but there are several that stand out for me. I actually just starting using SecondLife for work (via SecondLife Enterprise), so these are personal impressions.

  • Difficult to control: Someone helped me set up an account and got me familiar with the navigation controls in the 3-D environment, but it is still insanely difficult to move around and make your avatar do what you want it to do. Seems to take a lot of work just to get around.
  • Walking/running/flying takes too long: Sometimes I just want to GO RIGHT THERE and instead I have to sit there, holding the “Up” key until I get there. Seriously? I have better things to do.
  • Pay pay pay: I got in once and decided to try and customize my avatar. So I went to some clothing shops. And had to pay a bunch of money. Nevermind. I found some free clothes and tried to put them on and… some weird glitch. Help files? Useless.
  • Bandwidth issues: At work we have to access SecondLife over a Verizon AirCard, and that is painfully slow. Even at home, though, on my fast cable Internet connect? It takes a very long time for the world to load. Again – I have better things to do, like use the real Internet
  • What is SecondLife good for? This stems from the article and summarizes perfectly why I haven’t really tried to get good at SecondLife – what is the point? Is it a game? No, not at all. Is it a social networking site? Well… we have IM, Skype, e-mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter… I could go on. Is it a tool for creating your own 3-D environment that you would like to live in? Perhaps, but not my thing.

So what IS it good for? Well, the Navy is starting to push into SecondLife – not just a public presence, which doesn’t really have any real-world use. They are starting to develop some modeling and simulation tools to prototype new technologies cheaply and create augmented cognition training tools. Honestly, there is some neat stuff being developed, but it is very Navy-specific.

VirginiaC2

The creation of SecondLife Enterprise will really help this along, but public SecondLife is… well, sometimes you get pummeled with -censored-

chung-flunged

Some of the “motivation to learn” issues I listed above will be tackled because I will actually have to use SecondLife. The bandwidth issues will be solved because it will be hosted behind the Navy firewall, so that will be fast. So, for my job, SecondLife will soon become useful to me. I do not, however, expect to use it in my free time. Which could very well be a problem for SecondLife as a whole.

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Early February British and French Submarine Collision

Posted by jasonwong in mental map, navigation on February 16th, 2009

Submarines have long been called “The Silent Service.” The goal is to run long, deep, and as quiet as possible. However, sometimes, you can be two quiet.

LONDON — Two nuclear submarines, one French and the other British, collided in mid-Atlantic earlier this month, reports in the British and French news media said on Monday, quoting sources in the two defense ministries.

Both submarines were damaged extensively but have returned to their home ports since the collision on the night of February 3, the reports said.

In some respects, it is good news that the submarine anti-sonar systems were working well. However, at the same time, in close quarters like that (possibly performing some kind of training exercise?), a collision between two nuclear submarines is awfully dangerous.

Sonar displays are incredibly difficult to read. It is an interesting question, though: how do you take auditory information about spatial information and display it visually over time? Sonar is not like using x-rays to develop a CT image; sonar is not meant to provide a spatially mapped picture of what’s going on outside. Instead, the displays look like this:

sonar_display

Of course, Sonar technicians are well-trained to perform their task, but it is still not an easy or natural one. An additional layer of assistance, though, are the computer systems take that Sonar information and transform it into an easier-to-read display for the Fire Control technicians. Nonetheless, Sonar interpretation not an easy task, and someone probably missed something.

I am extremely curious to find out what really happened. Considering it is a matter of British and French national security, however, I doubt it’ll become public knowledge.

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Navigating in Three Dimensions

Posted by jasonwong in mental map, navigation, perception on April 12th, 2008

Recently, the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program had a guest speaker, Dr. Charles Oman from MIT. He spoke on spatial cognition in astronauts, because zero gravity is an entirely unique environment for navigation. There is no natural down – when you can orient yourself in any direction, it becomes much more difficult to anchor your perception of space to a single point. This makes for navigation and even basic perception a difficult task.

Here’s an example: you are an astronaut on the space shuttle and you fall asleep for your six hours in your sleeping bunk with the Earth below you when you look out the window and shut the blinds (there really are blinds). You wake up, not knowing the shuttle has rotated 180 degrees to do something. When you pull open the blinds, you expect Earth to be below, but instead, because the shuttle has rotated, it is above you. Your spatial sense is instantly destroyed, your feet and head are in the wrong place and – apparently – you vomit instantly. What you expect is not what you perceive or feel, and this leads to a massive body-environment disconnect.

While my line of work with the Navy should hopefully never lead to instant vomiting, this did get me thinking about navigation in a 3-D space. Normally, humans are flatlanders. However, in planes and on submarines (of direct interest to me), you have to think three-dimensionally, which we’re not so good at. How do submarine navigators learn to navigate in 3-D space? Does this improve their spatial skills? How good would they be at Tetris?

I am excited to begin learning about submariners, their training in navigation, and how systems need to be designed to take this extra dimension into account. I’ll have an expert group of participants for my experiments, which leads to all kinds of excellent ideas.

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If at first you don’t succeed, you fail.

Posted by jasonwong in imagery, mental map, navigation, thoughts on December 9th, 2007

I’m a couple of months behind on the phenomenon that is Portal, a short video game produced by Valve Studios. Portal is a first-person puzzle game with an ingenious twist: you have a “gun” that can shoot an entrance and exit portal pretty much anywhere, so you can cross a chasm by shooting portals next to you and on the wall across from you, allowing you to “cross” the chasm by avoiding it all together. The game is surprisingly hard to explain, actually. I’ll just embed a video: 

The game is amazingly well done, and it makes me think about the video game and cognition research that is all the rage right now. Multitudes of studies (most famously Green & Bavelier, 2003) have shown that video game experts can process more information and have a larger functional field of view. This is just a side effect of these action video games, though – they weren’t designed to enhance cognition. A game like Portal, however, stretches the mind and requires an entirely new way to solve problems. Portal requires the player to completely re-conceptualize their concept of 3D space. Not many other tasks do that.This game provides a fascinating platform for learning this entirely new concept in a first-person environment. There are times (when learning how to maneuver a submarine, for example) when this type of spatial nonconformity is necessary to successfully complete a task. It would be interesting to examine what new cognitive skills develop as one becomes an expert with a game like this. The field of video game and cognition research is still fairly new, but I anticipate seeing it expand in many new directions, including leveraging innovative new games such as this to examine how we can train our minds and expand the way we think.

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How I stopped worrying and learned to love my GPS

Posted by jasonwong in automation, driving, mental map, navigation on October 17th, 2007

So I’m spatially challenged. I can follow maps, but I have no ability to create my own mental map of an area. However, my inability to form anything above route-based knowledge is for another post. What is worth mentioning is that I finally offloaded the cognitive challenge of navigating to a new GPS device, the TomTom Go 720. Most everyone knows how GPS devices work. You enter in an address or Point of Interest, and it calculates the best way to get you there, giving you turn-by-turn real time instructions. It’s really great.

TomTom GO 720

There was a rocky start, though, and there was a learning period where I had to learn to trust the device. The voice commands are fairly demanding: “Turn right at So-And-So Drive.” The map shows you exactly where to turn, and it gives so much useful information. But there’s a strange loss of control that comes with trusting the device, even though you are, of course, fully in control of the car. The task of deciding where to turn next had been replaced by the task of deciding whether or not to trust the system. Whether the device really knew where it was taking me, or whether I should trust what I know and take a potentially longer route.

Learning to trust the system is directly tied to the body of literature that researchers automation. You should be reliant on it; it’s there to help, and you did buy it. GPS systems are assistive devices in their current state: they give you advice, and you can choose whether or not to follow it. It makes the task of navigation easier, but it adds a whole new layer of decision making: do you follow the advice to turn there, or do you follow your gut? And if you are worried about the trustworthiness of the system, is it really helping? Are things better because you’ve offloaded a difficult task to a computer?

After a while, I got used to it – most people do. The answer, at least with me, was training. After a few instances of navigating to a new location or avoiding a roadblock or getting around traffic, I trusted the GPS to save my butt and get me to where I was going. I was trained to trust the system, and my interactions with the system trained it to be more useful to me. I changed the settings of the device to adapt to my learning style and it learned some of my Favorite Locations and a little more about my driving preferences. I learned to feel more comfortable with it. This piece of automation goes with me almost all the time, and after a rocky start, I learned to rely on it.

Of course, over-reliance can be a bad thing: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article707216.ece

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