Where Virtual and Real Worlds Fuse

October 24, 2007. Media X at Stanford University announces seven new awards for exploration of the fusion of virtual and physical worlds for advanced human communications. A faculty review team selected these seven awards from nineteen proposals received from faculty members at Stanford University in response to a Media X request for proposals.

Results of the multidisciplinary projects will advance knowledge applied to how people living in the oxygenated world use, share information, and collaborate in a digitized world. Results will also inform the ways that “real-time” and “re-lived” virtual experiences support learning, innovation and productivity.  Graduate students participating in the research projects will carry this new knowledge into jobs they eventually accept – in government, business and education sectors. 

“The fusion of virtual and physical worlds for advanced communications represents a new field of interdisciplinary inquiry,” says Byron Reeves, Professor of Communication, Co-Founder of Media X and H-STAR, the Human Sciences Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford University.  “While computer-aided ‘physical worlds’ with digitized documents, media and information exchange are the basis of most corporate work these days,” explains Chuck House, Executive Director of Media X, “the question of synchronizing or harmonizing virtual worlds with physical worlds has not been studied in much depth, and is increasingly vital to understand.”

The interaction between physical objects and their virtual counterparts invites many intellectual and practical questions.  “Digitized virtual worlds have blossomed in recent years, enticing a wide variety of users via games, shared digital media, and participatory social networks,” adds Keith Devlin, Co-founder Media X and of Stanford’s H-STAR Institute.  For example, the psychological effects of deleting a ‘stored document’ when the ‘real’ document is shredded; or a virtual teacher applying a ‘touch’ to a student modeling clay in a ceramic arts class are all new frontiers.” 

The seven awards are:

Diane Bailey, Assistant Professor of Management Science and Engineering & Ingrid Erickson, PhD Candidate

Exploring the Virtual in the Physical and the Physical in the Virtual

To explore the virtual-physical-social interplay by investigating how social experiences and interactions in physical places are augmented with layers of digital information and how those in virtual places are augmented with layers of physical information.

Pat Hanrahan, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Vladen Koltun, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, and Philip Levis, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Virtual Sensor Networks

To develop virtual sensornets, which will allow scientists to construct instruments for measuring what is happening in virtual worlds, allow users to control and monitor what is being recorded, and provide an elegant and simple privacy mechanism.

Kincho H. Law, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering & Dr. Renate Fruchter, Research Associate, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Founding Director, Project-Based Learning Laboratory

ShowMeTellMe: Multimodal Learning Experience Mediated by the Future Interactive Paper TextBook

Using a scenario-based approach, this project will study the continuum between learners’ dialogue and paper and pencil sketching in order to develop a model of the future interactive paper textbook, which will create and capture sharable and reusable items in context – for example, to capture questions and thoughts of the textbook’s users and to communicate between the learner and the instructor, expert or author. 

Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law, Lauren Gelman, Associate Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, and Dan Siciliano, Executive Director of Stanford Law School’s Program in Law, Economics & Business

Virtual Jurisdictions – A Joint Project of Stanford Law School and Second Life

To learn how the use of the virtual world technology medium influences individual communication and interaction and how it influences the development of legal regimes to govern virtual communities.

John Perry, Professor of Philosophy

The Pragmatics of Computer-assisted Communication and Communication about Virtual Worlds

To apply the reflexive/referential theory of meaning to address the differences that new modes of linguistic communication present and to understand the coordination between virtual worlds and objects in the actual world that they may be taken to represent.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Professor of French & Italian and Director of Stanford Humanities Laboratory, Jeff Aldrich, Technology Director & Henrik Bennetson, Research Director, Stanford Humanities Laboratory

SPEED Limits

To develop a digital 3-D world that will nest a reconstruction of an international exhibition of art, architecture and design galleries in order to create and examine the fusion of virtual and real exhibits on the pivotal role played by speed in modern life.

Anthony Wagner, Assistant Professor of Psychology & Byron Reeves, Professor of Communication

Learning in the Digital World: The Impact of Social Belief on the Neurophysiology of Memory

To use the acquired equivalence paradigm to measure the extent to which learners are able to use the concept of memory-dependent logical inference as a basis for generalization, in order to study whether virtual contexts are optimal for learning and the expression of flexibly addressable knowledge.

 

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