10 Axioms for the Metaverse

 

David has posted a new story to Medium on "10 Axioms for the Metaverse". You can read it at https://medium.com/@davidjhburden/10-axioms-for-the-metaverse-26ac45c0e162

Free Pedagogy for Virtual Reality Training and Education eBook Released

 

Last year David and Prof. Maggi Savin-Baden and Dr Victoria Mason-Robbie (both of the University of Worcester and regular Daden collaborators) produced a 56pp eBook for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) of the UK's Ministry of Defence on the pedagogy of virtual reality. Whilst that version was approved for public release earlier this year we thought it might be nice to have a copy with non-military imagery and which removed the (few) military specific references. This new civilian version of "Pedagogy for Virtual Reality Training and Education" has now also been approved by MOD for public release and you can download a free copy of it right now!

If you've got any comments we'd love to hear them - just email info@daden.co.uk, and if we can help you think through VR and Metaverse issues more generally then again just drop us a line.

Improbable Interview

 Nice interview from Improbable about the work that we're doing together this autumn looking at combining our social media synthetic wrap work with their hyper-scale agent-based modelling system and synthetic environment.

https://defence.improbable.io/qa-with-daden-the-specialist-business-breaking-new-ground-synthetic-social-media/

What Goes Into a Metaverse?

 

I've just posted a new article to Medium on What Goes Into a Metaverse? It updates a diagram and presentation I did for PICNIC in Amsterdam on the Metaverse back in 2008.

The Metaverse — A Future History?

 

I've just done a (very) slightly updated version of my The Metaverse — A Future History?/ReLive post on the Medium platform at https://davidjhburden.medium.com/the-metaverse-a-future-history-e6f18b080d15.

Effect of Non-Immersive Virtual Reality Simulation on Type 2 Diabetes Education for Nursing Students: A Randomised Controlled Trial

 

A nice paper that we co-authored with Heidi Singleton form Bournemouth University on her Diabetes project in VR has finally seen light of day. You can read it on open access at:

https://www.nursingsimulation.org/action/showPdf?pii=S1876-1399%2822%2900016-0

The abstract is:

Background: A virtual reality simulation was used to teach treatment of diabetic patients.

Methods: This study evaluated the impact of using virtual reality on short term knowledge of hypoglycaemia, via pairing of a randomised controlled trial, analysed via Partial Least Squares-Structural

Equation Modelling. The setting was two large lecture theatres based at campuses within the UK. Second year nursing students (n = 171) volunteered to take part in the study. Students were randomised into two groups, control (n = 88) and experimental (n = 83). The trial enabled comparison, via preand posttest surveys, of the simulation with normative teaching methods.

Results: VR was found to be significantly (p ≤ .001) better in terms of hypoglycaemia knowledge than normative methods. The method also enabled identification of the key point of action of the simulation, which evidenced that the “engagement to immersion” pathway was responsible for leading to higher knowledge scores in the experimental group.

Conclusion: This paper claims addition to knowledge about how the novel approach taken has the potential to deepen understanding of how virtual technologies can affect learning in nurse education.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecns.2022.02.009.

Reith Lectures on AI

Thoroughly enjoyed Stuart Russell's Reith Lectures on AI. He just seemed to keep mentioning bits related to what we've done in various projects! 

In particular I liked this exchange from the first episode (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001216j) which touched on the approach we've been taking with our Reflexive Agent and our consideration of Wisdom and AI in our DASA/Royal Navy Intelligent Ship project.

"ROLY KEATING: Roly Keating from British Library. It’s wonderful to have

you here. Thank you for the lecture. I was interested in the language and

vocabulary of human intellectual life that seems to run around AI, and I’m

hearing data gathering, pattern recognition, knowledge, even problem solving,

but I think an earlier question used the word “wisdom,” which I’ve not heard so

much around this debate, and I suppose I’m trying to get a sense of where you

feel that fits into the equation. Is AI going to help us as a species gradually

become wiser or is wisdom exactly the thing that we have to keep a monopoly

on? Is that a purely human characteristic, do you think?

STUART RUSSELL: Or the third possibility would be that AI helps us

achieve wisdom without actually acquiring wisdom of its own, and I think, for

example, my children have helped me acquire wisdom without necessarily having

wisdom of their own. They certainly help me achieve humility. So, AI could help,

actually, by asking the questions, right, because in some ways AI needs us to be

explicit about what we think the future should be, that just the process of that

interrogation could bring some wisdom to us."

Spot on!