Science in the Triangle

More than 2,000 researchers and educators from 69 countries attended the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference last month, including Tony O’Driscoll of Duke University and Brent Ward from RTI International in Research Triangle Park.

Like the other attendees, O’Driscoll and Ward didn’t travel to VWBPE in person. They sat in front of a computer and had their voice-activated avatars teleport to one of 20 specially constructed virtual islands, where the conference took place over 48 continuous hours. Some of the islands resembled the Guilin mountains in China, an Irish seaside cottage and Stonehenge, the famous English prehistoric monument.

Brent Werber

Wada Tripp, O’Driscoll’s avatar, gave a presentation on 3-D learning, which requires students to interact in simulated, or virtual, environments. Brent Werber, Ward’s avatar, moderated a panel at the conference.

O’Driscoll is a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Ward provides RTI researchers technical assistance as the research institute’s director of commercialization. Both are professionals holding positions of responsibility, but neither thinks twice about slipping into his “digital sockpuppet,” a computer-generated persona that lives in Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world maintained by Linden Lab of San Francisco. Read more…