Related papers: Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds
Often mistakenly seen as a game, the online 3D immersive virtual world Second Life (SL) is itself a huge and sophisticated simulator of an entire Earthlike world. Differently from other metaverses where physical laws are not seriously taken…
At the frontier of most areas in science, computer simulations play a central role. The traditional division of natural science into experimental and theoretical investigations is now completely outdated. Instead, theory, simulation, and…
We describe the work of the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the first professional scientific organization based in virtual worlds. MICA was an experiment in the use of this technology for science and scholarship,…
E-Laboratories are important components of e- learning environments, especially in scientific and technical disciplines. First widespread E-Labs consisted in proposing simulations of real systems (virtual labs), as building remote labs…
Virtual Worlds (VWs) are an emerging technology used by a growing number of educational institutions around the world. It is an environment, a way of learning and an educational tool that allows different levels of online interaction. In…
After several years of intensive technological development Virtual Observatory resources have reached a level of maturity sufficient for their routine scientific exploitation. The Virtual Observatory is starting to be used by astronomers in…
Galactic nuclei and globular clusters act as laboratories in which nature experiments with normal stars, neutron stars and black holes, through collisions and through the formation of bound states, in the form of binaries. The main…
In the past twelve months, our team has had to move rapidly from conducting most of our user experiments in a laboratory setting, to running experiments in the wild away from the laboratory and without direct synchronous oversight from an…
Although cosmology is usually considered an observational science, where there is little or no space for experimentation, other approaches can (and have been) also considered. In particular, we can change rather drastically the above, more…
As a scientific discipline, Astronomy is rather unique. We only have one laboratory, the Universe, and we cannot, of course, change the initial conditions and study the resulting effects. On top of this, acquiring Astronomical data has…
Virtual Reality has become a significant element of education throughout the years. To understand the quality and advantages of these techniques, it is important to understand how they were developed and evaluated. Since COVID-19, the…
Many scientific disciplines have traditionally advanced by iterating over hypotheses using labor-intensive trial-and-error, which is a slow and expensive process. Recent advances in computing, digitalization, and machine learning have…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the first professional scientific organization based exclusively in virtual worlds (VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerging VR and VWs…
The physics laboratory-works creating and operating computer simulations experience is described. A significant amount of laboratory works can be classified as a "black box". The studied physical phenomenon is hidden from direct…
The quantum world is fascinating. It presents a description of nature that defies our most rooted concepts about what reality is. For example, quantum objects possess \lq\lq spooky\rq\rq\ properties that allow them to be in multiple places…
Augmented Reality consists of merging live images with virtual layers of information. The rapid growth in the popularity of smartphones and tablets over recent years has provided a large base of potential users of Augmented Reality…
For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of the starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive sky simulator of the twentieth century, the…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
Recent years have seen tremendous progress in our understanding of the extreme universe, which in turn points to even deeper questions to be further addressed. History has shown that the symbiosis between direct observations and laboratory…