Hospital Patients To Test Online Virtual World
(05/26/00, 11:21 a.m. ET) By Stuart Glascock, TechWeb News
BELLEVUE, WASH. -- Internet social interface researchers probing the potential of online virtual worlds will conduct a unique clinical trial this summer.
About 80 cancer patients and their caregivers will have access to a custom-programmed virtual world during lengthy stays at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Patients will enter an online, 3-D world through a password-protected portal through which they can participate in multiuser games, discussion areas, visit virtual gift shops, send free things to other patients, keep journals, and interact and gain social support in a variety of ways with other members.
The virtual world is reality-based, and contains a model of the hospital's lobby and characters that look like people, not cartoons. The virtual community members can also recognize each other, wave from across a room, and even flirt (by emitting little red hearts). A virtual auditorium provides a meeting place for group activities and lectures.
The pilot program is the result of a partnership between the reknowned cancer research facility and the Virtual Worlds Group at Microsoft Research. It was discussed in detail at the Washington Software Alliance's annual Online Advantage conference here Thursday.
"We know how patients interact with each other in the real world and how they interact with the staff," said Anne Marie Clark, director of library and Internet services at Fred Hutchison. "We wanted to know how that would translate into the online world. We want to know how the demands of the users' attention are affected by the different types of communication."
Microsoft (stock: MSFT) donated funds to cover the project costs and networking, and the Virtual Worlds Group at Microsoft Research helped with design issues of the virtual environment.
In the trial this summer, researchers will look at questions such as whether recovering patients' social support can be enhanced by online virtual worlds or if demands on caregivers' attention are affected. Researchers will track the trial group's usage and collect survey data, Clark said. If the results are positive, a wider rollout will begin in the first half of 2001.
HutchWorld, the community for cancer patients, is based on Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Platform, which provides synchronous and asynchronous communication and Web integration. It is further built on Microsoft's COM, ActiveX, and DirectX technologies. About 15 scientists working for the Redmond, Wash., software company are looking into methods for using virtual worlds in areas besides purely social interaction, such as distance learning and e-commerce.
Microsoft has released to nonprofit groups the source code for its multiuser platform virtual world architecture, said Lili Cheng, lead project manager of the Virtual Worlds Group at Microsoft Research.
"We have a tool kit for developing distributed, persistence, multiuser environments," Cheng said. "What that means is people can connect from all over the place to a location that supports multiple features." |
