I ran across a new Hospital world in Metaplace recently, which piqued my interest. The owner Relay was there, so we chatted about what the point of the Hospital was. In real life, Relay goes by Dr Neil Hamilton, Director of an e-learning center at the University of Aberdeen Medical School in Scotland. Dr Hamilton is exploring the use of Metaplace as a learning environment for his medical
students in the UK. His first prototype is "Jim" an "interactive
patient Metabuddy" that you can query about his symptoms and make a diagnosis of what disorder he suffers from.
Right now Jim is pretty basic, only following a fairly simple chain of text questions and answers. But Dr Hamilton wrote "if the students and clinical staff are receptive, I would hope to include digital images, video and sound as part of the medical history taking and the differential diagnosis."
Further down the road, Dr. Hamilton is interested in adding a "health bar" so you can track the status of your patient based on your decisions, and more advanced AI. He also wants to experiment with integrating the Moodle learning platform into Metaplace, which should be fairly easy since it already has been modified to work in Second Life via Sloodle.
That is all well and good, but I hope that Relay thinks about how others beyond his own medical students might use the Metaplace Hospital to learn about important medical issues, to chat with medical professionals, and, oh yeah, to have fun. The virtual world should not just mimic existing web and desktop app based applications, but add value and richer engagement.
"I
am also hoping that The Hospital will help people see how virtual
worlds can genuinely help in the real world," wrote Dr Hamilton. Sounds like the Betterverse mantra! He is looking for funding to keep developing the space. For more info, email him at n.m.hamilton@abdn.ac.uk .
