Slashdot Mirror
The New VA Health Plan Is Second Life
theodp writes "Remember when Catbert informed Dilbert that the new company health plan is Google? In another case of life imitating Dilbert, combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder are being provided with a US Army-sponsored virtual world in Second Life (slideshow) to help deal with their condition. Developed by USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, it is hoped that the veterans-only virtual world Coming Home and its planned activities will promote conversations that can help reduce PTSD. The Avatar will see you now, Sergeant."
I work in the military as a health care provider.
One of the biggest problems for military specific PTSD patients is the feeling that no one around them understands. And in most cases, they are right. No one really does understand, nor could they.
Once someone is medically retired they lose the connection of having buddies around them who've been through the same or at least similar experiences. There aren't many people in civilian life to connect with.
I think using a Second Life style interface for soldiers and veterans (especially veterans for the reasons I've mentioned above) is a great idea. It provides an opportunity for people to connect with others who have similar experiences. I think it would probably be even more effective to have a game where people are actually doing something rather than just sitting around talking to each other; many veterans will reject something like this as just another "group therapy" session.
Now a PTSD only Halo server or something would be great. You could even have separate servers for guys blown up in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. You could have an "I hate MRAPs but I still have my legs" server. The possibilities are endless. If you allowed the soldiers/vets to make their own designations they would probably scandalize those who've never been in the military :-).
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
I've been following a lot of similar stories recently and I don't understand why agencies and institutions wouldn't build on an opensource infrastructure that they can control (e.g., something like openlife)
Linden Labs has experience and resources.
Linden Labs clients include:
British Petroleum
Wells Fargo
NOAA
The government of Ontario
Naval Undersea Warfare Center
CIGNA
Kraft
Unilever
Disney
Northrop Grumman
Kelly Services
Cisco
IBM
Intel
Microsoft
Toshiba
British Telecom
Nokia
Second Life Work
Openlife is in beta and looks it.
Because opensim is unprofessional.
Quality-wise, the existent grids run very badly, with very common crashes, asset loss, bad performance, region crossing issues...
Development is unprofessional. The developers pulled an april fools day prank that caught by suprise several companies depending on their work. It wasn't an april fools day checkin either, but a change prepared weeks in advance, set to trigger on April 1. Which made it seriously hard to figure out what was going on.
Then there are the rumors about the developers keeping certain functionality intentionally broken, to make sure the project is hard to use seriously for free.
As much as I like Open Source, the fact is that at the time, Linden Labs has a much better infrastructure, better code, and a much better team to support it.
Did you read the link you posted? The prank was in the SVN branch only, only the developers should be using it. Certainly no one should show it to clients/investors.