Blogging on the rugged digital shores of Davis Island in Second Life®

I recently found myself immersed in a never-ending blog post trying to cover both a compelling overview of Second Life® and share our experiences with the MH214 Health Informatics class:
On the rugged digital shores of Davis Island: in Second Life® with the MH214 Class


Close-up of one of the orientation activities (camera controls)in the glistening waters surrounding Virtual Ability Island. To visit the orientation location use the following SLURL to open the SLURL map. From there you can either join if you do not already have an account, or click through to teleport to the location. Doing this will automatically launch any Second Life® viewer that is installed on your computer: http://slurl.com/secondlife/virtual%20ability/128/128/23


Visit the Virtual Ability website.
Tags: "davis island" "uc davis" "second life", "Virtual Ability", blogging, Second Life, libraries

Finding Medical Articles on Second Life®: MeSH by another name Medical Subject Headings: not the 3D Polygon MESH

I would like to share with you a couple of articles that were mentioned during last Thursday's class in Second Life®. These are the peer reviewed journal articles on the Virtual Hallucinations and Bioterrorism Defense research projects by Peter Yellowlees MD, James Cook MD and Martin Leamon MD. We will also dive into MeSH by another name... the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that enable us to locate relevant articles such as these in the vast PubMed database.

Both of the articles appear to be freely available in full text from PubMed.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18386971,17139026?report=citation

Note: If you are a full time UC Davis student or staff / faculty member and are currently off campus, be sure to login using the Virtual Private Network (VPN) if you are off campus, and always access the PubMed Database via the Health Sciences Library website or Clinical Resources Center in order to gain access to the full text of articles for journals for which we have online subscriptions.
As you may have noticed, it is indeed difficult to pull up articles about Second Life in PubMed. The reason for that is that many of the articles use terms such as "virtual reality" or "virtual environment" rather than the commercial name for the software. So, the best way to find relevant articles in PubMed on research being conducted in Second Life or review articles about Second Life®, is to search using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that are the backbone of this massive database.
In order to retrieve relevant articles, this is the query I used:
"User-Computer Interface"[MAJR] AND (virtual environment OR second life)
This query retrieves 860 articles... of course, way too many for our purposes. But, take a look at the subject headings in the articles by changing your view to 'citation view' and also adding in some of the subject headings or alternative keywords to narrow your search.

Note: the controlled vocabulary used by Pubmed it called MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and in the query above we are using it and telling PubMed to just retrieve articles that have User-Computer Interface as the major focus of the article, and also find the terms virtual environment OR second life in the article.
You can vary the terms that describe the environment.

As a reminder, in an earlier post I mentioned the freely available peer reviewed journals Journal of Virtual Worlds Research that has just put out a special issue on health and healthcare in virtual worlds and also Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR):

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research & JMIR
Originally uploaded by HVX Silverstar

Free full text journals:
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
Vol 2, No 2: 3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare
and
Journal of Medical Internet Research
http://www.jmir.org/2009/2/e17/HTML
A Survey of Health-Related Activities on Second Life

Firefox toolbars to the virtual world: MH214 Health Informatics Class toolbar

For anyone using the Firefox browser... or for anyone who wants a quick way to reach the MH214 class locations in Second Life... read on!
Download and install the toolbar with quick links to the Second Life locations visited during the last sessions, as well as additional links:
http://mhi214joinusinsecondlife.ourtoolbar.com/
Links include:

Davis Island (private - MH214 students & faculty only)
Virtual Palomar West Hospital
Second Health London Polyclinic
Virtual Hallucinations public location
Library Studios (my island in process)
UC Davis Extension Class site

Mozilla Firefox browser:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html

Note: Second Life viewer must be installed on your computer to use the toolbar. When you click on the buttons on the toolbar, they will launch the SLurl site for Second Life and allow you to click through which launches your SL viewer so you can login to the site.

"davis island" "uc davis" "second life", firefox, mh214, toolbars

Snapshots of the MH214 Gatherings & Tours in Second Life®

The virtual gatherings for the MH214 class have resulted in a lot of media from snapshots to machinima (which is video captured in a 3D real time game engine or virtual world such as Second Life®).

The following two articles available in full text via the National Library of Medicine's database, PubMed, describe two of the Second Life locations visited, Virtual Hallucinations & Bioterrorism Defense Training facilities, both on the private research islands of UC Davis faculty and fellow researchers: Peter Yellowlees MD, Martin Leamon MD and James Cook MD.


Documentation of the rich visual environment can be seen in the photos from the gatherings in Second Life®:
Sept. 3rd photos: visiting the builds on Davis Island (Virtual Hallucinations & Bioterrorism Defense Training Facility) and a tour of Imperial College London's Second Health Polyclinic
Sept. 10th photos: Include shots of discussions, building demo, tours of health related
Sites.

YouTube Playlist for UC Davis Extension Health Informatics Class: Exploring Second Life® for a couple of weeks

The Playlist for videos taken during the Sept. 2nd and Sept. 10th classes and assorted other instructional videos used for the online class Second Life® portions. Parts 1-5 introducing our avatar sides:
general introductions with MH214 students and Peter Yellowlees, Marty Leamon MD and Bernadette Daly Swanson MLIS, sharing of SL® experiences, troublshooting audio capture, building demonstration with James (Linden) Cook MD and tripping and touring around the metaverse looking at medical sites and health and medical research projects.

More information on our Second Life treks can be found on the Second Tours blog that I maintained for the sessions.

View the entire Playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5333F5146C944E14

or a series of clips from Sept. 2nd and Sept. 10th tours of Davis Island... beginning on Virtual Ability Island:


Part 1 of 5: Troubleshooting audio and introductions all around...


Part 2 of 5: Building with James Linden! Health Informatics Professionals need a place and the skills to build it... our first introduction.


Part 3 of 5: More building with James and discussions on virtual worlds, avatar height and in world physics:


Part 4 of 5: Visiting CISCO's Virtual Palomar West Hospital & their RFID bracelets used by avatars to tour the facility. It is the 3D version of the hospital to be built in San Diego by 2011. Next stop, Virtual Ability Island, co-winner of the first Linden Prize, a contest Honoring Second Life projects that are Improving real lives; Studio Wikitecture and Virtual Ability were both awarded $10,000 USD


Part 5 of 5: (10 mins.) More on Virtual Ability Island and the sites visited during the Sept. 2nd and Sept 10th classes including Virtual Hallucinations and Bioterrorism Defense Training units on Davis and Prophylaxis Islands (private UC Davis locations for research projects) and the very cool Imperial College's Second Health London Polyclinic.


And our tour video from the Health Informatics 2009 Conference at the UC Davis Medical Center:

Meet me at Med Projects, Davis Island in Second Life

MH214- Prophylaxis & Davis Islands
Originally uploaded by HVX Silverstar

Students from the UC Davis Extension MH214 class: The Internet and the Future of Patient Care landed in fine form on the digital turf of Davis Island; one of the research locations for UC Davis Psychiatry and Health Informatics Faculty & research partners, Peter Yellowlees MD, Marty Leamon MD and James (Linden) Cook MD. The private islands are home to two 3D facilities housing the Virtual Hallucinations and Bioterrorism Defense projects. Articles on both projects are available via PubMed, the mega-database of the National Library of Medicine.
The class session included discussion of students' experience in SL; an informative session about the SL platform by James (Linden) Cook MD who has been an engineer with Linden Lab evolving the platform since its early days. This was followed by a building demo, the results of which you can see in the screenshots.

The Tours:


Following the very cool building demo, we visited two health related sites in Second Life: CISCO's Virtual Palomar West Hospital of San Diego.
The second stop was at Virtual Ability Island was co-winner of the Linden Prize this past May, US$10,000. for improving real lives through Second Life.
Last week we visited Imperial College's Second Health London Polyclinic.

More colorful photos of the class: http://www.flickr.com/photos/photolibraries/sets/72157622335169900/
To view the images in sequence, click on the Slideshow link at the top right side of the Flickr window:

Working at the SW edge of Davis Island

Working at the SW edge of Davis Island
Originally uploaded by HVX Silverstar

This is where I will be hanging out on Davis Island, Second Life.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Davis/0/102/22
Once we are all added to the UC Davis group, we can gather on the island for a virtual meet-up.
Access to two free full text peer reviewed journals is available from SL and the web:
Marty Leamon MD pointed out that the most recent issue of Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is dedicated to health and health care in Second Life.
http://www.jvwresearch.org
Vol 2, No 2: 3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare

Journal of Medical Internet Research
http://www.jmir.org/2009/2/e17/HTML
A Survey of Health-Related Activities on Second Life