You’re invited to join NASA leadership, astronauts, scientists, and engineers along with local business, technology and academic leaders and local, state and federal officials discuss the role of space exploration in advancing science, engineering, technology, education and the economy that benefits your community and the nation. The program features an exciting preview of NASA’s Constellation Program – America’s return to the Moon and beyond.

SL Event Contacts: Universa Vanalten, Caledonia Heron, astrodel zapedzki, Be Ewing

The entire event will be streamed into a number of Second Life locations with opportunities for avatars to submit questions to the Panelists throughout the day; the topics for Panel discussion are listed below. Please submit your question(s) to Caledonia Heron via instant message (IM). Also, please join the Welcome to NASA group the day of the event to participate in group chat because participants will be virtually geographically dispersed to reduce lag. To keep group chat focused on the topics being discussed, please direct technical issues, etc. via instant message (IM) to the SL Event Contacts. Thank you.

8:30 a.m. Welcome by Peter Friess, President, The Tech Museum of Innovation
– Introduction of VIPs and Honored Guests
– Reading of Proclamations
– Short opening remarks

8:45 a.m. Keynote Address by The Honorable Shana Dale, NASA Deputy Administrator
NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale’s avatar, Xena Dahl, will be inworld at the New Venture Hall for her Keynote Address.

Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Tech/191/158/37/

This portion of the program will also be streamed on NASA TV at http://www.nasa.gov/qtl/151335main_NASA_TV_QT.qtl
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

9:15 a.m. Overview of NASA Exploration Program, Mr. James Norman, Director, Constellation Systems Division, NASA Headquarters

9:35 a.m. Break

9:50 a.m. Innovation Panel: “Unleashing the Power of Technology and Creativity”
This portion of the program will be streamed from Extropia into the rl New Venture Hall where SL guests will be able to submit questions to the Panelists as described above.

At Extropia Central Nexus, on the sim named “Extropia Core”

Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Extropia%20Core/127/100/22

Point of Contact: Sophrosyne Stenvaag

Sample topics for discussion are:
- How has space exploration (or NASA aeronautics research) played a role in driving innovation and technology development of your industry or sector?
- How can big business, small business, and government work more effectively to meet the need to constant innovation in the 21st century, for the benefit of NASA and the country?
- Discuss the importance of innovation to your industry or sector?
- Has the importance of “innovation” changed in the global economy of today?
- What are the new trends regarding innovation, creativity, and technology development?
- How can NASA and/or future space exploration spur innovation in your specific industry sector?
- How can we ensure that we remain a nation of innovators?
Moderator – Mr. Doug A. Comstock, Director of NASA Innovative Partnerships Program
Panelists:
Mr. Sourabh Satish, Architect and Distinguished Engineer, Symantec Research Labs
Dr. James T. Ryder, Vice President, Advanced Technology Center, Lockheed-Martin Space Systems
Mr. Liam Kiely, Vice President, Engineering, Converged Data Networks, Nortel
Mr. R. Joseph Cassady, Dirctor of Business Development, Emerging Exploration Technologies, Aerojet

10:50 a.m. Break

11:00 a.m. Discovery Panel: “Pushing the Limits of Knowledge to Inspire a New Generation”

This portion of the program will be streamed from Explorer Island into the rl New Venture Hall where sl guests will be able to submit questions to the Panelists as described above.

Location: JPL’s sim named “Explorer Island”

Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Explorer%20Island/182/216/22

Points of Contact: Jet Burns, Helion Enzo, Devery Barrymore, Caledonia Heron

Sample topics for discussion are:
- How has space exploration played a role in driving scientific discovery of your industry or academic discipline?
- Discuss the importance of “discovery” to your industry or sector?
- What is the importance of “scientific discoveries” to the global economy of today?
- What are the new trends in scientific discovery, creativity, and technology development?
- How can NASA and/or future space exploration spur scientific discovery in your specific industry sector or academic discipline?
- How will discoveries made about the Earth’s climate or the climate of Mars affect us in our daily lives?
- How does NASA science and discoveries through exploration impact our lives? Improve the environment? Build our knowledge of the Universe and place in it?
Moderator – Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute
Panelists:
Dr. Jim Garvin, Chief Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Dr. Darlene Lim, NASA Ames Research Center/SETI Institute
Dr. Peter Vitousek, Carnegie Institute/Stanford University (Invited)

12:10 p.m. Lunch – Keynote Presentation by NASA Astronaut Rex Walheim, STS-122 Mission Specialist

1:40 p.m. Inspiration Panel – “Building Idea Factories for the Future”
This portion of the program will be streamed from NASA CoLab into the rl New Venture Hall where sl guests will be able to submit questions to the Panelists as described above.

At the Sun Amphitheater on the sim named “NASA CoLab”

Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NASA%20CoLab/138/45/63

Points of Contact: Caledonia Heron, Be Ewing

Sample topics for discussion are:
- How do we enhance interest and performance in STEM and related careers?
- How do we reinforce individuals’ creativity and ability to become innovators in today’s workforce?
- How do we see NASA’s role in inspiring students?
- How do we prepare students to solve problems that don’t even currently exist as future members of the aerospace workforce?
Moderator – Dr. Mike Wiskerchen, Director, CA Space Grant Consortium
Panelists:
Dr. Joyce Winterton, Assistant Administrator, Office of Education, NASA Headquarters
Dr. Steven Beckwith, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, University of California; Director Emeritus, Space Telescope Science Institute
Ms. Diane Demée-Benoit, Director, Innovation in Education Project, Commonwealth Club of California
Mr. Peter Levy, Director of Strategic Development, Curriki
Ms. Kristin Hilf, Vice President of Community Relations, Raytheon Company

3:00 p.m. Closing Remarks and Wrap Up

Other Locations that will be Streaming the Event are:

International Spaceflight Museum – Spaceport Alpha, POC: Kat Lemieux
Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Alpha/107/139/22/

University of North Carolina – Pembroke: POC: Stone Semyorka
Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dotoorak/209/204/251

NASA appreciates your efforts to minimize lag during the May 14 Future Forum. You can determine your contribution to lag by going to Advanced -> Rendering -> Info Displays -> Avatar Rendering Cost

If you don’t see the Advanced button at the top left of your screen to the right of the Help button, you can activate it by pressing on a PC: Ctrl+Alt+D or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D, or on a Mac: Option+Shift+Open Apple+D..

You’ll see a number above your head that will be green (good), yellow (so-so), orange (worse), or red (ouch!).

The Avatar Rendering Cost display itself is CPU intensive, since it’s essentially profiling all the avatars all the time. So a good practice would be to walk around and turn it on when you want a glimpse- otherwise if you turn it on at all times, know your performance is suffering!

Learn more about avatar rendering cost at http://tinyurl.com/6fv6k2

Cypress Rosewood reports in with the latest iteration of the 12-hour live music extravaganza!

As of late April first,

YURI’S NIGHT 2008 Live Musical Entertainment
PERFORMANCE VENUE – Inspire Space Park
[Cypress Rosewood Emcee and Producer]
Inspire Dance Planet, Butsu 236, 212, 200

ARTISTS to PERFORM – Tentative Schedule
11:00 am SLT Spiral Sands – USA (electronic)
12:00 pm Joachim Gustav – Argentina – confirmed (Jazz/Tango)
1:00 pm Cylindrian Rutabaga- USA – Confirmed (Contemporary Pop)
2:00 Yan Etzel – France – not confirmed (Cont. Acoustic Guitar)
3:00 Torben Asp – Denmark – confirmed (Electronic Dance)
4:00 Frogg Marlowe and Jaycatt Nico – USA confirmed (acoustic pop)
5:00 Professor Blackmountain – Texas – confirmed (Ambient Space)
6:00 pm Gamelan Tunas Mekar -  Colorado – not confirmed (Balinese Traditional)
7:00 pm Jana Kyomoon & Trefies Kaufman – USA – confirmed (Electronic/Acoustic)
8:00 pm Stella – California – confirmed (Ambient Pop)
9:00 pm SPACECRAFT – Kentucky – confirmed (Electronic Space)
10:00 pm Von Johin – Tennessee – not confirmed (Blues)
11:00 pm Cypress Rosewood – Tennessee – confirmed (Ambient Space Native)

At the recent Metaverse U conference, Henrik Bennetsen asked attendees these questions:

1. What excites you about current metaverse technology?
2. What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
3. What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
4. What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?

He videotaped responses from numerous attendees, including Jessy Cowan-Sharp (Dragonfire Kelly in SL) and Andrew Hoppin (Drew Frobozz in SL). Here are their responses:

|

A photo from today’s SL Space CoLab meeting:

This is how many views the NGEC2 post at NASA CoLab’s blog got during the conference.

The Next Generation Exploration Conference 2 was held from Feb 12-15th. Notice the 21-views (or hits) peak on Feb 14th? Here’s the origin of that: I took snaps of the opening remarks by Ken Davidian, posted here, put the pics on flickr, captioned them, and got a couple views over a day. Thurs I asked Caledonia Heron to make a RL [real-world] mention of the link. Ten views a day for 2 days on the ngec2 post, and a steady tail of 3 hits a day since.

This was the first year, with only twelve hours notice inworld, that the proceedings were shown in Second Life [SL] as a prototype technology demo. Here’s how this came together so quickly, with, ah, virtually no lead time: Caledonia Heron is from JSC [Johnson Space Center) Learning Technologies program, an education technology incubator. She, Cindy Bolero, and Drew Frobozz, the NASA CoLab sim manager [SL names, all!], were the RL team that made this happen, partly because SL *is* a virtual world.

Caledonia tells the tale: NGEC2 mentioned at colab tues [Feb 5th] … we started seeing email late wed, working tech issues up til mon wee hours to begin event tues at 11sl [SLT, equal to US Pacific Time].

Paradox: gaah! A hundred hours! <hat, er, helmets off!>

Cal: between us easily – probably apiece

Para: I had meant only 100 hr to go – b4 u could start work

Cal: oh, yeah didn’t seem like much lead time plus we didn’t really plan on the first trial run being an all day, 4 day event

Para: hooo-”test to destruction”!

Cal: yeah, so focused on making it work we did not gin up PR; we didn’t really have it running until late monday so there was nothing to promote!!

Para: was this regarded as a success, defined as doing SL feed next time too?

Caledonia Heron: imo, yes. It was a trial run, to see if we could do it given the time, resources (0), and technical limitations. I think the sl attendees would think it was successful – expecially die hard space fans – seeing inside the internal process at NASA.

At the next weekly CoLab meeting’s published minutes, [13:19] Drew Frobozz: and lots of machinima video taken in SL by Haley Bailey at http://video.lisarein.com/nasa/02-12-08/. Please use only with attribution to her.
Ariel Miranda added: And many thanks to Cindy and Paul for keeping the cameras rolling for long hours each day.

And all the colab workers were thanked as well.

Posting or creating a specific page for an event seems like a good way to use this blog’s fast re-edit ability and visibility. Let’s add 2 or 3 zeroes, orders of magnitude, to these numbers for NGEC3!

The full-sized screenshots, far easier to read, are in the Flickr Next Generation Exploration Conference II (NGEC2) in Second Life at NASA CoLab (Set).

NASA CoLab island is hosting the Second Life Virtual World’s side of this Mixed-Reality conference.

There is a NGEC2 in SL flickr group – ask me for permission to upload to it in flickr or at paradox.olbers AT gmail.com.  I posted 5 snaps from the Tues opening day.  [Update - I created a flickr group for everyone's snaps - 3 people have contributed 20 pics.]

Europas_ice posted a slideset and other info at the Index of /NasaColab/Ken Davidian NGEC Supporting Docs and also gives us a great pointer to U of Wisconsin’s Fusion Tech Institute’s Resources from Space Course Notes – Spring 2004 with a note “with useful slides, especially see lecture 10 slides 21-24ish.”

Here’s the audio from Buzz Aldrin’s talk Thurs morning.  And Drew Frobozz advises: “lots of machinima video taken in SL by Haley Bailey at http://video.lisarein.com/nasa/02-12-08/.  Please use only with attribution to her.”

Favorable pre-event press article/blog at Troy McConaghy’s blog [he's Troy McLuhan in SL], Science & Virtual Worlds.

This coming Tuesday, Dr. Robert A. Knop Jr. will be visiting the Space CoLab sim.  He is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University.  Dr. Knop does research in active galaxies and interacting galaxies. He has also done supernova cosmology and was on one of the two teams that discovered the accelerating universe in 1998.   He will give a brief introduction to his work and then encourages everyone to engage in an informal chat.

Date:  Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007

Time:  8:00 PM SL Time (Pacific Time)

Location:  http://slurl.com/secondlife/Space%20CoLab/236/46   (The picnic area on the mountain near HQ)