Simulation Environments for Business
July 4 2010 –By Chris Koeritz
Graphical 3D
simulators could easily be mistaken for video games, but these
environments provide a number of benefits for business, chiefly
because the simulated environment is much cheaper and more
predictable than many real-world business scenarios. For education
and training, simulators are superb because the students can work
with virtual versions of real devices that are either too expensive
or too dangerous to provide. Scientists can use the 3D simulation
environment to stage experiments and look for potential problems
before moving a single test tube around in the real laboratory.
Medical students in training can use surgical instruments in a
virtual operating room on a virtual patient, providing a valuable
opportunity to explore the human body for less expense. The virtual
operating room can allow the educator to reset the simulator in
seconds for the next student.
After the early splash
of Second Life on the gaming and business simulation scene, many
other companies and groups have developed simulators. Linden Labs,
the creators of Second Life, may have accelerated this activity by
providing their viewer (the Second Life client program) as
an open
source application that can be freely modified and extended. The
OpenSimulator group has now developed a free server that is
compatible with the Second Life viewer and they have released the
server's source code as well. This has spawned a number of other
simulation companies that provide OpenSim grids. The biggest of
these grids is called the “osgrid”, which has roughly 4,000
simulator regions online. The osgrid is small compared to Second
Life, but is steadily growing.
Many educators are looking to virtual environments as being the next phase in distance learning, and they value the ability to give lectures to large numbers of students without needing an actual huge room. One might suspect that they are sneakily attempting to draw in the digitally intoxicated youth into a learning environment without the students quite noticing. The virtual tools for learning can be tailored for particular types of teaching environments, such as in the Tibetan Classroom in the figure. Students can learn the Tibetan characters and can read short phrases from the Wall of Tibetan Tiles. A “Cube of Tibetan Consonants” is also available, where a Tibetan Lama pronounces the sound for each of the characters.
The most useful
feature of the osgrid for businesses is probably the virtual meeting
room. Businesses can have 
conferences with a full multimedia
onslaught, using the built-in ability of the viewer to show web pages
and play movies and sound files. Since the room is virtual, there is
no bad seat in the house; any attendee can zoom in and peer at the
presentation as closely as they wish. And because the simulator can
be run over the internet or a VPN, attendees do not need to be in the
same town or even in the same country. Collaboration during the
meeting can be a breeze with any number of useful meeting tools that
have already been implemented, such as virtual whiteboards, live
chat, webcam broadcasting, and others.
The military is also
very interested in simulated battlefield environments, given the cost
and danger of training with live ammunition in a sufficiently
realistic environment. Nothing can replace that type of training (or
the rude awakening of the real battlefield), but simulators can help
soldiers prepare in advance and learn the techniques that will
protect them during combat. And when real tanks, airplanes and
helicopters can cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a
simulator can provide early
training on the control panels for those
vehicles for mere hundreds.
Those managing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have made a lot of progress simulating real-world places in the virtual environment. Here is an example GIS system depicting Mount Tamalpais in California. This is a 49 “region” simulation, meaning that there are 49 separate plots of virtual land that represent the mountain. Each simulator is a 256x256 meter segment in virtual space, which may impact whether the GIS simulation will be to full scale in the virtual world. There are also plenty of whimsical GIS simulations that have been developed. These may bear little relation to the real world, instead being figments of the terraformer's imagination. An example of imaginary geography is shown here, depicting Maze Island.
City planners might
also find it compelling to move into simulators for their early
designs. A simulated version of that new city block might be even
cheaper in osgrid than building a more traditional physical model
(even using popsicle sticks and construction paper, for example).
The simulator version can be refactored very easily using the
viewer's built-in CAD tools, whereas the physical model
may need to
be ripped apart multiple times to achieve the same results, which is
possibly a slower and more annoying process.
Architects can test out their designs and allow their clients to “walk through” the simulation before the project has even picked out a real world location. Exact versions of the proposed plans can be rendered in the simulator in order to test out utility connections, room dynamics, feng shui concerns, visibility, space utilization, and even the lighting of the facility at different times of day. Some architects might find it more convenient to design the building using the CAD tools in the Second Life viewer directly, rather than starting with a hand drawing or entering the details into AutoCAD. Since OpenSim is free source and the database is available to the owner of a simulator, the design could be extracted from OpenSim and converted into other formats as necessary.
At Inova Solutions we
set up many call centers with our high-visibility OnTrack displays
and LightLink server software. Often when planning the installation,
we create two dimensional mock-ups of the intended display locations.
We 
could actually get a much more realistic view of how the system
will work by creating a virtual call center that models the
installation environment. This simulation could be shown to the
customer prior to the install to allow them to test out how their new
system will work and to ensure the necessary visibility. After
creating simulation materials for a few different install sites, a
collection of templates could be developed to make it much easier to
build future simulated call centers.
For the museum
curator, the simulator can offer a cheaper alternative than
collecting priceless antiques while still allowing visitors to see a
bit of history. The example in the figure shows an Argand
whale-oil-based lighthouse lamp that is historically accurate, but
which may be out of the financial reach of a coastal museum.
However, visitors could take a virtual tour and see this and other
rare items, even if the museum itself doesn't run the simulation.
Museums can each contribute models and pictures from their own
inventory to be shared across the virtual “museum space”.
Simulations are only limited by the power of our imaginations. The simulated environment lets us show things from perspectives we can never achieve in the real world, such as an amoeba's eye view of a protein construction (if amoebae had eyes). Things that are not physically possible can be depicted (like traveling into a black hole), and very difficult environments from the real world can be simulated much more easily (such as the fluid flow of the wind during a tornado). Mathematicians can travel to a very realistic version of flatland if they so choose. Astronauts can try out the dynamics of zero gravity, or even negative gravity, if desired. The possibilities are “virtually” unlimited.
About the Author
Chris Koeritz is a
software engineer with Inova Solutions who works on high reliability
Call Center and Emergency Notification Systems. He has achieved some
small amount of notoriety in Second Life by creating a search engine
device called “searchbert” that looks for virtual objects. In
his spare time, he builds simulators and scripted objects in the
osgrid.
