Can We Make Out-of-the-Box Online Immersion Matter? An Ohyay Exploration
From Second Life to Sim City to Minecraft, people have been building and exploring digital online worlds for decades. Innovation has ramped up tremendously since the pandemic jolted much of what had been physical experience into screens and static stacks of Zoom boxes.
Much can still be accomplished this way, and in fact there are great advantages to online convening -- not the least of which is the capacity for people anywhere with online access to meet up. But where do go for a quiet sidebar brainstorm?
Here we explore one of many such efforts to break the static two-dimensionality of our screen-bound time -- a new platform called ohyay. There, anyone can create almost any kind of virtual space and experience imaginable — from music festivals and interactive museums to family reunions and imagined vacations.
At Columbia, our Earth Institute Initiative on Communication and Sustainability and the new Climate School are testing a host of uses for ohyay, from virtual offices and hangouts to eventually conveying tough climate and sustainability issues in a three-dimensional series of rooms in place of, say, a slide show. The Journalism School's Brown Institute for Media Innovation is building learning environments with the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
In this Thriving Online chat, you’ll explore this new environment with host Andy Revkin, Ziv Schneider, who is a creative technologist at the Brown Institute, and Walt Lin and Andrew Lin, the co-founders of ohyay.
We’ll tour some of what's been built so far, watch Walter and Andrew build a room, and talk about what might come next.
Visit Ohyay and sign up for beta access: http://ohyay.co
More Thriving Online episodes: http://j.mp/thrivingonlineplaylist
Background:
Second Life and Real Life
BY ANDREW C. REVKIN MARCH 13, 2008 12:44 PM
https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/second-life-and-real-life/
The Man Behind Spore Explores Gaming as Learning
BY ANDREW C. REVKIN FEBRUARY 5, 2011 1:15 PM
https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/the-man-behind-spore-explores-gaming-as-learning/
