Getting work from play

A group of World of Warcraft players planning their next attack online may look like pure fun and games, from the chat-room banter to the orcs and elves they send into battle. But to UCI researcher Walt Scacchi, a senior research scientist at UCI’s Institute of Software Research, it just might look like a business meeting.

“They may spend hours strategizing in chat rooms or looking at recordings of previous game-play sessions,” Scacchi said.

“They’re helping to educate themselves on how to be a better team, more effective. There’s team building, leadership and social interactions. That sounds a little like designing a new kind of widget, or a study group.”

At UCI, a group of professors dream that tomorrow, online worlds similar to World of Warcraft and Second Life might be places to model the next generation of mass transit, or perhaps run an interactive safety simulation for a semiconductor factory.

That’s why the National Science Foundation has given UCI’s Institute for Software Research a $3-million, three-year grant to study how to use those tools to get work done — not just play.

A virtual world like those might be just the ticket to improve safety at semiconductor or nanotechnology factories in the future that will require extremely high levels of safety and precision, said Scacchi, one of seven researchers who received the grant.

“You would be able to train people in how to work in this environment by having them interact inside the simulator of the factory,” he said.

“It would be a new high-tech factory simulator, kind of by analogy to a flight simulator. In those, you have pilots who learn to fly a plane and deal with potentially dangerous situations, but no one is physically at risk.”

The university is collaborating with organizations from the aerospace, telecommunications, transportation and electronics industries, as well as the Discovery Science Center, to explore which applications are suitable for getting work done and which aren’t, researchers said.

“Many technologies have come out of computer-based games, and their concepts appear to have real potential,” said Richard Taylor, the institute’s director, in a statement to the media.

“This grant will determine how emerging technologies can be used or modified to support serious group work.”

UCI-related work has already created one such environment, linked to the Discovery Science Center: DinoQuest, an online learning environment where kids can dig for fossils, visit an “ecology lab” to learn about the dinosaur food chain, or reassemble bones into skeletons in a “reconstruction lab.”

Developments like those have helped launch the center into a list of the top 10 science facilities in the nation, Scacchi said.

“The future of science centers is more like what [the Discovery center] is doing,” he said. “When other for-profit companies see that kind of thing going on, it doesn’t take much of an arm-twist in wanting to explore some opportunities of their own.”

Reporter MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at michael.alexander@latimes.com.