NASA’s Role in Developing Virtual Worlds for Space
The following are notes taken from the Economic Community Breakout Session at the Virtual Worlds Workshop in January at NASA Ames.
How can NASA encourage individuals, universities and companies to develop virtual worlds technologies for the space industry?
Support a viable community including:
NASA staff and affiliates
Other people (not-for-profits/museums/education/universities)
For-profit entities
How? Could NASA provide seed funding through special grants, enage in cooperative agreements or sponsor contests or Centennial Challenges in the virtual worlds arena? This topic was touched on briefly, but not the focus of the discussion.
Granting process?
Cooperative Agreements? Provide legal addition of NASA identity.
Contests/Challenges?
Small business challenges:
Contractor’s requirements? Each is different.
NASA offers:
Data/Assets
Association with NASA identity
Expertise
Funding (SBIRs for example)
The Reality is
- you are competing with internal efforts and their need for survival
- Large scale contractors have regular relationships, but you give up autonomy
- No steady flow of information or funding
- Threat of cancellation
- Constant reorganization at NASA
- Constant contact management required
- Free prototyping up front at your own cost
- SBIRs are good: Congressional line item
- Could encourage open sourcing
- Constant networking/dissemination
- Heavy reporting load (non-trivial cost)
- Payment lag
- Value to supporting community of active grantees and interested small businesses
- Possible to influence rfp topics
- Another approach for small contractors: subcontract with large contractors
- Space Act Agreement structure
- Tech transfer
- Facilitates project: in-kind or cash plus
- MOUs
- Time consuming details to complete projects, for example logo use approval
CONCLUSION:
NASA should be fostering a community for potential contractors/small businesses developers and research/education content developers within and beyond NASA. This community should set and communicate NASA goals for specific projects, then establish shared goals with contractors. The existing NASA Colab group should become the contact and resource for this community with a focus on providing access to useful, platform agnostic NASA content (for example, cleaned digital elevation models for terraforming in any game or virtual world format) and should be responsible for managing a repository of this content.
Positive Solutions:
- NASA leadership advocate for Virtual Worlds, central contact
- (Colab—Ames and Bay Area—sets a model to meet the needs of the development/education community-encourage that they focus on virtual worlds )
- Virtual Worlds Advisory Group within NASA
- Or an outside group to manage the development of virtual world technologies for NASA (example, Space Telescope Science Institute or USRA-get beyond NASA)
- Group could plant the seed. Define and provide “data/resource” starter kits as part of this effort that would encourage viral development
- Develop specifications for projects
- Reports to Group from within NASA should be publicly available
- Partners organization for virtual worlds (Small business and others) – recognition and interaction
- Continue development of accessible tools
- Coordination among the centers
- Communicate through SpinOff
We encourage a near-term follow-up meeting creating the opportunity to share with Colab and support their effort.
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