NASA's latest mission to Mars is well underway, with the landing of its Phoenix mission on the surface of the Red Planet. To explain the purpose of the mission (and its progress), NASA has unveiled what it calls a 'cyber twin' on its Second Life island, which visitors can chat with.
It’s using AI tech from Australian firm MyCyberTwin, and has been trained by the team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Houston. The idea: visitors just rock up for a chat about how things are going (when I visited this morning, it was keen to tell me how cold the surface of Mars is, for example).
It’s a novel feature, and is apparently capable of supporting several conversations at once - when I went, there was one other visitor having a chat with the cyber twin. You can imagine this kind of thing being used for news - you’d just visit once a day and say ‘What’s new?’ - although the usual arguments about this being quicker through a standard website apply, of course.
If NASA is still planning to launch its own virtual world / MMO, as rumoured, then expect more of this kind of thing.
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