Menu
The Possibility Lab is the main hub for research on tools to augment, extend, and enhance human imagination. These include the latest in biometric sensing technologies, Extended Reality (XR) interfaces, high-speed networking, robotics, edge computing and IoT, and artificial intelligence/machine learning—and artificial imagination. These tools are used as new lenses through which we understand the faculty of human imagination and create new possibilities for its better use for human thriving, empathy and compassion, and equity. The Possibility Lab is also where new programs for cultivating imagination are designed, including our Imagination for Engineers curriculum, and where artists-in-residence explore and create with the brightest minds from across disciplines at UC San Diego.
The increasing sophistication and availability of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technologies wield the potential to transform how we teach and learn computational concepts and coding. This project develops a platform for creative coding in virtual and augmented reality. The Embodied Coding Environment (ECE) is a node-based system developed in the Unity game engine. It is conceptualized as a merged digital/physical workspace where spatial representations of code, the visual outputs of the code, and user editing histories are co-located in a virtual 3D space. It has been theorized that learners’ abilities to understand and reason about functions, algorithms, conditionals, and other abstract computational concepts stem in part from more fundamental sensori-motor and perceptual experiences of the physical world. Our own work, for instance, has revealed that computer science (CS) educators incorporate a wide range of metaphors grounded in tangible experience into their lessons on computational concepts, such as demonstrating sorting algorithms with a deck of cards or the transfer of information between functions by throwing paper airplanes. Our long-term research aims center on the question of how a coding platform that supports these types of embodied conceptual phenomena can make learning to code become a more intuitive process.
The Clarke Center for Human Imagination, in collaboration with Origami Air (a private metaverse-first venture studio), is developing Compassion Island: a virtual world and set of virtual-enhanced practices to augment mindfulness and compassion training through virtual reality (VR) and visual imagination (VI). The project is led by Dr. Cassandra Vieten (Director of Research and Development, Clarke Center) and Dr. Erik Viirre (Director, Clarke Center). Compassion Island is designed to leverage immersive visual technology to boost mindfulness and compassion practices, and experiments are underway testing the effectiveness of this approach. The goal: enhance mindfulness and compassion in healthcare professionals and others at home and in their professional lives. Compassion Island provides tailored experiences and moments that could make mindfulness and compassion training more compelling and effective, in particular for individuals who may be resistant to quiet sitting visualization exercises due to low capacity to visualize, high levels of mind-wandering or rumination (negative mental chatter), or difficulty focusing due to stress (all common for healthcare professionals).
Built upon the Pacific Research Platform and National Research Platform (PRP, NRP) network, UC San Diego’s Clarke Center for Human Imagination and the Qualcomm Institute are developing server-side tools and deployments of Unreal Engine based game experience to scale the Open-Metaverse AR/VR hardware needs into a distributed system, enabling a campus-wide XR test bed as part of developing a global Augmented Reality Network Observatory (ARNO) networking visualization system. ARNO represents the third generation of big data visualization, realized through persistent, procedurally rendered simulations produced from live data at global scale via Epic Game’s Unreal Engine. The research and development for this project touches upon every aspect of the technical and workforce development needs of the emerging Open -Metaverse and broader Cyber Space ecosystems.
In partnership with the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion and Origami Air, we are developing and testing a prosocial, virtual reality immersion tool designed to elicit, engage, measure, and train compassion and empathy responses among first responders and protestors in asimulated street protest environment. We envision this as the first in a series of virtual reality applications involving social unrest/protest and politically charged settings as they relate to public health and street level interactions between first responders and protestors. The intention is to create and assess these as tools for cultivating empathy and compassion in high-stress/fight-of-flight type scenarios, with potential implications for the future of VR-based trainings.
Practitioners of the emergent field of Speculative Futures Studies use speculative forms – including, but not limited to, art, literature, and theory- to confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine and enact more sustainable and just futures.
Science explains it, but
art may be the key to finding it.
The Speculative Futures Collective seeks to cultivate research with faculty, graduate students, and community members using speculative cultural forms and theories to collaborate on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, and race.
Practitioners of the emergent field of Speculative Futures Studies use speculative forms – including, but not limited to, art, literature, and theory- to confront the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in order to imagine and enact more sustainable and just futures.
Science explains it, but
art may be the key to finding it.
The Speculative Futures Collective seeks to cultivate research with faculty, graduate students, and community members using speculative cultural forms and theories to collaborate on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, and race.
Unlike intelligence, memory, and creativity, there is an alarming lack of coherent theory and a thin empirical literature on imagination. Why alarming? Imagination may be one of the most important keys to human flourishing and human progress, with spiritual and evolutionary adaptive benefit.
The science of imagination needs a guide for the future.
The Atlas of Imagination is the guide, focusing coherent theoretical models of imagination to drive further investigation and the tools needed for the empirical study of the neurodiversity of imagination.
Unlike intelligence, memory, and creativity, there is an alarming lack of coherent theory and a thin empirical literature on imagination. Why alarming? Imagination may be one of the most important keys to human flourishing and human progress, with spiritual and evolutionary adaptive benefit.
The science of imagination needs
a guide for the future.
The Atlas of Imagination is the guide, focusing coherent theoretical models of imagination to drive further investigation and the tools needed for the empirical study of the neurodiversity of imagination.
The Clarke Center is a research-and-practice hub, where the best insights from the neuroscience of imagination are connected with the latest in technology and put to use to unlock the transformative power of imagination across age groups, and communities to tackle the most pressing issues facing the planet.
Imagination discovers
new possibilities within the impossible.
Imagination is at the root of empathy and compassion. Imagination gives rise to hope. We aim to unleash the power of imagination to tackle the most pressing issues facing life on Earth – to envision and build a more equitable an sustainable world.
