Oasis Foundation Virtual World: a new way of caring.
ISN Virtual Worlds, in partnership with Memory Dome, is proud to announce the roll-out of the Oasi Foundation Virtual World Project. As of November 2009 the work has started to produce a significant project of social impact in virtual worlds. The project consists on building an innovative communication platform and a tool for assisting disabled people and give them a new possibility to work from home and through the use of computers and virtual worlds technologies.
The project is commissioned by The Oasis Foundation, which is an Italian nonprofit organization that provides medical care and assistance to disabled and elderly people, as well as assisting patients in different types of treatments for a number of diseases. The project is managed in partneship with Memory Dome, a digital media company based in Rome. The Oasis Foundation is based in Troina, a village in Sicily, where the organization has a vast area of land dedicated to its medical and care facilities. The whole area of the Foundation is almost self sustained, farming its own land and cattle and producing a variety of dairy products. The primary mission of the Foundation is to assist the weak, in all forms and ways.
The project for the Oasis Virtual World consist in creating a number of virtual facilities where specific activities are held, to give a possibility to disabled and ill people to do an activity or work from home, through the virtual worlds technology.
ISN Virtual Worlds has planned and is currently building a space of 6 virtual islands, composing the virtual environment of the Oasis Virtual World. The environment is based on the SL Grid technology of Linden Lab and is hosted on a private estate with restricted access to the Oasis Community Members.
The virtual world of the Oasis Foundation will provide 2 main functions:
1. Act as communication and collaboration environment to inform, communicate and interact with the public in an innovative way.
2. Be a collaboration and activity platform for the disabled.
Some of the activities which will be held include:
1. Virtual Learning sessions on various topics in the Oasis Virtual University.
2. Conference and conventions in the various meeting areas of the virtual world.
3. Workshops for virtual goods production.
4. A virtual school for video production and machinima, connected to a real life TV.
5. Assistance and help sessions for families. Contact with a psychologist.
6. Exhibitions of different kinds.
7. Sessions and discussion on religious topics, cultural differences and lectures.
The staff involved in managing and running those activities is all employees or voluntary personnel from the Oasis Foundation or people from the community, assisted by ISN Virtual Worlds tutors and staff.
What is important about this project besides the goals, is that for the first time in such a project, especially in the nonprofit sector, an organization is allocating RL personnel and resources to manage ongoing virtual activities in a virtual world. Most virtual worlds projects in the past years have been sort of “left there” by companies and organizations. The main reason being the lack of resources to allocate to the management of this new channel, especially during a crisis period. That is why one of our goals within this project is to demonstrate the potential of virtual worlds, in a use case where an organization truly invests not only economic resources, but also allocates dedicated human resources full time on the project and for a long lasting period, namely 3 years.
The Oasis Foundation Virtual World will open in April 2010. Registration and access to the virtual environments will be possible through the website. A customized SL Grid viewer is also available to navigate the Oasis Virtual spaces, it will be downloadable for free from the website.
The project first phase is due to last 3 years and it will produce one of the most significant use cases in virtual worlds.
