A Virtual Social Support System for Long-Duration Space Exploration Missions

Our overall goal is to enhance the overall behavior health and performance of personnel on (future potential) long-duration missions. We propose to use a local representation of the Second Life virtual world, along with our computer graphics and artificial intelligence background, to make a highly interactive and responsive environment between groups of people that are literally worlds apart in communication distance. By having the interactions occur this way, there is no communication latency that needs to be dealt with, because content is updated asynchronously.We will also leverage and adapt our Automated Behavior and Cohesion Assessment Tools system, previously developed under a recent NASA Phase II SBIR, to measure behavior health and performance.