Interstellar Arc is an immersive sci-fi experience that uses recent advances in headset tech to break new ground in virtual reality. And it all happens inside an empty-looking room in Las Vegas. It feels like I've been transported into a scene straight out of a science fiction movie. I'm walking around on a giant centrifuge in space, which I can see the outlines of at the edge of my vision. Beyond it, I see the planet we're orbiting. The pathways I walk on stretch endlessly above and below me, giving me the feeling I'm in an absolutely massive structure.

Location-based games are an emerging paradigm fortraining, simulation, entertainment, health and many other domains. In this paper, we consider the role of artificialagents in such games. We also examine how human teams perform when given the same game, playedin both a real environment with mobile devices and alsoin a virtual environment that replicates the real environment.We perform the first direct comparison of real andvirtual instantiations of the same location-based game.We show the similarities and differences in game playand then investigate how adding an advice-giving agentchanges the experience.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), in their aspect as online communities, represent an exciting opportunity for studying social and behavioral models.  For that purpose we have developed Cosmopolis, a free MMOG containing several key research-oriented features.  First, Cosmopolis consists of an outer game for larger-scale social modeling, as well as a set of subgames suitable for tightly-controlled sandbox-style experiments, all allowing a high level of data logging configuration and control by researchers.  Also, Cosmopolis’s world model incorporates configurable, AI-driven non-player character communities, as a means of researching interactions between individuals and societies