"Advanced cyberlearning environments that involve Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence innovations are becoming powerful tools that can facilitate the explorations and conversations needed to solve society's "wicked challenges," said Winslow Burleson, PhD, MSE, an engineer by training and currently associate professor, New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing. The researchers posit that the use of technology, specifically a bundled and ever-evolving fluid set of integrated cyber tools, will connect disparate groups and individuals, converging them in both a real and an imagined cyber-social-physical environment, called the Holodeck, that Burleson's NYU-X Lab is currently advancing in prototype form, in close collaboration with colleagues at NYU Courant, Tandon, Steinhardt, and Tisch, "The "Holodeck" will support a broad range of transdisciplinary collaborations, integrated education, research, and innovation by providing a networked software/hardware infrastructure that can synthesize visual, audio, physical, social, and societal components," said Burleson. NYU-X Lab's Holodeck prototype harnesses the collective power of shared computation, integrated distributed data, immersive visualization, and social interaction to make possible large-scale synthesis of learning, research, and innovation, that will dramatically accelerate the Rittel and Webber iterative mode of problem solving. The goal is to create a networked infrastructure and communication environment where "wicked challenges" can be iteratively explored and re-solved, utilizing visual, acoustic, and physical sensory feedback, human dynamics with and social collaboration.

In the late 1960s, urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber began formulating the concept of "wicked problems" or "wicked challenges" --problems so vexing in the realm of social and organizational planning that they could not be successfully ameliorated with traditional linear, analytical, systems-engineering types of approaches. These "wicked challenges" are poorly defined, abstruse, and connected to strong moral, political and professional issues. Some examples might include: "How should we deal with crime and violence in our schools? "How should we wage the'War on Terror'? or "What is good national immigration policy?" "Wicked problems," by their very nature, are strongly stakeholder dependent; there is often little consensus even about what the problem is, let alone how to deal with it.