It's lonely in space, especially if you're on a mission for extended periods of time, cooped up in a capsule hurtling towards Mars. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Frank played long games of chess with Hal 9000, while on Star Trek, the crew spent downtime in flights of fantasy on the Holodeck.

To combat the stress of the long distance space traveler, NASA is about to start testing its own Holodeck, a rich 3D Virtual Environment called ANSIBLE, built by Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT) and All These Worlds, LLC (ATW). NASA is hoping that ANSIBLE will allow astronauts to avoid the perils of what it calls ICE (isolated and confined environments) and make re-entry to Earth less jarring.

PCMag met with Dr. Jacquelyn Morie, founder and CTO of All These Worlds, in Los Angeles, to find out more. Morie is a pioneer in virtual worlds, virtual humans, autonomous agents, and VR. Her Ph.D. thesis focused on virtual environments, and she is a co-founder of USC's Institute of Creative Technologies. She left the university in 2013 to tackle All These Worlds and take her ideas from the lab to the real world, and beyond.

With a background in fine arts, Morie was drawn to the visual and sensory aspects of VR, which gave rise to the ideas shown in ANSIBLE.

"In the early 90s, I was participating in networked VR like Dactyl Nightmare, BattleTech, and Virtuality, but they weren't totally open worlds, they were applications. But I could see the potential, even then" Morie explained. "So, the first virtual world that I really took part in was Second Life."

Soon her work came to the attention of NASA, and she was asked to write a technical document on the ways virtual worlds could be used in space. Eighteen months later, SIFT and ATW were commissioned to prototype their vision. They went one better and built the whole thing.

"They were blown away—in six months we built a whole virtual world, on the OpenSim platform, with a number of the activities we thought a crew in isolation might need. We demoed it via an Oculus Rift, provided a book, and made a video explaining how it all worked."

Morie often works remotely, so PCMag got a tour of ANSIBLE in her Los Angeles home's creative studio, where several screens blinked at one end of the long room.

Other team members were already present in ANSIBLE's virtual atrium as avatars. After saying a brief hello, we flew up into the further reaches of the world and entered an art gallery. We then moved to a meditation room to stimulate the cerebral cortex, before taking a punt down a river in a boat, complete with ambient nature sounds, and onto a weather station, which provides Earth's weather pattern data. Suddenly a "v.alt" (recorded avatar sequence) materialized as if teleported into the room to tell us how something works in that space.

Although communication inside ANSIBLE is not in real-time, servers will be synced in the early hours of the morning, imprinting all activities, messages, and behaviors into the merged world. Obviously it is a much more vivid experience using a head mount, like the Oculus Rift, but completely compelling after a while via a PC or laptop.

Some examples of astronaut and family interaction via ANSIBLE could include watching the same comedy show in the club area, having Thanksgiving dinner, and leaving each other packages in the post office. The astronauts will have a 3D printer to then bring those gifts to life.

Before it goes into space, ANSIBLE will be tested at HI-SEAS in Hawaii, where, starting in mid-August, six participants will be isolated and enclosed inside a Mars analog for a full year. Researchers working with NASA's Human Performance Research arm will be monitoring their general well-being, mental health, and cognitive impairment throughout. Their only contact with their friends and family will be things like emails, blogs, and other social media, or via the embodied and customized avatars participating in ANSIBLE's asynchronous answer to the Holodeck.

For Morie, this is the pinnacle of a life's work. "In the early 90s I gave a speech at the Imagina Conference in Monaco, and said that VR would eventually connect everyone up," she said. "You wouldn't have to go somewhere physically to meet someone anymore."

Even if those people are out there on another planet.