UAV operators may be distracted nearly one-third of the time. Photograph by star5112/flickr.

While fighter pilots risk being shot down, or, in the case of F-22 pilots, suffering oxygen deprivation, it turns out that one of the hazards of flying an unmanned drone is boredom—or at least that’s what researchers at MIT have concluded.

“You might park a UAV over a house, waiting for someone to come in or come out, and that’s where the boredom comes in,” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, quoted in a study released yesterday by MITNews.

Cummings, a former F/A-18 pilot, is the director of the Humans and Automation Lab in MIT’s department of aeronautics and astronautics. She and her team set up a UAV simulation in which operators monitored the activity of four UAVs during a four-hour shift. Each subject was videotaped, and researchers noted when the operators were engaged, and when they were distracted. Not surprisingly, the operator with the highest score was the one who paid the most attention during the simulation. “She’s the person we’d like to clone for a boring, low-workload environment,” Cummings said.

The next-best performers were distracted a whopping 30 percent of the time—either reading a book, getting up to find a snack, or checking their cellphones.

Is being an unmanned aerial vehicle operator that bad? According to CareerCast.com, the worst job of 2012 is lumberjack, followed by dairy farmer and—wait for it—enlisted military soldier. Other hellish jobs include newspaper reporter, meter reader, and conservationist.

In the MIT experiment, participants were asked to rank their personality traits, including extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Top performers ranked “conscientiousness” as their strong trait. Sounds good, right? Maybe not. “You could have a Catch-22,” says Cummings. “If you’re high on conscientiousness, you might be good to watch a nuclear reactor, but whether these same people would be effective in such military settings is unclear.”

It’s not just virtual volleyball and dancing, either. Hackers started “improving” and fiddling around with Kinect almost from the beginning. Here’s a cool Kinect interaction with Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope:

Victoria Crater in Google Mars.

Real Mars exploration has been at an impasse lately, what with the Spirit rover stuck in the sand, and the Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft both experiencing  service interruptions.

But virtual Mars exploration is going gangbusters. Google Mars, if you haven’t tried it yet, is a feature in recent versions of Google Earth that makes Martian tourism easy from your home computer. Google recently added more archived images from the European Mars Express orbiter, so that now nearly half the planet’s surface is covered by imagery having a nominal resolution of 25 meters per pixel. It’s well worth checking out. The long-awaited day where you can explore a convincing representation of Mars based on actual high-resolution data is rapidly approaching.

Here’s a quick overview:

Sony Pictures

A shame that Cessna doesn’t seem to recognize a potential PR gold mine. Remember when Mathias Rust landed a rented Cessna 172 near Red Square in 1987? Not a peep from Cessna headquarters. Now the company appears to have missed out again: In the mega-apocalyptic move 2012, a lowly Cessna 340A saves one extended family from a variety of spectacular demises.

The world’s only Antonov An-225 makes a valiant attempt to do the same but ends up sliding off a cliff and exploding (as does just about everything else, everywhere, 24/7, in this movie). Oh, and Kennedy is back in the White House — the aircraft carrier, that is.

Futuristic look, vintage airplanes (Courtesy USAF MyBase)

The avatar who’s giving me a guided tour of MyBase—the first virtual Air Force base—is wearing wings. And I don’t mean the kind you pin on your shirt. Real ones, protruding from her back. Because she can fly. Of course, so can I. Or rather, my avatar can. Which makes me wonder why I should bother to take MyBase’s virtual P-51 for a ride, when all I have to do to become airborne is hit the “Home” button on my keyboard.

Perhaps I should explain.

Last December, the U.S. Air Force opened a new area in the virtual community known as Second Life, where cartoon-like avatars interact in a cartoon-like world. It’s like The Sims, except that every Sim you meet is being controlled in real time by some flesh-and-blood person somewhere. According to Linden Labs, the company that owns Second Life, there were more than 1.3 million logins during the last two months (although it’s not clear how that translates to the number of people “in world” at any given moment).

Second Life, in my admittedly limited experience, often seems like a ghost town. You very rarely see anyone else, at least in the places I’ve been. It’s not that the people have disappeared—they have yet to show up. Most government agencies and many public institutions have felt compelled to set up shop anyway, in case they do, and the Defense Department is no exception.

MyBase is part of a larger Air Force presence in SL known as Huffman Prairie, after the Wright brothers’ practice field outside Dayton, Ohio. Here, says my avatar guide—whose name is Scarlett Stand—the Air Force explores “the art of the possible.” MyBase is part recruiting tool for tech-savvy young people, part education project (it’s ideal for “distance learning”), part game, and part training tool.

At the shooting range (Courtesy USAF MyBase)

Stand, who in First Life is an information technologist at the Air Force’s Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, shows me around the place, which she and a handful of virtual world developers built from scratch in just 20 days. Except for the slightly distracting wings, her brief feels a lot like any other guided tour.

There’s a visitors center where avatars can read informational posters, link to websites or watch videos about Air Force programs. There’s a club with a dance floor where they can mingle. They can test their mettle on an obstacle course and shooting range, or take the virtual P-51 Mustang for a spin. These are popular activities, says Stand, who tells me that since MyBase opened in December, 4,300 visitors have stopped in, averaging about 18 minutes per stay.

At an area called MyBase Zeta, she shows me a simulated Afghan compound, which can be used to stage training exercises. This area is still in Beta testing, but the idea is that a dozen or so people could meet in Second Life to wargame a rescue operation. It wouldn’t be hard to change the scenario from Afghanistan to North Korea, Stand tells me. Second Life is flexible that way.

The Afghan compound at MyBase Zeta (Courtesy USAF MyBase)

That makes me wonder if this is really about finding cheaper ways to build those elaborate wargames that defense contractors charge the Pentagon millions to develop. I ask an expert in military computer simulations, Michael Zyda, who directs the University of Southern California’s GamePipe Laboratory. “People use Second Life if they don’t have a lot of money to develop their sim,” he answers by email, adding that “the clumsy interface and poor performance of the Second Life client turn most people off.”

In other words, serious gamers, and those with access to expensive custom-made simulations, won’t likely be impressed by MyBase. But to a newbie like me, it seems pretty cool, even if it is deserted most of the time, and even if I can’t say exactly what you’re supposed to do after you’ve read all the posters and mastered the virtual obstacle course.

Second Life is free, but requires that you download and install software to participate (not difficult at all). To reach MyBase, go to this Second Life URL, or SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/MyBase/174/136/28