I keenly read Ener’s posts and I am almost as passionate about virtual worlds but from a slightly differing perspective. They can be a wonderfully immersive media that can increase user engagement particularly in training and education.

In education circles we like to discuss learning styles such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (tactile). There are other models as well and today we recognize that learners often use a combination and that the styles for a learner may change day to day.

The more styles we can intertwine into educational materials and techniques, the greater the chances are that our learners will learn what we are teaching them.

Reading text and looking at illustrations access certain parts of our brain. Writing information relative to what we are learning accesses other parts of the brain (thus the value of written activities). Reading aloud accesses yet different areas as does teaching our newly learned information to others (such as a mentoring program).

With virtual worlds, I believe we engage additional areas of the brain as well as parts of the brain accessed via “standard” learning styles. Virtual worlds allow us to engage with the learner’s imagination and trigger thoughts of touch, smell, sound, the visual, and the kinesthetic (such as a scripted object reacting to the avatar) – the same senses we access in a real life situations. This increases the learner’s engagement, the immersion provided by the imagination, when their avatar is placed into a virtual world.

I contend that we may even engage more deeply with the user because of the simple look that OpenSim presents as contrasted with more sophisticated graphics such as Blender imported into Unity. This simpler look, sometimes referred to as cartoon class in comments to Ener’s blog, forces the user to fill in details and use their imagination to a greater degree.

Playing ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ is something done by millions but I don’t believe it engages the imagination as much as OpenSim can. Think about how Legos engage the imagination, how the unseen movie monster is typically scarier than the one revealed, or playing army or having a tea party when you are little. The imagination lets us fill in what we think the situation calls for.

Happy Halloween and think about how scary the dark can be when our minds are left to wander and wonder.

A few years ago I spoke at a number of eLearning conferences about using Second Life for creating fast video footage. Now I use OpenSim, mainly on a USB stick, and the ideology is the same: easy-to-build 3D models combined with fast, real-time rendering makes OpenSim a “rapid development” tool for eLearning. The alternative is to use Blender or Autodesk 3ds Max which mean much longer development time for building sets and characters as well as long render times. With OpenSim you create video footage in real-time but trade that for quality and lighting only possible in a tool like Blender. There is also an added benefit to using OpenSim, if it is done on a server, and that is the chance to have fun with fellow workers when you need to film several people interacting.

Adobe Media Encoder

When I was talking about Second Life I was using Adobe’s CS3 suite and bringing my Fraps generated AVI files into Flash. Once in Flash, I could add ActionScripting, buttons, and even quiz objects to the Second Life video footage. Last year I upgraded to CS5 and along with it came a new way of importing AVI files. Adobe’s Media Encoder comes bundled with several CS5 packages and is worth its weight in gold. You have far greater control over the quality of your AVI clips and the compression yields nice results. I filmed some footage last week in Enclave Harbour and have been pleased with how well it can be compressed and still hold up quite well.

If you are an eLearning multimedia developer and think that 3D animation is out of reach, either from budget or skills, try OpenSim out – the Ener’s sim-on-a-stick version is a great way to try it. I was able to teach two hour workshop participants how to build in about an hour, so I maintain that the learning curve is very short (contrary to many eLearning Guild members), and how to film in a second hour.

Build something, film it with the free trial of Fraps, and import it into a Flash file using the Media Encoder and you may be surprised at how reasonable the resulting file size is and how the possibilities become far greater for your eLearning (and it looks good on your LinkedIn profile!).

originally posted at iliveisl

Unity is very cool, no doubt about it and if I was working on a commercial game, Unity would be a good choice for a browser-enabled teaser version of that game. The posts by Ener in the last week showcasing Unity as a viable way to share OpenSim content are compelling for what the future may hold for OpenSim-based virtual worlds.

Mesh-based 3D graphics will always look “better” than primitive-based graphics and . . . will always take longer to create.

However, there are a large number of nicely made mesh models to satisfy many needs – just like Getty Images has a very large catalog of photos. If you only use stock models, you risk ending up with a vanilla virtual world. Using a mix of stock models with your own models can yield great results because many things in our real world are “stock” such as phones and cars.

Even with that possibility – I’ll stick with OpenSim for our current needs because of the rapid development it allows. The video below shows a hotel lobby I built in about eight hours which includes an hour creating textures. From the phone to the pens to a somewhat odd chandelier, almost everything was created in one work day. Exceptions are my use of Ener’s equisite Espresso machine, cafe sets, and Aeron chair.

The trade off between photo-realism, and development time and cost, makes OpenSim my choice for now.

originally posted at iliveisl

A topic I have discussed in the past is in the use of virtual worlds for creating multimedia assets for eLearning and I have some old tutorials for doing this with Second Life. Creating video from Second Life or OpenSim is fairly easy to do and fairly inexpensive.

However, virtual worlds are also an easy way to create simpler graphics. In the past, I have used Second Life as my stock image library by taking snapshots of whatever I needed – be it a person or two, an office, or campus. Using such images means you have embraced the low detail look of Second Life (or OpenSim) and that can be hard for some to do. The lack of detail is from a low polygon count which is necessary so that virtual worlds can render in real-time. This is only something that you can decide is acceptable or not for use in your eLearning and is a balance is speed, details, and cost. Getty images are expensive and may not be exactly what you need – virtual world images are inexpensive and can be created to exactly what you need (to an extent). With http://simonastick, you have a free studio with which to create any scene you want. Creating content can be time consuming but there is a lot of free content available, including an entire pre-built and free campus.

I have shifted my personal focus from using virtual worlds for eLearning video (although I continue to do this in my day job) to creating a middle school workbook that uses virtual worlds for science field trips. That endeavor can be glimpsed at http://enclaveharbour.com. My “part” of this work is developing activities that go with the builds created by Ener Hax and defining what the final project will be. The Enclave Harbour link is for the virtual world component of this and the workbook has its own website (yes, I am guilty of over complicating things at times). In developing a temporary single page for that site I wanted to tie in the virtual world aspect since that is what, hopefully, makes this an interesting way to learn science.

In creating an image that reflected what Enclave Harbour is, I wanted it to be more iconic than simply an image. By iconic I mean showing features that define what this place is. Think of the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, both can be represented with simple line drawings that many people will connect with immediately. Some city skylines can be silhouetted and be easily recognized (Toronto and Seattle, for example).

That is the perspective I wanted to create for this graphic and it was very easy to do.

I created large “full bright” backgrounds that I placed behind a dozen selected builds, took anti-aliased images of each, then treated each so that I would end up with a black silhouette. Some needed a little cleaning up and I did add two more images, plus the shape of the land, in which I did not use a white background. You can see that the process was very simple and I ended up with a stylized skyline that represents Enclave Harbour.

If you use virtual worlds, use them as 3D multimedia applications as well. It is easy to only think of them as collaborative and immersive virtual worlds, but in reality they are 3 D software applications and can often be used in the way one would used Autodesk 3ds Max or Blender.

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this post also appears on iliveisl

I have been following a discussion in LinkedIn’s Virtual World group that has taken a shift into an area of interest to me. It will come to no surprise to the reader’s of Ener Hax’s iliveisl blog to learn that this shift was loudly accented by our own Ener.

Linda Rogers (Bread and Roses | Music Island), whom I have a deep respect for and who has a comprehensive knowledge of Second Life, started this shift and brings up a great point in a conversation with Ener.

With heavy editing below, here is part of the thread to set the stage for my two cents.

Linda: I frequently run into educators that are new to Second Life, because one of the places they tend to visit (if they are interested in the Arts) is my music series. It is amazing how frequently I meet educators in their first week who are just blown away by things they have visited, the virtual Dresden Museum, the virtual Sistine Chapel, historical sims, science sims, space and ocean sims. AND they want to bring their Grade 3 class to see something and explore. That’s when they find out with a shock that Second Life is not open to children.

These educators want a world with the quality and depth of content of SL available in a child-friendly environment.

Ener: well the good news is that educators can have that same experience in OpenSim! =)  because everything that was built in Second Life can be built in OpenSim. a teacher could build it themselves, create a consortium of like-minded teachers and do it as a project, or even hire others

Linda: Linden Lab has indicated clearly that they are disinterested in retaining Educators.There’s clearly room for someone else to take that ball and run with it.

Ener: if a group of teachers can organize, then a great number of things can be built. i think if all disparate OpenSim educational efforts could loosely come together, people would be surprised at the tremendous volume of educational material out there. Linda, you hit on a very good point and i believe that it is up to teachers to form this and not some corporate entity =)

Linda and Ener have hit upon a very good point indeed!

Second Life was the first “create anything you want” virtual world that saw mainstream media attention and attracted many people who did come and build fantastic places.

We all know what Linden Lab thinks of education – the layoff of many that dealt with education, such as Pathfinder Linden, the closure of the teen grid, and the cessation of the educational/not-for-profit discount.

Second Life does have a large amount of interesting builds and, unfortunately, many have disappeared due to a number of factors. However, there is no longer the need to pin all hopes on a corporate entity that will make choices to serve itself over that of education.

The advances and stability seen in OpenSimulator make it nearly as viable as Second Life. The one exception, in my opinion, is the physics engine.

The challenges in creating an educational consortium, which could be as simple as a list of Grid URIs and a sentence about each, include some of the following:

• semi-private grids, such as our Enclave Harbor
• grids existing on local servers, in the school or district
• classroom grids on local machines, such as Eric Nauman’s
• grids behind firewalls
• grids on teacher’s personal computers at home

There are further variations but even with hypergrid-enabled regions, not all grids will be able, nor necessarily want, to connect into a large consortium. With Second Life, we were all in this one single “walled garden” which invoked a community feel that made it more natural to want to share your work. Often, sims were paid for from school budgets and did not represent as deep a personal investment as some OpenSim grids do. To compound this, many Second Life builds were heavily comprised of “things” that were bought or found for free.

To use Enclave Harbour as an example, Ener has created every item we have in-world, even trees. This makes for a more personal investment into OpenSim than in Second Life. Buying a chair for fifty cents is easier to share with others than a chair you may have spent a few hours creating. Add to that the more “gritty” feel that running your own server has and its expense and somehow it feels more emotional than it did in Second Life (even though we pay what one educationally discounted sim cost and have 16 sims). This may simply be my own bias, but I am protective of Ener’s work and value it greatly. I confess to not seeing much value in being open to the public. It may sound callous, but I bet my feelings are not that different from others who have gone through the trouble to establish their own grid and have all of their content custom-made.

However, a consortium of educational OpenSim grids could have great value in the larger scheme of K-16 education.

I would like to see this consortium include linkages with community colleges and universities. The educational grids could serve as “feeders” to higher education institutions and this is something that would hold value to me. If students going through Enclave Harbour resulted in a higher number of students pursuing science studies in college (particularly STEM with emphasis on reducing its gender gap), then I would open our grid up because this meant that a real relationship existed between us and a college (or colleges). This would add value to our grid in a way that benefited us and the partnering college, in effect our program would have value to the students and to the college.

If you are interested in being part of a listing of educational grids, even if you are fully private, let me know. I would be glad to start a listing (perhaps even self-registration via public Google Docs). Private grids being listed may help others gauge the size and richness of OpenSim educational work in a way analogous to Second Life and spark new ways to look at OpenSim for education.

also posted at iliveisl

A US House bill looks to eliminate Ed Tech spending as they “trim the fat” from the Federal budget.

Many Education Technology programs fund expensive endeavors and many of those endeavors are only realised at more privileged schools. Two challenges with the more expensive technologies often come in the form of on-going training for teachers and the maintenance of associated hardware. Many schools in the US have unused technology gathering dust due to a lack of training in their use or overdue maintenance sometimes due to cost. I see 3D projectors following that same route in time – broken and lost 3D glasses, LCD projector bulbs that cost far too much, and the novelty of 3D wearing off for students (a past post of mine on this).

Education Technology includes many types of technology for use in the classroom and in “virtual” schools. In this definition, virtual schools don’t have much to do with virtual worlds. They are a distance learning approach to help reach out to students that are unable to attend a brick and mortar school (this is a gross over simplification on my part). Half of the states in the US have adopted some form of virtual school and we should expect this to grow in importance, adoption, and efficacy.

While trimming Education Technology can be short-sighted, I have always looked at Science in the classroom as a discipline that does not need the “latest and greatest” in order to be effective and even exciting to students.

I did immensely enjoy the multimedia auditoriums that I taught in when I was with Miami-Dade College but that may have had as much to do with teaching as it did with my love of creating content with Flash. It was fun to see my work displayed on a big screen with state-of-the-art audio. However, I also have taught in a secondary school setting where resources where limited and the first school I taught at was one where I would bring my own VCR, strapped to the back of my scooter, to my classroom. The VCR comment should sufficiently date that time period!

Regardless of State or Federal funding, or of the wealth of a school district, technology does not always need to be expensive. OpenSimulator is open source virtual world software and can be run on average computers. While not every student in America has access to a computer, a good deal more students do than those with access to the “latest and greatest” education technology.

If you are in a situation where you do have the latest technology then more power to you but for many schools, even before this proposed budget cuts, education technology was a yearly line item that was often crossed out.

In those situations resourceful and passionate teachers find ways to excite their students and I have seen fine examples using OpenSim for this. A semi-technical and patient person will be able to install OpenSim on a server but barring a server, much can be done with Ener Hax’s “sim on a stick“. The latest version of OpenSimulator is available online as a zipped file that can be run on a USB drive or simply copied to anyplace on a PC (unfortunately this build does not work on Macs).

The “stick” version is for individual use and not for collaborative group work like you could do with a server deployed version (for server installation, see Dr. Lopes’ five step install instructions). Many activities can be done with this stick version when you view it as a tool and 3D application. Science is my focus but OpenSim can, and is, used for architecture, storytelling, filming, engineering, and art.

Imagine creating a water cycle that students could walk around in rather than just looking at a drawing, or having students create a giant plant cell as a project. You are more limited by your imagination than by technology.

Having Federal funding cut for Educational Technology is a shame with long term repercussions but that does not mean your students need to suffer.

Be innovative and explore the possibilities.

With OpenSim on a USB drive, you can explore this while riding the train or maybe visiting the in-laws (shhh, I don’t really mean that . . .).

http://simonastick.com

cinema lobby built on a USB thumb drive

cinema lobby built on a USB thumb drive

reposted from iliveisl

Ener Hax has mentioned that I use OpenSim on a USB drive for “real work” and asked me to write a post about this. I will dovetail into Ener’s post last night and frame this with a similar Blender 3D perspective.

I have been using Blender 3D since it went open source in 2002. It’s a great program and once you move beyond its steep learning curve it can be a fairly rapid tool to use.

My primary task in my day job is to create multimedia assets for eLearning that is distributed to 90,000 annual users in over 110 countries. This varies from software simulations to static graphics to scenario-based video. In addition, and like many corporate eLearning developers, I often am tasked with non-eLearning multimedia work that can range from creating conference videos and product demos to large-scale printed exhibit graphics for clients. For some presentation work I use Blender 3D and it is well received but the downside is in its rendering time. It can take hours to weeks to render out video from Blender 3D.

For our corporate eLearning the rendering time is simply too long to be cost effective and the hardware requirements are sometimes too great (i.e., render farms for large projects).

When Second Life was all the hype in the media a few years ago it seemed like an easy answer to my need to do “3D” animation faster and cheaper. At first it was challenging to accept the “poor” graphics quality of Second Life prims and I confess to a certain elitist attitude I had regarding this. However, stepping back I realised that Second Life could get me 80% of the way there and that it was worth sacrificing the remaining 20% for something that was many orders of magnitude faster. As a bonus, avatars had built in joints and adequate walk cycles and gravity even existed.

After a short time, a freedom to concentrate more on the overall interactions and less on the details developed and was a pleasant benefit. It was liberating and it opened doors to share this with eLearning colleagues. I could teach the use of Second Life as a 3D animation studio to colleagues in a manner of hours and not months!

I left my elitist mindset behind and embraced a tool that ended up being just as well received by learners. People just get it and I often compare my use Second Life (now OpenSim) to YouTube content. YouTube is considered the largest eLearning repository out there and it works because of the content and not the production quality. People understand that they are not going to always have Steven Spielberg quality productions on YouTube but they also know they can find virtually any topic covered in a video tutorial.

Using OpenSim as a 3D animation studio for eLearning is fast and inexpensive. I add the needed interactivity for eLearning by importing the videos into Flash and have been doing this technique for four years now.

I have also been using OpenSim, particularly the USB stick version, for doing space and product visualization. It does not have the polished look of a Blender 3D video but clients don’t have an issue with that because it also means a significantly lower project cost for them and a project delivered in a shorter time. It’s also easy to make edits because there is no rendering time. If I don’t do a camera fly-through in the way the client wants, it is easy to redo it in a matter of minutes.

The images below show an exhibit booth that can be textured with a client’s graphics, placed in an exhibit hall, and have videos showing how it will look to their customers (I don’t need to bring them in-world – I simply shoot video for them). OpenSim on a USB stick has been ideal for doing this and lots of fun as well.

Interested in giving it a try on a shoestring budget? Get yours at Ener’s very handy http://simonastick.com!

this post also appears on the iliveisl blog

A few years ago I had read about someone who took USGS maps and converted them to grayscale and mapped them to Second Life terrain files in the RAW format. The technique required Photoshop and some hit or miss tweaking. The complexity of this made it a less than ideal manner for doing what is a very cool thing – creating geologically accurate terrains!

Thanks to the talent of Dr. Lopes, one of the OpenSim core developers, there is now an easy-to-use tool for converting digital elevation model files into terrain files.

DEM TerrainGenerator

As a former Corps of Engineers GS-12 ranked Geologist, this is an exciting development that should see good use in OpenSim and something I look forward to trying.

Thank you Dr. Lopes for your passion in all things OpenSim!

San Fran's China Beach - © Dr. Cristina Lopes

Four years ago I set up a social networking presence to help promote Ener Hax and the iliveisl Second Life “land sales” business. Ener Hax is an account name in Second Life but those of you familiar with Second Life know that these names can take on a life of their own (ener hax actually dates back to at least Dungeons & Dragons in the early ’80s and may have been a nickname for a certain hyper child then!). Many otherwise unknown individuals have created significant online presences through their avatar names and their avatars are as reputable as a person’s real identity.

Online avatar personae are different from the “brand personae” of such spokespersons like Erin eSurance, the Geico gecko, the Aflack duck, or talking M&Ms. The difference is that there is one person behind the avatar versus a corporate marketing department.

Having a real person behind the avatar makes for a more genuine conversation that catches the nuances of a real person over that of a contrived personna. It also means that this persona is more of a pseudonym than a character for that person.

Ener Hax has written several iliveisl blog posts on the validity of  ”avatar identity” despite having run against prejudice for this viewpoint. From my perspective, avatar identity is no different than a nom de plume or an artist’s stage name. Many of our favourite authors, actors, and musicians go by assumed names and it is their work that brings them acclaim and not their names.

Last year Ener Hax was removed from Facebook for not being a “natural person” and that seemed rather pedantic of Facebook in my opinion. I did not give it much thought until I read a Time article today about a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing on consumer privacy. Then it hit me, as an avatar, Ener Hax holds little value to data miners because of the “disconnect” between the avatar and real world spending. There are no credit cards in the name of Ener Hax and no direct way to measure marketing success to Ener.

Thus, it is not worth Facebook’s server costs to have an account in an avatar’s name. What does it cost to host a Facebook account? Clearly the server space costs more than they can sell that data for.

What really struck me in this Time article was this possible use of such data:

. . . prospective employers who may seek, for example, to exclude women who “like” Charlie Sheen on Facebook. Insurance companies may buy that data to deny coverage to people who frequently purchase supersize bags of Doritos.

I knew data mining occurs but never gave it much thought as a new form of prejudice. It turns out that perhaps being an avatar online is a pretty smart way to go.

Zuckerberg – Time’s Person of the Year or Master Exploiter and Profiteer of Privacy?

Who is Facebook to decide that Ener Hax, or you, have no value?

this post appears on both the subquark and iliveisl blogs

It is no news that iPad fever sweeping the world, but for eLearning it causes grief and some retooling. Many eLearning tools output to Flash and it’s not just video but interactions such as tests, software simulations, and so on. Some of these interactions simply can not be recreated by other means (especially complex, multi-step software simulations). With iPad’s massive appeal and the slowness of Android or Chrome-based tablets to enter the market, the iPad is becoming the de facto tablet in business and schools.

I just read a post about a 1,000 student private school which is making iPads mandatory next year for all students from the 4th to the 12th grade. I do like the use of good technology for education and using tablets can eliminate the need for books and their subsequent weight toted about by students (much research has been done on the negative affects of heavy book bags on developing children).

There are other tablets out there, such as the Kno which is made specifically for education, but they have been slow in coming to market. I have been keeping an eye on the Archos 10.1 which is available for just under $300 but it has not made much of a splash. The sheer volume of iPads out there just make it the easier one to buy and the standard to measure all others against.

I have a client that deployed 2,500 of them last month and they are ordering more! Another client was an early adopter and has over 5,000 in their organization. For me, designing to the iPad is increasingly a “must”.

What about laptops compared to tablets when it comes to education?

The Google Cr48 with the Chrome operating system is being deployed for free in some pilot programs with schools and is designed to run off of the cloud. You can’t install programs on it and, oddly enough, it has no caps lock (a feature this two finger, head down typist would greatly benefit from) but it also faces the iPad ubiquity challenge.

Some colleges evaluating tablets and laptops have found that students are more likely to take notes and be attentive in classes when using tablets. This is in large part due to the tablet’s form factor – it is designed to lay flat and be used much like a paper notebook. You can’t “hide” behind the screen as easily as you can with a laptop. Farmville crops just have to wait until class is over!

How does this affect OpenSim?

Currently, there is no decent way to interact with an OpenSim grid via the iPad. Even with the Google Cr48 laptop, you can’t install a viewer. Browser-access seems to be the only viable option for accessing OpenSim grids but so far no one has launched a suitable way to do this. As Ener Hax reported on iliveisl, Canvas by Tipodean made a small splash in December but seems to have gone silent (five images on Flickr don’t instill much confidence in me nor does Ener’s unacknowledged invitation response). Linden Lab’s Project Skylight using Gaikai‘s cloud-based gaming service also seems to be stagnant but looked very promising.

WebGL might be the answer but would seem to be at least a year off for most of us. Ener Hax explored this with KataSpace and posted a review and a video – this seems the closest thing so far and is available for anyone to try for themselves.

Assuming a workable browser-based solution does come along, how would a finger driven display work for moving your avatar through an OpenSim world?

It would be nice to have iPad and tablet access to OpenSim grids and would help our own endeavor of Enclave Harbour, as well as that of many educators. A “read only” access would meet many needs and keep the browser from becoming a gaming engine (think of this similarly to the Flash authoring environment as the regular viewer where you can build and script and browser-access as analogous to SWF content online where you can interact but not create).

OpenSim is a great tool and, to stay relevant, some way to view it on an iPad is needed.

reposted on iliveisl