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

OpenSim makes for a good, and free, tool for 3D animation work. I have spoken at conferences and webinars on the use of Second Life for creating video for branched scenario-based eLearning because it is a relatively easy tool to use. My focus has shifted to our current endeavor for secondary education but I still use OpenSim for eLearning and more and more as a presentation tool. Especially with OpenSim installed on a USB drive since I no longer need to worry about our corporate firewall or about installing any software on my work station (http://simonastick.com).

As a presentation tool, it works well for doing space visualization by allowing fairly rapid creation of a space, especially when a CAD illustration can be imported in as a tracing element. In this use, the space is “filmed” with Fraps, touched up with Virtual Dub, and deployed as a either a standalone video or as part of a Flash-based project.

OpenSim would also work very well to create static images or video for use in Environmental Assessments and Environmental Impact Statements.

Granted, the finished video from OpenSim is not as polished as that created in Blender 3D, but speaking from my experience, I can create and render out an OpenSim scene in perhaps 20% the time it would take otherwise. That certainly comes into play whenever ROI is an issue (and for my day job, that would be all the time!).

I find OpenSim as a 3D application inching ever more into the top tray of my multimedia toolbox thanks to its stability and ease-of-use. A big thank you and genuine gratitude extend to the OpenSimulator developers and administrators for creating such a useful application.

Here is a test video to see if a popular technique of doing 3D floating text would look okay done with OpenSim. The words are simply transparent PNGs and seem to work okay (if not a bit of a ripoff from the first Spiderman movie’s starting credits).

reposted from iliveisl – a much more thorough source for OpenSim topics

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) report on Science Education has just been released and science literacy is “unacceptable” according to the executive director of the National Science Teacher’s Association (the NSTA is something that both myself and our OpenSim builder Ener Hax have been a member of in the past).

One of our goals with Enclave Harbour is to make science fun, approachable, accessible, and affordable. There is a “craze” at the moment for 3D teaching materials that use special LCD projectors and 3D glasses. These projectors are expensive (the bulbs can run in excess of $1000!). This type of expenditure is beyond many school districts and while 3D content is seen as innovative, it does little good if it can’t reach every student.

click to explore more charts

The NAEP report shows that not only is the gender gap growing in science, something we are consciously addressing with Ener’s builds and my workbook, but so is the ethnic gap in science literacy.

The poorest schools have the largest gaps and they need ways to make science fun, affordable, and that allow teachers to add their own ideas to. Current 3D materials typically do not allow teachers to add to them nor do they allow any additions by students – they are passive and non-participatory.

In my graduate work I was fortunate to have a department chair that was focused on making science accessible and sustainable for the poorest school districts. He did this by creating science activities (labs) that used common inexpensive items, many of which were items that are often discarded after use (I’m dating myself but some of those items included things like 35 mm film canisters which used to be prevalent).

OpenSim is one potential tool that is priced right and fairly accessible. Many schools have computer labs and a computer is infinitely more useful as hardware than a 3D projector. The problem with trendy “hi-tech” things like 3D projectors and glasses is the long term use of them or, I should say, the abandonment of them. At some point, they no longer get maintained and join the other techie things that were past fads. If you are a school district that can afford these types of things and are not letting go of teachers, then more power to you.

In the real world we are obviously failing and Francis Eberle, executive director of the NSTA, summed it up like this:

Unfortunately, over the last decade, schools have been forced to reduce funding for teacher training and science classroom resources and even eliminate positions to offset budget constraints. As a result, students are barely able to keep their heads above water in terms of their science education learning.

Reduced funding will continue to be a challenge and has been a challenge in the sciences for as long as I have been in teaching – both at the secondary and community college level. When I taught at Miami Dade College, we had a fantastic Geology lab that was very well equipped, yet the Geology classes no longer were offered with a lab credit. The money had been spent but it was cheaper to shutter the lab. Cheaper in that a professor was paid for a three hour course rather than a four hour course. While I could not bring the students to the lab, nothing prevented me from bringing the lab to them. I would get to school a little early, load up an AV cart with rocks, minerals, sieves, balances, and whatever I needed to ensure that my students had the chance to “feel” science.

Science can be a blast (literally and maybe Ener will embarrass me and mention the times that Mr. Miller blew things up – not always intentionally) and there is no substitute for being immersed in science. Handling minerals and figuring out density is immersive but also requires the proper resources.

As Eberle wrote above, science classroom resources are often lacking and teachers need innovative and inexpensive tools. Some progressive teachers and science departments have discovered OpenSim as both an immersive tool and one that allows themselves and students to go beyond passive observation and enter the creative realm offered by OpenSim (great post by Ener about one tech coordinator bringing OpenSim to students).

OpenSim does require computers but many schools have them and they are far more versatile than projectors. Thanks to Roger Stark’s tutorials on installing OpenSim on a USB drive and Ener’s sim-on-a-stick website, OpenSim use can be very simple requiring a minimum of tech skills to place this great immersive tool into the hands of teachers and students.

Your imagination is often the only limiting factor and OpenSim can be used for more than just science.

reposted on the iliveisl blog

It has been quite the year and Ener not only has chronicled the move from Second Life to OpenSim with over 500 posts in 2010, but also has built many wonderful field trip locations on our grid. Along the path, Ener has provided some great tips for making a move as easy as possible and has strongly voiced opinions on OpenSim options such as “sim on a stick”.

To say I am grateful for all the work Ener has done for us in Enclave Harbour would be a gross understatement. While Ener hates to sit still (I mean there is never a moment where she just sits down and kicks back), the amount of “things” she built this year go above any simple hobby. To keep from gushing and prevent a humble one’s embarrassment, I thought it would be most fitting to simply list some the things that Enclave Harbour has come to life with. These are all things that are 95-100% built by Ener with very little outside direction.

Thanks little one for shedding more light on OpenSim for many people and for making Enclave Harbour an exciting resource for kids to explore science concepts.

Namaste Ener!

In no particular order (because I had to start somewhere and fly around to try to catch most things):

• Ener’s home – architectural principles incorporating the environment for aesthetics and energy concerns
• footbridge to the weather station – to help n00bs with in-world movement
• scale relief maps of the estate (terrain sculpty creation)
• space station with gigantic solar array
• airport and terminal building
• spaceship – to spark talks about the future or travel, energy, and beyond this world policies
• hovercraft (silly video indeed but nice use of beacons and nice pan at 3:06)
• segway-like personal transport
• helicopter (I particularly like this one)
• solar powered cargo zeppelin
• supersonic passenger jet
• desalination plant (very nicely laid out)
• skid steer loader
• forested camp fire meeting spot
• floating pod homes
• rocket junk yard
• deep sea oil platform
• “forgotten” tropical shack meeting spot with suspended footbridge
• weather station
• glacier with cave
• hydroelectric power plant
• water coolers & bottled water vendor
• harbour overlook meeting spot
• automotive suspended bridge
• automotive lift truss bridge
• solar farm (thank you DreamWalker for scripting these, they work great!)
• land-based wind turbines
• deep water floating wind turbines
• in-stream water turbine
• lighthouse
• suspended beehive building
• carbon atom classroom
• drive in diner (complete with dumpsters to discuss biofuels)
• Sunny’s shop
• 901 metre tall building with toilet power!
• “corporate” building (secretely housing Club l’Energie)
• Ener-gy Hotel
• l’Ascenseur inspired by Quebec City’s angled elevator (thanks to Micheil for scripting it)
• “hat box” building
• DNA building
• landfill (recycling centre in the works)
• speedboat & Harbour patrol boat
• Megamall (now gone but it was a nice build)
• Energon – post-apocalyptic settlement (gone as well, but a great idea)
• Haxor Lunar Lounge Remixed (lots of work on the old SL one)
• water tower (complete with secret pool inside!)
• 1905 Espresso machine (one of my favourites of Ener’s work)
• a dozen chair types & tables
• Ener’s one tree! =p

Wow! That is quite a list! Thank you Ener!

I am certain that I have missed many things, especially so many small details like bouys, conservation signs, and so much more, and I am also thankful for the wonderful terraforming. Terraforming in OpenSim is one area that is not as smooth as in Second Life, particularly region borders – but Ener’s persistence is matched with equal patience!

Not only has Ener built a ton of stuff, but she has also made sure our grid stays up and is running in tip top condition. Details like making OAR backup stations with a steampunk feel that make it easy (even for me) to make on the spot and in-world region backups. The OAR backup script is written by James Stallings II who setup and maintains our server and has done a fabulous job for us, far exceeeding my expectations and redefining what an OpenSim experience can be.

It’s been a heck of a year and 2011 will prove to be an excellent one as well!

Happy New Year Ener and a very Happy New Year to all those in both virtual and real worlds!

reposted from the iliveisl blog

One of the things I covered in eLearning presentations about the use of Second Life, and now OpenSim, is that video captured from this type of virtual world is “real-time”. There is no rendering time as found in “real” 3D programs.

Those of you reading this on the iliveisl blog take this fully for granted and rightfully so. My use of virtual worlds before starting the Enclave Harbour project was as a 3D animation tool. I had been using Flash in conjunction with Swift 3D and Blender 3D to create 3D video assets but the amount of time before you even get to creating video could be impractically long. Especially for the use in corporate eLearning.

Enter Second Life – avatars already exist, there joints are setup, physics exist, and it is very fast to build “sets”. Rather than creating a person, wiring up their armature so their elbows and knees bend properly, and making everything from a mesh – you could just make an office, get a few people to login in, and video right then and there. The downside is that you don’t have the detail and you don’t have the lighting control. However, what would take at least two weeks to create outside of a virtual world platform now only took one day. Far faster and well worth the trade off for training videos.

OpenSim now gives you the same option but for a fraction of the cost or even for free! Ener on the iliveisl blog has done a wonderful job exploring OpenSim installed on a USB drive – even covering USB read times (I would have not thought of that) – and has gathered those links onto a master post (even a zipped OpenSim installation that will run on most PCs).

I now use “sim on a stick” for my work endeavors. I no longer need a special port through the firewall and I don’t need to install anything onto my workstation. OpenSim on the USB drive works better than Second Life. I am able to maintain much higher frame rates for using Fraps with a higher anti-alias setting in the viewer (54 FPS at 4x anti-alias).

Here is an example of an OpenSim “build” that took me about 6 hours to make at a relaxed pace that I made for Enclave Harbour, our middle school science project, of a nightclub in an abandoned building. I used some furniture from Ener Hax and Sunnygirl Whitfield (thank you) and look forward to streaming video over the club’s “plasmas” that are placed in the space. This should make for a neat place to explore and possibly even hold a science activity or two!

If you have yet to add virtual worlds to your eLearning toobox, OpenSim on a USB drive might be the way to try it out. You can also place those zipped files into a folder on your PC and run it from there, no need to use an actual thumb drive.

reposted on the iliveisl blog

Virtual worlds are experiencing rapid growth due to several factors and their future is being defined now.

The first, and most important, are the availability of alternatives to Second Life. There have been, and are, other virtual worlds out there, but with the ease of in-world building tools, Second Life has enjoyed widespread adoption.

Secondly, the cost of the alternatives. The finest OpenSim hosting is a fraction the cost of Second Life. While we have 16 “sims”, in reality we have four SL-equivalent sims when measured by hardware. This results in about $40 per sim versus $295.

A third reason for OpenSim growth is adoption. As more people try it out and report their successes (like Ener Hax at iliveisl.com), more people venture out from Second Life or venture into virtual worlds for the first time as true users.

When OpenSim becomes as common place as Apache then it may become a “one-click install” much like WordPress and MOODLE are through GoDaddy, HostGator, and many hosting companies.

OpenSim is relatively new; it takes a few years for technologies to become the “latest thing”. Twitter was started in 2006 but was not saturated with media coverage until 2008 and 2009. OpenSim also has the burden to overcome some of Linden Lab’s stigma.

Currently, Second Life is a closed system requiring an account specific to it for access. It is natural for others to use this same model for OpenSim. After all, Second Life enjoyed over a hundred million user hours in the last year; not a bad model to want to emulate.

However, to quote Mitch Wagner today: “Second Life is not successful“; so perhaps emulating that model may not be the most prudent approach. It is easy to think that in running your own commercial grid you will not make the same mistakes that Linden Lab has. However, running a grid with 100 concurrent users is vastly different than 80,000.

In my opinion, which is admittedly biased, creating a community grid that is “better than Second Life” will always tie you to a Second Life comparison and inhibit innovation. Placing the same people in the same roles using the same model yields the same results.

“Community” grids have their place of course, just like blogger or Ning, but they lack the flexibility and freedom of self-hosted solutions. In the end, the abillity to host OpenSim on your own server will prevail, much like today’s internet and intranets.

OpenSim grids will, and do, have firewalled intranet-like portions and also external hypergrid-enabled parts.  After all, universities have their websites hosted by their own IT departments in their own data centres, why would they choose a third-party community grid to host their virtual worlds? True communities will emerge from hypergrid technology just as Justin Clark-Casey presented in his Oxford Masters dissertation.

There will always be individuals who choose to be part of communities just like being part of a Farmville group or LinkedIn, but for educational or business use, OpenSim will be on your own turf.

OpenSim will have “arrived” when it is no longer the focus as it is now; when it becomes a part of standard server software and easily implementable by corporate and institutional IT departments, and even individuals like myself who use it for eLearning and education.

Virtual worlds are still novel but will eventually become another tool to communicate with, just like the many technologies that make up today’s web.

the one & only Ener Hax

If you looked at Second Life during the media frenzy a few years ago but could not overcome obstacles to adopt it, it may be time to explore OpenSim. You can even set it up for free and build real content that you can use for eLearning like I have spoken about for the eLearning Guild. In fact, the techniques I presented work very well on a USB deployed version of OpenSim!

I have gone to exclusively using “sim-on-stick” for my eLearning endeavors because I don’t need to hurdle our corporate firewall to obtain access to the proper ports. For educational use, we use SimHost as our solution provider because our grid needs to be accessible by students.

Using SimHost is analogous to using a website host and they offer the most hardware for the dollar and are run by a core OpenSim developer and an OSGrid administrator.

There is no time like the present and it is a very exciting time for virtual worlds.

reposted on iliveisl.com

Education used to be fun. We all remember that one great teacher that turned us on to some topic or at least made it fun. Somewhere along the way, education and learning became somewhat separated. Not intentionally, but as a result of some who wanted to make it better, and who genuinely thought they were making it better.

In the U.S. we saw the development of Federal policy where “teaching to the test” overrode teaching for the sake of education. This is a gross generalization to be certain and chances are that if you have been reading Ener’s blog posts on OpenSim you are not “that” kind of teacher. I would bet that you are the type of teacher that students will remember and the type of teacher that truly believes they do make a difference. And you do.

Using OpenSim is a skill set that you do not need to have to be a teacher. No teacher certification depends on your ability to teleport or terraform. If you are a teacher reading this post and actively involved in using virtual worlds, or just starting to explore them as a possible tool, take a moment to acknowledge that you care and that your passion pushes you to knock your head against the virtual wall. Learning to use virtual worlds takes effort but it can also be fun. And that is the key isn’t it? Learning can also be fun.

OpenSim allows you to create learning activities for your students and allows your students to learn using a very different and rich medium. Depending on your school, resources, students and their resources you can do many things with OpenSim. From assigning projects where students build their own objects or worlds to creating simulations to making large scale models of molecules or even of the human heart that you could walk through. These types of possibilities are why you read all that you can on OpenSim and spend your own time learning it. The biggest limit is your time because, if I have judged you correctly, you have more ideas of things to do with OpenSim than you can possibly create.

Virtual worlds are now on the upswing according to Gartner and decisions like Linden Lab just made about eliminating their educational discount is causing a stir in educational communities. Some of you saw the possibilities of virtual worlds a few years ago but could not take advantage of them because of cost and access. Now with the fresh activity of news you may just be learning about OpenSim and seeing that it is much easier to explore than Second Life ever was. If you have not had a chance to explore OpenSim, maybe try OpenSim on your own. Ener has done a wonderful job talking about running OpenSim on a USB drive, right down to even discussing a very reasonably priced drive that works very well (I now also use the Patriot USB drive and it works very well). The passion that Ener has is only hinted at with the iliveisl blog and what you don’t see are the hours spent exploring things like “sim on a stick” so that an honest and down to earth assessment of it can be made and presented to you.

That same passion is being expressed in our endeavor of Enclave Harbour. We are exploring OpenSim as a contextual learning instrument. True contextual learning involves real places with real meaning to students. For example, contextual learning goes beyond learning that kinetic energy can be harnessed by turbines to create electricity to looking at the world around you and recognizing that there are many mundane instances of kinetic energy that could be harnessed. In the traditional teaching of turbine-generated electricity you could discuss wind turbines, hydro-electric plants, nuclear energy, and tidal and wave power. Those are great examples but many don’t exist in the context the student is living in. They simply become something to learn that may not hold particular relevance and thus may be quickly forgotten.

Ener did a great job, right down to performing the math, in building an example of harnessing kinetic energy that many students are able to relate to - flushing a toilet! In true Ener fashion, this commode is atop a building that is one metre taller than the current tallest building in the world.

When I taught private school, I might have hesitated using that example because of the ensuing chaos that would erupt in class (students making jokes for days, jumping off the virtual building, and other things that I am sure I would need to explain to principals and parents – but after blowing the light covers off a few times with experiments, these activities just get chalked up to “oh that Mr. Miller . . .”). Actually, I would have loved that example and love it when students get so excited about an idea that they run with it, even in silly directions. Some of the silliest things lead to the most serious of scientific discoveries (like harnessing the power of wastewater from high-rise buildings!).

My contention (and seemingly distant Ph.D. rides on this) is that a virtual world, such as one created with OpenSim, can lead to effective contextual learning. Having “physical” places created in a mixed urban and rural setting, such as Enclave Harbour, helps students see how connected these things truly are. This immersion makes learning fun for both educator and student and is, in my opinion, effective contextual learning.

Anything that you build in OpenSim represents something in the real world, at least in the mind of others experiencing it. Even if what you build is pure fantasy, such as a floating night club. You look at the object, maybe even walk around in the object and your mind tries to correlate it to a real object – it tries to place it into context – a context that you can see yourself in.

As another example, Ener is working on a space station to explore various topics taught as cycles – such as the water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles. As soon as you enter a closed system like a space station, your mind starts to wonder “what if” and you can more easily understand how these cycles are indeed “closed”. Then, in moving from the space station to the desalination plant, you can better understand the water cycle and our relation to it – the context of us, as humans, in that cycle.

Contextual learning: it’s one of the many things that makes OpenSim fun for educators, the ability to create a context, and makes for effective teaching and fun learning for students by placing them in that context.

reposted from iliveisl

The hospitality industry is responsible for getting myself and Ener Hax into virtual worlds. In the media frenzied coverage of Second Life in 2006, two hospitality giants received a fair share of coverage and worked that to their advantage.

Starwood had the Virtual aloft built as an architectural feedback project and International Hotel Group (IHG) had Crowne Plaza branded meeting rooms. Some of my video work featured those Crowne Plaza meetings rooms which were bookable via an online engine, just like much of their function space is.

Both of those are now gone. The aloft had an exit plan which included donating their island to a worthy endeavor – Global Kids. Crowne Plaza stayed longer but quietly closed at some point last year.

Second Life was an exciting new technology with so much media coverage that it was hard to ignore. Couple that with the promise of virtual meetings sweeping the globe and it was natural for the hopsitality industry to explore it. Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, touted an end to face-to-face meetings with IBM case studies (IBM poured 12 million into virtual worlds in 2006-07).

Fortunately for the hospitality sector, there will always be a need for “real” meetings and, at best, virtual worlds could supplement those and be used as an upsell item. Certainly some small meetings could be, and are, done with virtual worlds, but they should not be viewed as a threat.

Meeting Planners International has explored virtual worlds and there is an opportunity for properties to be the source for virtual meeting space no differently than real function space. Virtual events have similar needs as real events and do generate real revenue (Dan Parks’ Virtualis, complete with MPI certified professionals, attests to this).

Up until last year, Second Life was about the only viable choice for this and had many issues that led to users, such as IHG, ending their virtual presence. Some of these factors include cost ($295+ per month), being part of a larger “world” and the potential lack of privacy, not truly owning your virtual assets, and being subject to a third party’s terms of service. Another factor may also the stigma that has been associated with Second Life being viewed as a game or world full of sex-craved avatars.

In the last year a viable alternative has quietly been growing. Its adoption is primarily by educators and business users who recognized the power of Second Life but did not want any of its limits. OpenSim is an open source virtual world server side application that uses the Second Life viewer (or third party Second Life viewers). While the platform is not Second Life, it does look, and act, like Second Life due to the viewer (the client side).

Freedom from high cost results from OpenSim being an open source software which can be installed on your own servers (in fact it can even be installed on a USB drive, making for some interesting possibilities for meeting planners to show room setups to clients). Being able to host this application yourself means it can be fully under your control and security.

OpenSim may be poised to be reevaluated by the hospitality industry and has matured to the point of opening achievable opportunities in this sector. From offering virtual space as an upsell for a real event to being used in the visualization of function room setups, virtual worlds seem to now be here to stay and be adopted steadily according to Gartner.

A hotel in OpenSim

reposted on iliveisl

What is Enclave Harbour and why being counted in OpenSim stats don’t matter?

Counting the regions that come and go in OpenSim is a bit like counting sites using Flash was ten years ago. Flash was new and allowed for new things to be accomplished in the World Wide Web. Today, Flash has enjoyed a bit of news with Steve Jobs waging his war against useless content on the web. Steve Jobs can do anything he likes but I take offense to him making the decision on what is useful and of lasting value on the web.

Apart from that, Flash has enjoyed ubiquitous reach and is a part of a great many things, including being a large and significant part of eLearning. Ten years ago there was a lot of bad Flash and so many “Skip Intro” buttons that it’s a wonder it did become mainstream. Today Flash serves many purposes and for the most part, people don’t realize that they are using it.

OpenSim may become like that one day, a vehicle to deliver an experience, eLearning, entertainment, or any of a number of things that have shaped the Internet into such an important part of modern day life.

No one counts the number of sites using Flash because Flash is so well integrated.

No one needs to count Enclave Harbour because it is a vehicle to teach with. Enclave Harbour does not rent land to others and is just a medium like a photograph in a school text book is. If we do our job well (and Ener is an ace at building these activities out) then the OpenSim part of Enclave Harbour will simply be just the instrument and not the focus.

Our grid runs so incredibly well that no one will think about lag and thus can focus on the activities, which is its entire purpose. When you view this or that on the web, you don’t wonder what version of Apache that site is running. When you watch Lord of the Rings, you don’t wonder what brand of microphones they used or how many they used. If Enclave Harbour can achieve its goal to be part of reaching out and teaching kids science, then we will have achieved a good thing.

I would like to see OpenSim reach the level that Flash has been at for years, to be a vehicle to deliver content. With great hosts like James at SimHost and the passion of the core OpenSim developers, this goal is become a reality.

So don’t count us as simply a set of OpenSim regions, that has little value except to show others that OpenSim is hitting the proverbial nail on the head as a great platform for delivering immersive content.

Now to get back to writing and I hope I do justice to all the wonderful work our Ener is doing!

Ener's OpenSim work

Publication use of OpenSim work

reposted on iliveisl