After seeing a post on New World Notes that represented how I use OpenSim but left out the most compelling reasons as to why use OpenSim, I decided to reiterate what I’ve mentioned in the past.

One of the hats I wear is corporate eLearning developer for an international company (in 150 countries with 70,000 annual eLearning users). As such, I architect many aspects of our eLearning including just completing 14 courses (about 40 hours of seat time) as HTML5 content that is viewable by 99.2% of devices connected to the web.

In creating a large amount of eLearning, I am always looking for low cost solutions that are also fast for our team to use. Back in 2006, Second Life caught my attention, but not as a social place. I spoke at several conferences, such as the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn Conference and the Texas Distance Learners Association Annual Conference, on the use of Second Life as a 3D authoring tool – much like Blender.

The output is not photorealistic and has a distinct look (I’d say low-poly before using the term cartoonish) but the plus side of lower detailed graphics is that it doesn’t need rendering time. What you see on your monitor is fully rendered. This makes creating video footage for branched scenarios rapid, virtually free, and easy (and also fun!).

Your cast of characters never age or get new hairstyles, their warddrobes are alway constant, and the sets can cost little to nothing to build and store, and can be built without needing expert 3D modelling skills.

Rapid development and basically no cost. Hard to beat that combination!

In the last two years, I have not used Second Life and have an easier and completely free way to create this content – OpenSim. Specifically, OpenSim running from a USB drive.

One significant OpenSim/Second Life issue that many corporate eLearning developers run into are firewalls in the workplace. Using OpenSim in a portable manner, from Sim-on-a-Stick, eliminates those firewall issues.

Buiding a studio set, such as the hotel room and lobby below, is much easier than working with meshes in a traditional 3D application. OpenSim and Second Life use a small number of primitives (“prims”) used as building blocks. This is what gives the “simplistic” look but what also allows for real-time rendering at frame rates that exceed the 30 frames per second needed to create smooth video.

Details on creating video can be seen in my older posts and even from conference materials I have online.

OpenSim, specifically as “Sim-on-a-Stick”, is a great tool to add to your multimedia toolkit – plus it’s easy and I love the creative outlet it provides.

full image set hosted by 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 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

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

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