Activeworlds here we come
Posted onJuly 23, 2008
Filed under Announcement, Conversations, News, Research, Trends | Leave a Comment
Expanding our exploration of the Metaverse, we’ve got a few green lights and need a few more, before we’re developing a presence in Activeworlds. There are over 110 institutions from around the world in their education universe. The Educational Universe is an entire Active Worlds Universe dedicated to exploring the educational applications of the Active Worlds Technology.
River City, an NSF funded project with Harvard and Arizona State, uses AW, so I’m very excited to get in there and see what’s cooking. Stay tuned.
First person/Mouse View and designing space
Posted onJuly 16, 2008
Filed under Reflections, design | Leave a Comment
In virtual environments you have a first person view. It’s when your viewpoint is as it is in real life, through your (avatar’s) eyes. It provides a more visually immersive experience than when you’re view is third person, or over your avatar’s shoulder.
In Second Life, it’s called mouseview and it’s a rather visually awkward experience. (I should take a mini survey of SLers, but my guess is that the majority use 3rd person view most of the time.) Your field of vision is better. The reason SL mouseview is awkward is because your field of vision is at about 25%; you have no peripheral vision to speak of.
In Project Wonderland, you can adjust your field of vision and add peripheral vision to your 1st person view. What a noticeable difference that makes, all of a sudden being in the 1st person, feels like it does in the physical world.
But as I was walking around with my improved 1st person view, I still had trouble navigating the space, although it’s incredible unbuilt. I realized the absence of the typical markers we rely in actual space to navigate our way around, everything from walkways, to doors, to signposts, to familiar structures. I’ve notices this in SL on and off, the degree to which a space has been designed for way finding, for easy navigation and understanding what the space is for. Just some of the issues that come up when we begin designing learning in such a space.
One after the other - Wonderland and Active Worlds
Posted onJuly 15, 2008
Filed under Harbingers, Helpful, Reviews, Trends | Leave a Comment
I spent a couple of hours poking around a few nodes in Wonderland , Immersive Education Initiative on the Media Grid, and then in Activeworlds and Activeworlds educational universe.
Wonderland is self-described as primitive in terms of development, but given that it was only launched in June it’s quite impressive and full of potential. What’s most compelling about the grid is that it’s technological infrastructure is distributed, a computational grid. The idea that each entity or organization has a node on an open grid if fundamentally different than the computing framework of SL or AW, both of which are proprietary. It would seem that the media grid has more Metaverse potential than either SL or AW for this reason.
AW’s browser based interface is really quite impressive. I didn’t do much in there otherwise except fiddle with my avatar, which was also incredibly simple in their new 4.2 release. The user interface is designed quite differently than in SL and thus more useful for learning. For example it’s brower-based so that you get web pages and the AW in interface. AW has been around for since 1996 when it was called AlphaWorld, so they’ve been working on their product for a while and it shows.
I heard again at another conference that the the developments in technology, software and hardware (graphic cards) make it difficult to predict what’s a good investment. It seems that any investment is best made for the short term, at least to start.
Google’s Lively
Posted onJuly 11, 2008
Filed under Announcement, Harbingers, Helpful, News, Reviews, Trends | Leave a Comment
I downloaded Lively, Google’s avatar-based virtual on my pc last night and poked around a bit. I’ve been reading early reviews in the blogosphere too. Digado said this about his second dip into Lively. One tone is that it’s nothing special, and indeed compared to Second Life, it does lack the creative functionality, technical and aesthetic capacity that make SL so compelling. As it’s been pointed out, it’s a virtual experience not a virtual world, an avatar driven chat room similar to IMVU which has about 2o million users. Not comparing it to SL seems a smart way to go. It has low overhead and low investment. It might actually be a better introduction to avatar-based learning than SL for this reason.
Learning in Virtuality Archived Session
Posted onJune 25, 2008
Filed under Announcement, Articles, Events, Trends and tagged metaverse, Second Life, virtuality | Leave a Comment
Access the archived Horizon Wimba session go to Blackboard>Course Design Institute>Communications>Live Classrooms>Learning in Virtuality Archive.
[slideshare id=485368&doc=virtua2-1214409150287338-9&w=425]
Avatar Design for non-designers
Posted onJune 23, 2008
Filed under Trends and tagged avatars, Second Life | 1 Comment
When I first looked seriously at Second Life, it was self-evident that the avatar was the essence of the entire experience. This may be more the case in world-building environments than in gaming environments. It’s not only that learning is an embodied and social endeavor, turned topsy-turvy now that we can control avatars in a shared space, sitting thousands of miles apart from one another. It’s that selfhood and identity in these spaces becomes wildly complex.
In Meez and Spore Creator Creator we can create avatars. We can create selves, characters, personas; it’s all completely open. One of the initial critiques of QWAQ has been the lack of avatar customization.
There’s also been some research looking into avatar design from a functional perspective. What does an avatar need to be able to do to be an “effective avatar” in a given virtual situation?
I’m personally enamored with the aesthetic of Second Life avatars, it makes being there visually rich. I redesign my avatars more than anything else in SL. They are my playground. And in one sense, this might be a good entry into 3D design for non-designers.
What’s a virtual world & how should we pay attention to them?
Posted onJune 11, 2008
Filed under Helpful, Reflections, Trends | Leave a Comment
Thanks Cathy! Great summary. I was going to comment, but since I can post, 
I thought I’d do that and extend the discussion.
I think we need to refine the term “virtual world” for our audience and context and extend the conversation to include cultural, organizational and pedagogical perspectives.
Improving student learning is our main goal and it’s easy as technologists, to take a somewhat instrumentalist approach to achieving that.
Here are my In-a-nutshell attempts at refining the notion of virtual worlds for our audience and context.
Cultural: Children are growing up playing in virtual playgrounds like Habbo, Neopets, Club Penguin,etc. Read more from BBC Tens of millions of adults spend an estimated 10-20 (See footnotes) average hours per week in MMOGs and commercially available virtual worlds. The majority are white and middle class. These are not neither culturally nor socially neutral locations of play. They have emerging cultures of their own. In adult environments, there are legacy cultural mores and practices from MUDs, chatrooms, instant messaging and online communities.
Organizational: At the organizational level, these should be considered first as educational technologies. As a public institution we have students, faculty and staff from diverse cultural, SESs and technological backgrounds. We make decisions about human and technological resources to support learning.
Pedagogical: Tools are pedagogical means not ends. At the same time, there is currently more evidence of learning through play, than there is of learning through pedagogy in these environments. I DO believe people learn in them. The first questions are what, how and why. The second are: are faculty ready to change what they do, how and why.
1 Ortiz dxe Gortari, A. (2007, September). Second life survey: User profile for psychological engagement & gambling. Paper presented at The Virtual 2007 Conference: Interaction, Stockholm, Sweden.
2 Yee, N. (2006b, June). The demographics, motivations, and derived experiences of users of massively multi-user online graphical environments.
Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 15(3) 309-329.
