Wonderland 0.4 - Demo video

Posted onAugust 22, 2008 
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What to notice
It’s helpful to understand that Wonderland has been envisioned as a platform for working/collaboration across distance. It provides a more immersive experience than you could achieve with current available technologies such as video and phone conferencing, web-conferencing and chats.

Two things to consider in a virtual environment are its capacity to facilitate users achieving specific tasks alone and together and its effectiveness at compensating for the missing sensory and contextual information we take for granted when we’re face to face.

The first point is not difficult to address. We call it task analysis, which means you break down a task into small components (sub-tasks) in order to understand how to design learning it. It gets tricky when you must also consider sensory and contextual information needed. We easily recognize the barriers to learning created by a classroom with fixed seating, inadequate lighting or instructional equipment, the same holds true in a virtual environment. Most of use use classrooms, we don’t build them. And we may walk into a technologically sophisticated room like our Learning Research Studio and have to learn how to use it technically and pedagogically.

So lots of things to think about.

Watch this video and you’ll see how Wonderland developers are designing for accomplishing specific tasks as well as compensating for missing sensory and contextual information. For example, when an avatar is speaking his body gestures and his name title (above his head) pulsates. This facilitates verbal communication and compensates for some of the visual information we have when we talk to people face to face. What else?

Suzanne

It’s Wonderland & the pICTsl Farm for Faculty Development

Posted onAugust 10, 2008 
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When one thing leads to another, you have to go with it. Human resource challenges and our general consensus that AW is rather last year’s VW model, and Wonderland is potentially tomorrow’s model, we’ve made some decisions.

I’ll continue participating in the Wonderland/Immersive Education development community as a user and potential content builder. Cathy (Mari) will likely start snooping around there too.

Jon Rizzo (ITS), who’s becoming conversant with SL building and likes to play, has got a parcel on the Farm to play on in his free time (if the surf isn’t up :)).

We’re brainstorming on the design and content of a faculty development “outpost” at the pICTsl Farm. (We may call it something else).

In keeping with the initiatives goals, on top of the trends, and aware of our institutional readiness to accommodate vw technologies, we’re going to continue to provide faculty development in this domain and wait and see otherwise.

The faculty development outpost, or (maybe we’ll call it a barn) will be the only one of its kind in SL. Our emphasis is on using SL to introduce faculty to being and working in an avatar-based, 3D environment.

This parallels other work we’re doing with the Library, ITS and CTL, introducing faculty to social software. The main difference is that while web 2.0 seems to have reached its tipping point, web 3.0 is still “out there” for most folks.

I don’t see an avatarized version of psych 101 in the near future.

~~Suzanne

Activeworlds or Wonderland? Hmmm?

Posted onJuly 30, 2008 
Filed under Conversations, Reflections, Trends and tagged | 1 Comment

As we’re wading in the Activeworlds waters, deciding how we’re going to get in, I’m kind of wondering whether we should also (or instead) get into Wonderland a bit more. I’m connected to their and the Media Grid’s conversations, but we’re also looking at this with new eyes, with building some capacity to support a world in the future.

It’s really and apples and oranges thing, once I actually think it through. But the decision to allocate resources to one or the other is based (obviously) on its ROI.  There’s no obvious choice, as there was last year with SL.

Decisions, decisions

Where has all the knowledge gone? Activeworlds circa 1999

Posted onJuly 25, 2008 
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I began getting a sense of the bigger picture, let’s say the beyond Second Life view, of virtual worlds doing my dissertation lit review. Now that we’re actively looking into AW, I’ve come across a mountain of information. Projects, research, people, consortiums, conferences, all involved in this stuff in the late 90s, early  2000s.

I started on this page of educational resources for AW. Drilling through to this Vlearn 3D, and transcripts from roundtables at AWEDU, to a paper entitled, “3D Virtual Worlds and Learning: An Analysis of the Impact of Design Affordances and Limitations in Active Worlds, blaxxun interactive, and OnLive! Traveler; and A Study of the Implementation of Active Worlds for Formal and Informal Education.

Moral of the Post: Where has all the knowledge gone?

Activeworlds here we come

Posted onJuly 23, 2008 
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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 
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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 
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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.

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