Activeworlds or Wonderland? Hmmm?

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

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

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

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

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

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.