If It Qwaqs Like a Duck…

… It must be another virtual world!

Thanks to a SLED announcement by Lori Bell of Alliance Library System, I had the opportunity to attend a Qwaq demo yesterday hosted by John at Learning Times. Very interesting, despite some unforeseen technical issues (gotta love technology!)

Built on the Croquet platform, the Qwaq environment offers some interesting collaborative features not currently supported in Second Life. For example, users can simultaneously collaborate on Word or other applications, view multiple live web pages (no dividing land into multiple parcels to support multiple media streams), and even stream a live video camera from their little Qwaq lego-like head. Yep - a talking head!

Due to the tech issues du jour, I wasn’t able to fully experience all the nifty Qwaq features. It plays nicely with Google SketchUp and seems to support multiple avatars quite well.

I’m excited! Does Qwaq replace Second Life? Of course not. But opportunities to experience and compare the differing strengths and capabilities of different platforms helps me think more carefully about instructional design decisions - including on which platform to develop specific projects. A good thing. I’ll be looking for more opportunities to experiment in Qwaq.

Here’s a YouTube featuring a Qwaq demo.