Microsoft is currently installed on Reaction Grid, a service provider that uses Open Sim as a server platform.

Furthermore, from October 31, Microsoft is abandoning its Sims on Second Life. On that very day they are celebrating an open welcome event on Reaction Grid.

On the one hand we see that Microsoft regards Open Sim as a mature enough platform. Arguably more reliable than Second Life. In fact one of the reasons why they have decided to migrate is because during an event in April 2008 that a mistake occurred and was restarted islands that teleportation system broke down.

We must also take into account that “OpenSim itself is a C # application (a part of Microsoft .Net Frame). As a result, Microsoft is very interested in providing the open platform with its own Windows Server 2008. Last week Microsoft released a case study in touting the success of its virtual servers running OpenSim.

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From 3 to February 5, the LERANTEC-2009 fair took place in Karlsruhe (Germany).  LERANTEC is an international venue for experts in  e-learning and knowledge management. Among more than 200 vendors who gathered there, we (Eduardo Valencia and Javier Selva, joined Volker Gässler of VCOMM.

At the booth for the presentation of the DOT CLASSROOM. 

LERANTEC-2009 is a major appointment for the experts in e-learning and knowledge management, as well as the most important of this kind in Germany. Learntec is the right place for the presentation of the latest products, applications and services in this sector, accompanied by conferences and other special events and forums. 

DOT did not want to miss the meeting to present DOT Classroom and accompanied VCOMM at the F6.1 booth of the fair. 

The benefits of DOT CLASSROOM

DOT Classroom  focuses on several key factors: virtual reality, feeling of immersion, cooperation and cost saving.

DOT classroom is a virtual environment that allows companies to facilitate communication between individuals and groups located in different places. Avatars and environments are similar to the real ones, which allows to hold training sessions in an immersive way, while helping them overcome the obstacle distance. 

The effect of virtual reality is that the user receives the impression of actually being emotionally close to others in the same environment. Furthermore, the virtual learning becomes more relaxed and the participants end up feeling a lot less tired than when using a web conference or videoconference. 

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Technorati claim code: UEDV838NH3WP

OpenSim is an open platform for creating virtual worlds. When compared to Second Life Open Sim has some clear advantages for businesses.

Before coming down to these advantages, it is important to know that, apart from Second Life, there are a few dozen virtual worlds. In a YouTube video (2008 METAV TOUR - THE SOCIAL VIRTUAL WORLD’SA STAGE) Gari Hayes makes a nice animated catalog of some of them. As the video shows, most of them are geared to gaming or socialization.

The video, however, does not mention two open source platforms that arguably will be the most influential platforms por training and virtual Meetings: Wonderland and OpenSim.

Wonderland is an open source project promoted by Sun that it will become, with all certainty, a reference for project management in a virtual space.

Open Sim is like Second Life

OpenSim is an open source simulator (BSD license) that uses the same standard of communication that Second Life. You can use the browser to OpenSim from Second Life (the client software that is downloaded from secondlife.com). The code was liberated by Linden Labs

IBM is supporting  the community that develops OpenSim. An interesting article in Ciberpaís described the force with which IBM is supporting OpenSim.

Both Second Life and Open Sim are so close from each other that IBM and Linden Labs have teleported avatars from Second Life to an OpenSim server:

OpenSim: open source

It is a project with a dynamic community of developers and highly supported by IBM.

-Open source allows us to develop new features that are tailored to the needs of each organization

OpenSim: our own server

-Open Sim is installed on our own server or servers running in cluster mode (Linux or Windows), which allows us to scale the capacity to our needs. We could have hundreds of simultaneous avatars in a virtual single event.

–Avoid the problems of confidentiality associated with operating on a server controlled by Linden Labs

-The reliability of our service depends on us. Stop relying on the Linden Labs “rolling restarts”, “disruptions” and the like.

OpenSim: Featured Projects

-Various projects led by IBM

-Intel is working on OpenSim to develop “ScienceSim”.

In DOT we have spent several months working on the platform. We’ll talk about our projects soon.

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