Technorati claim code: UEDV838NH3WP

Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality What solutions provide for e-learning?

On Wednesday 24 February at 18 hours I am participating in a workshop on Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality at EXPOELEARNING 2010, the IX International Congress of e-learning.

The session will focus session on Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality.

The workshop has got a sort of original format: a real-time discussion of a practical case to which companies in various sectors provide their own solution.

The meeting will be coordinated by Ruth Martinez (@aureamemotech), Director of ELEARNING3D, SL. Along with DOT there will be companies such us UTOPIA COMPUTER SOLUTIONS (java for cells) and ARPA SOLUTIONS SL (Augmented Reality).

I am very likely to talk about DOT-AULA, our  OpenSim based solution for virtual worlds.

ELEARNING3D S.L, http://www.elearning3d.es

DIENTEAZUL S.L, http://www.dienteazul.es/index.html

DOT-SECONDLIFE, http://www.dot-secondlife.es/

ARPA SOLUTIONS S.L, http://www.arpa-solutions.net

EXPOELEARNING 2010, http://www.expoelearning.com

Compártelo

Technorati claim code: UEDV838NH3WP

In a post on Rezzable, Jon Himmoff makes a critical review of his one year experience with Open Sim.

The work is complete and accurate. While he values very positively the improvements of late ( “OpenSim works, is getting better and will be the future of the 3D Web”), he  identifies 10 points that OpenSim needs to improve.

In this post I intend to summarize the 10 points and discuss briefly the post in Rezzable.

First the point on which I have nothing to comment, if not fully agree.

1. Physics is weak. The proposed solution is to replace the current engine with a more effective. There is nothing wrong.

2. Permissions. Open Sim has a long way to go. Agreed.

3. Documentation scarce. Ok

4. Admin Tools. We must have more information about the user, inventory and server memory. Perfect

5. Mesh support for mesh is needed. Ok

6. Scripting. Should be improved. But the good news is that you can program modules at the server level.

7. Movements between grids bad, but improving.

8. Concurrent users. Sim vs sim Second Life (50 approx) is superior to OpenSim (20-30). But in a single server we can hold 6 regions with less prims and get up to 400 users per server, compared with only 50 concurrent Second Life. We are working on many fronts to improve the ability of concurrent users, as does OSGrid.

Just two short comments. We work on developing virtual worlds for businesses and institutions Mostly education and training.

In our approach to OpenSim, the development of a currency like the Linden Dollar is not necessary. In fact the entire system of buying and selling that works in Second Life now creates more noise than benefits for our learning orientation.

Voice, on the other hand, is a priority for us. In fact it is one of the areas where we work harder. Having fought a long time against Asterix and FreeSwitch (open source), Teamspeak and Vivox (proprietary), our job now is to integrate Mumble (open source), which provides high quality sound, positional audio features and could arguably hacked into activating Lip Sync.

Source: Top 10 OpenSim Issues and Performance Update

Compártelo

Second Life and OpenSim virtual worlds are the best known and most used by Universities and other academic institutions in the UK, according to a comprehensive study by Virtual World Watch.
They asked what use virtual worlds and why they chose them.

Second Life was chosen for his 6 years of constant development, it is not necessary to purchase a server, because of the great community that exists and the amount of resources that are available cheaply or free.

OpenSim is attractive because, compared to Second Life, ‘land’ does not carry the same expense, there are fewer security issues, there is no dependence on a single commercial vendor, and it is easier to configure how private your environment is; content can also be ported from Second Life.

Compártelo

Customers need to predict how many concurrent users can be accommodated on a Sim. In OpenSim were used to a maximum of 50 avatars or even less, depending on the number of prims.

The aim of the OSGRID people was to test if the SIM code improvements made in recent weeks have been effective.

The test was made on 9 October 2009.

Their goal was to reach the 100 users (the magic number) and the result is impressive because they managed to accommodate 85 real avatars(not bots). And the server did not crash, it was still accepting connections when they reached 85, people simply stopped logging.

So how did they do it? The answer lies in three points:

1) They abandoned Openjpeg technology to decode the J2K textures

2) Using the experience of Intel’s John HURLIMAN to rewrite the server code. It remarkable that the arrival of people from IBM and Intel is pushing up the quality of OpenSim

3) Improved management of server memory.

The result is impressive, 85 avatars on an old server with less than 1 GB of RAM.

Source

Compártelo

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.

Compártelo