Mont St Michel

Ages since I've been to the real one and who knows if and when I may return. In the meantime there is a brilliant evocation of Mont St Michel in SL. It's a commercial sim but the shops intrude no more than in the real-life equivalent. Not in the LL Showcase but well worth a visit. (remember these images click through to larger versions).

Google Wave(s); /me waves back

Lots of "next great thing" announcements around at the moment. Hard on the heels of WolframAlpha and Microsoft Bing, we now have Google Wave, heralded as email reincarnated as fluid conversation (or a drag-and-drop real-time wiki with granular permissions if you want a more jaundiced view). With the caveat that I haven't watched all of the video, some thoughts strike me (and read Tim O'Reilly's blog and comments thereto for further insights and comparisons to existing products and services).

Firstly, the real-time element is neat and something I've pushed with HTML-on-a-prim apps like Etherpad and latterly Twiddla. However, my guess is that the majority of teachers beyond the age of 35 or 40 have little experience of IM-style conversations and being asked to use such an environment will give them a significant culture shock. Some will ultimately like the more level playing field it engenders, others not. The development of course documentation with real-time contributions from students will, however, shift the emphasis from the transmission of knowledge towards its negotiation (which has to be good). As with small group chat in SL, however, it will be crucial to build in opportunities for reflection or the fastest thinker/typist will rule and some seriously bad decisions made.

What the potential for real-time interaction does, of course, is to put a premium on attention (though, to be fair, Wave also works in deferred email-style mode). How are you going to structure your working day around this type of activity? How many Wave sessions can you run in parallel? How do you factor in the phone and the knock at the door? Is contribution to such documents going to be evaluated? How many misrouting mistakes are you going to make when swapping between documents (akin to typing in the wrong window in SL IM)?

I think the hypermediated nature of SL provides good preparation for working in this type of environment as well as flagging its issues and limitations. From a teaching perspective it may provide staff with a neutral third space for interaction with students akin to SL, i.e. not VLE, not Facebook, not Twitter (though the latter is not so much student-exclusive either and the closest to Wave in some ways). For SL it poses a challenge. SL does real-time particularly well, provides some support for voice/telecomms but its handling and integration of text and web is less than stellar (can you scroll a web page or search notecard text across your inventory?).

I commented in another forum on the ability to play and review SL scene-based simulations as you would a movie, something that Clark Aldrich initially missed in SL but now sees becoming feasible with the arrival of PIVOTE and latterly Citrus Virtual and Theatron products. Such a facility is especially relevant to courses with a vocational component and shared presence adds extra value again. However, with Google's O3D project being resolutely web browser-based (and presumably at some stage Wave-compliant), there is a potential challenge for SL in terms of both its education and business markets. Is it going to embrace, compete or cohabit with Wave and its ilk?

da Vinci Gardens

I've been working my way through some of the Linden Lab showcase sites, hopefully absorbing a few ideas along the way. One sim I like a lot is the da Vinci Gardens on Kalepa. The general theme, as the name suggests, is the imagination and creativity of Leonardo da Vinci. Accordingly, there is much fine period Italianate architecture to accompany "working" models of some of da Vinci's drawings. I'm no expert on such matters so I can't attest to the authenticity of the build but that is rather beside the point for a sim that offers so much to the inquisitive mind.


The builder has extended the core themes in the direction of space travel and nanotechnology as shown in the images here. You can take a rocket to a space station on Mars and then be miniaturised and injected in a nanoship into the bloodstream to fight bacteria. The execution is not 100% perfect but nevertheless extraordinary in terms of what can reasonably be accommodated in a single sim. Well worth a visit.

Rocking the Metaverse, Parts 1 & 2

This is simply to record that, as per the images, I made it to the first two parts of Rocking the Metaverse in which our band of gallant musicians sally forth from SL and essay the perils and potential of other virtual worlds. Fortunately, these guys trust one another and their audience and know it's their business to push envelopes to breaking point.

Part 1 was based at Orange Island in SL which is fast becoming a second home for me. I really only caught a small part of Slim Warrior's set but clearly she likes to live dangerously in performance and this sits well with the bleeding edge nature of virtual worlds. Good fun!

Part 2 was on ReactionGrid and, as such, only the second OpenSim grid I've encountered, the other being ScienceSim. Where Orange Island had been in many ways rather smooth and predictable but nonetheless enjoyable, ReactionGrid was much more a leap into the unknown and hence beset with a fair few problems during Dizzy Banjo's opening set. Everyone being a seasoned metaverse traveller, however, the bumps were taken more or less in their stride. Eventually a more stable venue was located at the Foo Bar and Slimmie and subsequently DJ Doubledown Tandino did their stuff in fine style. The sim owner, Chris Hart, did a great job of making everyone feel welcome.

I've been back in ReactionGrid a couple of times since and have been impressed by the quality of design and architecture there for such a new world. Yes, it has limitations (15 avatars is a decent crowd for a gig like RtM) but there are dividends for old-timers like myself in the adoption of SL conventions.

One thing that did grate was that I made some new friends on ReactionGrid but I can't take them with me to other places in the metaverse. However, I hope to meet up with a few of them again on the next stage of the tour which reaches Metaplace this Tuesday.

Holding forth: text to speech and back again

I am not a great user of voice in SL. I will listen when necessary but rarely speak unless required. For me, voice breaks not only immersion but all too often technically as well. That said, many must have a better experience and Linden Lab clearly anticipates building on this according to their voice roadmap. From an educational perspective the availability in short order of a builtin recorder will at least save folk from having to struggle with third-party software.

Signally absent at present is any crossover between text and voice which is unfortunate for those who are, for example, visually impaired. There are some solutions though I am only just starting to investigate them in the context of StoryMachine.

Adding a basic level of text-to-speech was relatively straightforward. While there is a commercial application called EVA that does this, the virtual guidedog project has a simple freebie app that works in much the same way, viz by reading the chat log (so you must have chat logging enabled). It was a simple matter to get StoryMachine to chat the name of the node being rezzed and the linking of one node to another. While the voice quality is not great and the functionality in StoryMachine limited, it is a start. The guidedog project incidentally has much broader ambitions in terms of being able to sense the SL environment on behalf of the avatar (SL wiki page; Massively article; SLHealthy overview).

This minimalist solution presently lacks the ability to convert in the opposite direction, viz speech to text. EVA apparently also supports this feature though I have yet to try it. There are two gamer applications, Keystroke and Voice Buddy, that may also support SL in this context (there is a template file for Keystroke on the product forum). Sadly, none of these technologies is freely available so none is an instant solution and making comparisons costs money. Moreover, these solutions tend to be Microsoft-specific (as is much Python-based code). The situation is not helped by the voice component of SL currently being largely separate from the client (as explained for lipsync).

An alternative solution is to use a screenreader like JAWS (expensive) to speak a text-based version of the SL environment. This is the approach being taken by the libsecondlife-based textsl.org. Liberated Learning also has an ongoing project based on IBM's ViaScribe speech-to-text engine though the actual engine seems to have departed the IBM download site.

Finally, I should mention from the perspective of the hearing impaired that there is a sim in SL devoted to this and other disability topics, viz Cape Able, which is run under the auspices of Virtual Ability Inc, recent winners of the Linden Prize for their excellent orientation. There is also a page of accessibility topics on the SL wiki.

Problem Solvr

Nik Peachey blogs about the educational potential of a new-ish (February 2009) Web 2.0 product, Solvr. This allows you to make a problem statement, add ideas that might resolve the problem and then identify further problems that might arise (the net effect is tree-like) as well as general comments. Colour is used to code the branches: they are red until all the problems are solved when they turn green. Ultimately a solution can be put to a vote.

I've seen more complex versions of this type of software (the OU has one) but this is simple and fast to set-up. If I have a problem, it is that deleting a node seems to delete everything under it (logical perhaps but there is no warning or undo).

Interestingly Solvr seems to run on web prims (HTML-on-a-prim) in SL in as much as live updating occurs (as with Etherpad and Skrbl). If you set the touch action of the prim to "Open media", the page will open in the internal client browser (assuming that is your default; shown on right in somewhat grotty image which can at least be enlarged by clicking on it) and you can access the full functionality so far as I could tell. I haven't had a chance to try this collaboratively yet but it looks promising and I hope the authors don't break the SL functionality (last time I tried you couldn't run Etherpad in the client browser). Nik covers educational uses.

Worth noting that Solvr uses the Etherpad approach of no registration. It is therefore very fast to setup but use is anonymous unless people decide to add their initials etc. Confidentiality is based on a randomised URL so good-ish but not at all guaranteed.

Learning while having fun? I did

The common experience this time of year is fatigue so a change is in order. Art Box is a new place to visit in SL, well new to me anyway via the excellent NPIRL blog (slurl). The concept is similar to the Primtings Museum: 3D versions of familiar works of art. This place is a holodeck, however, which means you can swap paintings at will (though this can be a tad annoying when it isn't you doing the swapping so go when it's quiet).

Poseballs are provided so you can merge your avatar into the image à la Photoshop. Moreover, an adjacent crate provides props such as the paint pot above and the shirt and pitchfork shown in the image below. The Jackson Pollock exhibit (above with the proprietors watching on) is a little different in so far as the avatar creates the image and it is the process of painting that is mimicked.

It is probably better to go with a friend to facilitate general badinage and mayhem though there are a mix of exhibits for pairs (as per American Gothic above) and singletons. Thanks to Ledoof and Carolrb for being good sports.

What earthly relevance does this have to education? Firstly, it is fun if you want it to be and fun is no bad thing. You do get to interact with and maybe even reflect on the context of some wonderful artwork; mostly these are old favourites with a North American emphasis but there are a few surprises among the 8-9 available (with more on the way apparently). If there are multiple avatars present, some communication, negotiation and cooperation is involved. You get to practise your camera control and, I guess, you could go for unusual perspectives or behind-the-scenes shots. You can edit the pictures and maybe use Murku to add captions. Best of all, you can blog what you did and reflect on the experience and its value.

The recreated Koch lab and "The Cure" scene on the TB build are the nearest I get to this but they don't have the same iconic value as these paintings and there is also the question of learning objectives. There probably are iconic images in biology: Watson & Crick examining their molecular model of DNA is one for me though I'm not sure students would feel the same way.

The other day I wandered round a set of student projects on Eduisland (temporary slurl) where they had rezzed some molecules (ATP, etc) and put a notecard in a prim adjacent to them. I commented on SLED that one way of building on this was to merge the molecules into a metabolic pathway using a holodeck as I blogged previously.

One of the student builds was embedded in a transparent blue prim and I wondered whether that was some reference to the context, i.e. a molecule of marine origin in a fishtank. Students might dream up other contextual references as appropriate and, indeed, this is one of the thoughts I had for the molecule kiosk.

An alternative and simpler approach might be to add poseballs that integrated avatars into the molecule build. At one level this might involve amusingly posed avatars pointing at certain features. They might have information on a T-shirt or a number on a hand attachment that acted as a key. At a more experiential level, the avatar might somehow become part of the build. In both cases the idea is that a snapshot be taken and blogged.

Would the students find this fun or insulting? It feels like something that might fit as a small group activity as part of a warm-up exercise. However, Intellagirl Tully warns of making contracts with students that cannot be fulfilled ("You're going to really enjoy this -- it's hilarious"). On the other hand, if you list the skills involved, it makes some sense.

As to the Pollock approach at Art Box, this seems to tease the viewer with the prospect that sense might emerge from the chaos as it used to from Rolf Harris paintings. It might be cool, maybe even fun, if in some fashion it did.

117 prims

I've been playing on my 512, rezzing a little kiosk for molecules. Having only 117 prims available means that I'm basically looking at ways to economise on prims. Including the flu drug Tamiflu/oseltamivir and some 1-prim chairs easily reaches the parcel limit.

I haven't given great thought yet to what I'm going to do: the Wikipedia page shown is effectively a placeholder. I tried WolframAlpha as an alternative but it is slow here at present and the functionality appears limited for the kind of thing I want to do. Having said that, I look forward to playing with the API -- it has the potential to be very useful inworld.

The picture also shows that the DJ's build has been griefed by megaprims and that the adjacent sim has failed to rez. Just for the evening, I have a sea view at no extra cost. Now where did I put those palm trees...

Quality animals going cheep!

Well, not chickens so much as elephants and camels. These are by Bethi Cattaneo (her shop is in her picks) and they do cost money (L$650 for the elephant) but they are good quality sculpties and, more importantly, copyable. Typically you want a herd of elephants, not the odd one, and many shops will make you buy individually. You can also modify them, e.g. resize or add Puppeteer animations so the cow bends its neck to get to the grass. Astonishingly, they are also trans so you can give them to students. And yes, she does a pig too.

Meanwhile, back on the sim, I am still grappling with the complexities of the land market. I came inworld in 2007 just in time to see various inworld banks collapse alongside my first encounter with the name of Ponzi. Given the credit crunch, it's a pity more politicians don't come inworld to experience the cauldron of financial creativity that is our sim. On the other hand, given more recent headlines, maybe they have.

I had no idea previously that there was a market in tier (which I roughly equate with paying LL so they stick quarters in the meter and feed the grid monkeys). Of course, for the last two years I've sat on the free tier my premium account gave me while I rented. I was aware that people "play" SL to "make tier", i.e. earn enough from selling so they can pay their tier. Three parcels along from mine, beyond the DJ, was what has latterly been the cheapest 512 on the sim, even cheaper than the one I bought. However, I resisted the urge to trade down as it's right next to the somewhat desolate and spooky theme park. What struck me, however, was that the canny parcel owner used the land to advertise the fact they (the owner manifests as a company) also rent your surplus tier to other SLers. Sadly, I can't remember the precise details as the parcel was sold before I had time to blog it. It is now off the market.

On a more strategic note, I mentioned before that there was a diagonal of protected land across the sim that looks as though it might have (had) the makings of a road. Of course, I never realized (until now) that there are no equivalent paths around my parcel. If I build to the edge, I will directly abutt my neighbours and vice versa. I'm still considering the consequences for the holodeck layouts which, I guess, will have to be smaller and/or on a pedestal. I guess that's why the parcel was, erm, cheap.

In passing Gavin Dudeney blogs on some of the negative reaction to SL among educators and I've responded a few times in the comments. It's a phenomenon I have personal experience of from teachers at other UK universities. I'm afraid I think less of them as a consequence, not because of their views about SL but because they have closed minds.

My other avatar is a paramecium

While some avatars agonise over their fashions, I decided to abandon clothes and go unicellular. Someone mentioned on the SLED list that Yoa Ogee (of whom I blogged previously) has a Paramecium avatar. Well, L$190 later (for charity, no less), here it is. It has a HUD that lets you dance it about in various ways and, more usefully, it expands and contracts when touched so the short-sighted can actually see it without having to zoom. The picture above shows the avatar alongside the giant cell on Genome.

The actual, rather spindly avatar is scrunched up and hidden inside a transparent sphere above the cell though it can become visible when teleporting or sitting (oops, did that need a spoiler alert?). The visible cell is presumably an attachment. Dispensing with limbs means no more of those awkward arm-in-air animations while building or sit animations where your feet disappear through the floor. The smaller of the two cells might also be handy in confined spaces such as my 512 skybox. There is, however, a risk of the small cell being confused with poseballs. All of which is sufficiently weird, especially to some students, that I will probably use it for fun rather than full-time.

Meanwhile, back on the sim with my new 512 parcel, the DJ on one side has extended her HQ to 7 slightly precarious storeys and put the parcel up for sale at roughly twice the price she paid. The majority landowner bought the parcel on the other side, hiked the price further and then mysteriously took it off the market. I note that there are still some parcels going pretty cheap and wonder what, if anything, will happen to them. Over the adjacent sim boundary, rotating For Sale signs are augmented by glowing prims but there is also a neat row of parcels similar to mine with a more tasteful tree motif.

There are many sky platforms on the sim, most it would seem used for building, as per mine. At ground level, the theme park paeears to have a small club attached and the three avatars in the nearby arcade are the next best thing to traffic bots as they logon to almost the same spot each day and are then static. Next to the club (not the happiest juxtaposition) is an abandoned academic build from an Israeli college communication studies department that looks as though it never saw use. Maybe they moved on and kept this for fallback purposes or perhaps it is simply land that will one day be recycled.

Clearly the sim is active in terms of land dealing but otherwise relatively low use though you do see active residents and passers-by from time-to-time. There is a cluster of shops albeit nothing so grand as a mall, some protected land, no roads and lots of ban lines. Many of the commercial builds date back to the 2007 land rush. One abandoned 160 has been acquired by the Arbor Group who landscape small orphan spaces and then gift them to adjacent owners. No takers here so far and the whole setup increases my respect for what Fleep Tuque and her colleagues have achieved at Chilbo.

All in all, though, still a good site for me as community is not solely sim-specific in SL and the next location no more than a teleport away. Doing something unusual in this context, even if it is only a rotating display of small molecules, will have a greater resonance. What the residents will think remains to be seen but I believe this qualifies as outreach...

Small-minded

I've amazed myself slightly by finally buying a small plot of SL land, viz 512 sqm. I got it via the inworld Search and it cost L$2000 which is approximately $8 or £5. Normally land also accrues a rental charge called tier ($5 per month for this size parcel/plot) but as I have a personal premium subscription I get this much for free in addition to my weekly stipend. There were similar plots either side but I wasn't tempted as the idea is to see what I (or a student pair) could do with a parcel this size (an island is equivalent to 128 such parcels).

Purchase did not involve an intermediary: all I had to do was rightclick on the ground and choose Buy. Of course, you don't have to buy land in SL; many people rent from landlords and that's how I started two years ago. On the other hand, purchase means that people can get involved in land as a means of making money and, indeed, scouting round showed that there was quite a range of prices being asked for similarly sized parcels. Moreover, within hours of purchase, the major landowner on this PG mainland sim had bought the adjacent similarly priced parcel and hiked the price by L$500. This and the adjacent plot at the original L$2000 were then purchased by a Singaporean inworld DJ, again within hours, and there is now a multi-storey build there (more likely an HQ than a club). Interesting to see the psychology at work. That said, there is still a lot of land for sale on the sim, albeit somewhat more expensive.

My parcel is nice and flat and the usual 32 x 16 m, coming with just 117 prims. I've played with the media URL but resisted the impulse to terraform. Instead, I have rezzed a sky platform and am experimenting with Troy McLuhan's excellent open source holo-emitter which I anticipate modding in various ways.

Thus far, I have not met anyone to chat to; the four avatars (not bots) on the sim logged on continuously appeared to be garnering traffic. They did not move at all over the period of the day while I came and went at intervals. I do wonder whether the figures for alleged SL "stickiness" factor this in (Eloise Pasteur's thoughts). There were never more than 12 avatars and the (admittedly lightly loaded) sim ran smoothly throughout.

The sim itself is entirely unremarkable (no sea or river view, for example) and hence, I presume, the relatively low-ish price at current values. There seems to be a mix of residential (including at least one US education grad student) and commercial activity. The latter chiefly comprises a small arcade and slightly larger theme park, neither used much, if at all, during the time I was there. I had a quick look at the adjacent M sims and again found them unexceptional.

Truly, the bliss of mundane Second Life suburbia and, as I am primarily there to play (in the sense of experimenting with the holo-emitter and learning a little about mainland), all the more welcome for that.

All together now: CAMSync

Second Life can pose problems in communicating positional information to other avatars. If you want them to look at one particular textured prim among many, you need a means of communicating this without having to rely overly on telepathy. Of course, after a while you (hopefully) get quite good at using chat for the purpose. A number of cursor and pen systems are also available to support pointing at locations but these still depend on avatars looking in the right general direction in the first place.

IOL Realtime Camera Synchronizer (or CAMSync as the actual product is labelled) is an inexpensive HUD (L$190) that allows the teacher to control a student's camera so both of you are looking at the same view, initially the teacher's. The HUD (Heads-Up Display) works in two modes. In single mode you can swap control between teacher and a single student. In multi mode (which I haven't tried) you can control multiple students but swapping is disabled.

Camera movement is via the standard Alt-zoom techniques but the student must wear a second (free) HUD and press the Esc key to enable camera movement. As a consequence the chat field closes which may cause confusion and/or limit interaction, both by text and potentially with the build (IM would be an alternative in the former case). The instructions also sensibly recommend disabling camera constraints.

Distribution of the student HUD is nicely automated via a menu. The system also has a good chat interface. I didn't find the system 100% intuitive on first acquaintance (70-80% maybe) but it reponds OK to the usual trial-and-error approach. The documentation is reasonably clear although English is presumably not the author's first language.

While I don't think you would want to overdo its use, there might be occasions on which you do need to be certain that everyone is looking in the same place and this tool does a good job of that, especially for moderately experienced students (beginners might struggle with the HUD and unlinked camera concept in the first place). Doubtless there will still be limitations that mean not everyone gets the same view, e.g. hardware dependencies may mean views render differently and students will still not see media, for example, if they are not on the same parcel as the teacher. It doesn't, of course, show the client interface menus either if, say, you are teaching building. However, overall this would seem to be a useful addition to the educator's toolset and good value at the price offered.

N1

Yesterday I had an image of the H1 hemagglutinin component of the influenza virion. Just for balance, today we have N1 (as in H1N1; pdb 2hty), the neuraminidase, alongside its substrate sialic acid on the right and, in the centre, its larger structural analogue oseltamivir, aka Tamiflu. Ordinarily the neuraminidase comprises four such monomers.

The week in review

Newswise, this week has been dominated by H1N1 influenza (swine flu as-was). The image shows part of the structure for the swine flu H1 hemagglutinin 1ruy rezzed inworld. The molecule is essentially three copies of this dimer. Sadly the shadow feature of the new RC viewer doesn't seem to work for my hardware.

There were more structures on Orange Island midweek when Jean-Claude Bradley and Andy Lang gave a wonderful presentation on molecular models in Second Life (SL).

The previous day David White and Ian Truelove gave a great talk on their experiences in the Open Habitat project. The only exception I took (of course) is David's notion that SL is less well-suited to science. It's probably true that there are fewer scientists and science educators pro rata in SL and course logistics can be an issue but that is not in itself proof of this assertion. David has said this a couple of times now to my knowledge and these things can stick if not challenged.

Favourite quote of the week: "Did you build that?". "Yes". "It's really impressive". One science student to another at student presentation.