The gaming news this week has been all about the Kinect (formerly Natal) controller for the Xbox 360. While some early development work was done for SL, it isn't clear that a reimplementation will be facile, nor that it would be generally useful to educators outside of an individual use, small group or front-of-class setting (... OK, that's not bad).
Meanwhile Jon Himoff of Rezzable has been comparing OpenSim (+ Imprudence -- or Kokua as it is now called) with Unity3D. Having championed the former, he now seems to be shifting towards the latter, most notably due to ease of implementation via the web and on mobile devices. The downside for me is the loss of simple prim-based building, not just for me but for my students. I can, however, appreciate that from a commercial perspective Unity has a lot going for it. Moreover, it may be that a simpler platform with pre-packaged solutions will appeal to the average teacher, as opposed to the technology maven, in a way that SL for various reasons hasn't.
However, the notion that my students will build in Blender for Unity3D (or SL for that matter) seems untenable. On the other hand, digital sculpting software such as Sculptris (presently an alpha version free download but Windows-only) appear to be a much better match for generating "organic"-type SL meshes. The user is presented with either a flat or spherical surface and generates the shape by grabbing, inflating, flattening and smoothing it -- imagine students being able to use something like this inworld via a haptic interface!
The image above shows an SL mesh for a large protein whose overall structure has only been determined at low resolution using electron microscopy. It's only a rough first attempt on my part, generated in Sculptris and ported into SL via MeshLab (Sculptris exports in .obj format) but the use of the intuitive "digital clay" environment was both engaging and informative. True, I could have used real clay but I suspect it's simpler and cleaner to keep such creations on a computer!
1 comments:
I forgot to include the possibility of using physical clay itself as an interface, either by embedding spime-style sensors or by using laser scanning.
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