So that was 2010

What happened: Viewer 2, prim media, mesh and web viewer in beta, VWBPE10, LL partial melt-down, educator price-hike/lock-in.

Sadly no longer with us: CDC, ACS, International Schools 2, Livingintheuniverse, my SL sim :p, a few highlight categories from last year.

Enough already: anti-LL snark just for the sake of it -- let's move on, pls.

Drumroll...

• Highlighted best support for newbie avatars: John "Pathfinder" Lester in promoting the HyperGrid through the HG Adventurers Club.
  
• Highlighted best educational tool developer: Crista Lopes for the HyperGrid
• Highlighted best educational sim: Aaron Duffy's Fernseed on ScienceSim.
  
• Highlighted best developer educational build: Virtual Mine (Sand Castle Studios)
  
• Highlighted best RL talk on VW: Clark Aldrich at FCVW Conference
  
• Highlighted best blog/Twitter: Tateru Nino, Maria Korolov (general), Ener Hax (education), Opensource Obscure (Twitter, FriendFeed)
• Highlighted best conference: IndieMetaverse 2010 ; MetaMeets2010
  
• Grids to watch in 2010: Any grid that is HyperGrid-enabled

(Edited to fix obligatory mis-directed links; added a couple of things too)

Predictions for 2011

Firstly, I wonder whether a die has been cast for SL following appointment of a gamer as CEO and the opening of SL to 16+ teens. Is this year about entertainment, about social? Phillip promised "fast, easy, fun" and, while progress has been made, I guess it's the new CEO Rod Humble who will hopefully deliver (good to see him on Twitter already). Delivery will mean more residents, more participatory events (including perhaps a pay-for web option), further evolution of breedable animals and games like Tiny Empires and Combat Cards. Some have speculated that gambling may reappear.

None of this precludes educational use of SL but it does make it more tangential and SL in particular a harder sell. That said, LL hasn't completely ditched edu as it continues to sponsor VWBPE, the SLED list and the edu wiki. At the same time, however, there will be increasing pressure on educators to bring virtual world activities into the mainstream and, in times of budget cutbacks in the UK, to demonstrate cost-effectiveness, including revenue generation. OpenSim will look increasingly attractive when the next version with web-on-a-prim and mesh support appears though stability and availability of content may still be a challenge at times.

In that light I offer the following very tentative predictions:

1. Region concurrency will increase to 150 in SL and Intel will further develop their tech that allows 500-1000 avatars on an OpenSim megaregion. Global SL concurrency will start to trend upwards again but stay short of 100,000 (it's about 65-70K at the moment according to Tateru Nino).

2. More inworld advertising and advertising-supported web viewer options (already more prominent in inworld search). More revenue generating activity on edu sims that pay full tier.

3. Increased gamification in SL and better support for mobile use on iPad and Android, including low-fi graphics. Functional Kinect interfaces will appear but have only niche edu applications at first.

4. Resumption of interest in use of SL and OpenSim for edu marketing purposes, student recruitment, schools liaison, etc.

5. Mesh will arrive in SL in February and OpenSim 2-3 months later (as far as the Diva Distro is concerned) but have limited impact initially except in niche areas where mesh content is readily sourced.

6. Educators using OpenSim will become major users of the HyperGrid. The corollary is that they will favour hosting solutions that are HG-enabled and that better HG directories will appear.

7. There will be increased use of OER repositories for dissemination of virtual world content created outside SL.

8. Most VW edu users will continue to explore a multi-location strategy, using hosts best suited to particular purposes, e.g. high concurrency vs low-cost student building.

9. Sim-on-a-stick will find new uses, e.g. for pre-event orientation, textbook supplements.

10. Educators will be involved in maintaining the SL edu wiki.

OpenSim port of room-rezzing app

This shows an early draft of the OpenSim version of Roomiotix running from a USB memory stick. The only significant change was the move to a 15 m grid prim as the megaprim fell foul of the 10 m limit on the ability of llRezObject to generate remote objects. On that basis the rooms also have to act as rezzers for upper storeys. I'm not sure how that is going to affect lag.

I guess the surprise with the benefit of hindsight is that the megaprim grid in SL didn't respect the 10 m limit...

Merry Christmas!

A desert island, a decorated fir, a suspiciously winsome avatar, a snowman with slow-to-rez sculpties and annoying particle effects... it can only mean one thing so have a good one everyone!

And the hot news is that there is a Santa -- he just brought Linden Lab a new CEO.

Roomiotix

The video shows yet another attempt to generate a tool that students can use to create builds without having to master the full SL interface. Of course, this entails a lot of simplification and the underlying premiss, that it is good to engage students in higher level skills such as design, is untested. The builds are fairly crude but, as the video shows, you can generate and link single rooms fairly quickly and, more to the point, without camming or, in this simple example, flying.

The megaprim grid serves as a rezzer for multiple room types. Touch it and you get a menu that allows you to choose which room style to rez. At the moment the rooms simply have doors in different positions (numbered according to the clockface, e.g. "02050811" has four doorways at 2, 5, 8 and 11 o'clock). You can change the room colour and transparency, rotate it and "hot swap" another into the same position. The rooms replicate some of the functionality of the grid in so far as you can rez further rooms above them on a pedestal. You can also rez similar pedestal rooms (pRooms in the menu) directly onto the grid.

The story-telling aspect comes from being able to link and decorate the rooms in various ways. Firstly, you can touch-rez prims that act as the start and end of ramps and walkways and the ramp prim is rezzed and stretched automagically, albeit to a maximum of 10 m (this is code "borrowed" from Hiro Sheridan's molecule rezzer!). The start and end prims will try to auto-align along the most probable primary axis. You can also get the rooms to report their name and location (as a slurl) in chat so that you can go direct to any particular one, albeit via the Viewer 2 sidebar. Ultimately, it would be useful to use such data to reconstitute builds from a notecard.

The implementation is not without issues. You need space for the megaprim although it works pretty well as a sky platform. As prim efficiency is at a premium for me, the rooms themselves are single sculpted prims generated using Prim Oven. I've found it necessary to make the prims phantom in order to allow unfettered avatar access and hence there is a need for the pedestal to support avatars in raised rooms. The use of sculpties also makes useful texturing fiendishly hard. Finally, a degree of prim positioning is still required to get doors and ramps to align and vertical navigation within a stack of rooms is not supported directly (a ladder maybe?). The present set of rooms were generated ad hoc with no conscious attempt made to align doors.

The room contents, of course, are a potential problem given that they are not intrinsically associated with the room and will not, for example, rotate with it. Some need for pre-planning, methinks. Using Builders Buddy to "capture" the relative positions of objects is a possibility though it might be simpler for some applications to simply limit the scope of rooms to basic media (textures, audio, etc) and supply the necessary display gadgets built-in.

Of course, none of this is new and arguably the inspiration is the Memory Palace /Method of loci concept of antiquity. There are already many excellent linear builds in SL (the Living in the Universe timeline springs to mind, along with Cancerland which, sadly, is no longer inworld) and I have played with mazes previously which are similarly modular. If one is thinking of 3D wikis, then the Wikitecture tree is a fascinating and far more sophisticated implementation.

And yes, the name is awful but got attached to the video before I could think of something better. Hopefully there will be a version for OpenSim before the New Year (though I'm not, of course, specifying which New Year).

Predictions 2010: how did I do?

First things first. Notable events I didn't predict:

• The melt-down in June and change in focus at LL that saw Phillip Linden return temporarily as CEO and, more significantly, the end of discounts on new edu accounts (announced in October). Subsequently the education link disappeared from the home page and the edu-specific microsite migrated to the wiki.
  
• Closure of the Teen Grid, although that was a 2009 prediction.
• The web streaming trial based on Gaikai.
  

I did in passing predict Viewer 2 (or at least a Flash-enabled viewer) though that was almost a given by the time it arrived in February (and met fierce resistance). In terms of the predictions I did make :

1. Hardware on campus will become more of an issue as universities try to economise by keeping hardware going for longer...
Hard to quantify but this affected me personally on legacy hardware, not so much as a consequence of the Viewer 2 upgrade as the institutional move to Windows 7 (now a supported OS though it wasn't in September), so I am giving myself a generous 2 (out of 3).

2. The number of education and non-profit sims in SL will decline slightly as institutions assess their needs more stringently. There will be continued departures for other grids balanced to some extent by new arrivals coming in for very specific reasons.
No evidence for this yet on a major scale but, apart from closure of my sim, I'm pretty sure Edinburgh has reduced its estate (9 sims, down from 12?) and Leeds Met is considering its position. The consequences for edu of improvements in OpenSim allied to the price hike/lock-in in SL may be delayed in taking effect and most SL educators seem to be adopting a policy of watchful waiting or, like me, dual location. In adjacent spaces, the CDC has gone and the American Chemical Society is scheduled to go. I believe ScienceCircle is considering the OpenSim-based ScienceSim as an option. Others have fully or partially relocated to Jokaydia and Reaction Grids with VWER playing an active role as sponsor (all 40 of their parcels have now been assigned). A more parsimonious 1.5.

3. Development of a more edu-friendly search facility will be initiated and some third-party developers will allow you to swap this into their client in place of the LL default. The backend database will also act as a repository for cost-free distribution of content deemed of educational value, to include individual items, builds and sims. The database will not be limited to SL and will interoperate with other initiatives such as CLIVE/Merlot and JorumOpen.
Sadly, not yet. A disappointing 0.

4. There will be increasing exploration and use of tools that facilitate development of educational sims, both at the level of the institutional VLE (e.g. SLOODLE) and the inworld class (e.g. Pathways).
Pathways appears to have evolved a community and I may well use my room rezzing gadget for development along these lines. As well as the established Pivote, we now also have a newcomer in Vushi. I have no measures of adoption but there is some exploration by the likes of the Tools.Jam folks. A slightly circumspect 2.

5. Web-based lesson design tools will extend support to SL and OpenSim.
Not that I'm aware of. I was thinking of an extension to LAMS or similar. Big fat 0.

6. As part of an overall consolidation and recognition of (the need for) exemplars, there will be a trend towards subject-specific rather than institution-specific sims on the basis that this is presently a pre-competitive phase and that development and operational costs may usefully be shared.
The classic examples are Pharmatopia and Theatron but I'm not aware of (m)any others as yet. A slightly ambitious 0.5.

7. There will be a trend for institutions, and more particularly departments, to share sims or rent them for the duration of specific classes rather than year-round. Sharing might be on a time zone basis and/or include collaboration with non-profits.
A few offers on SLED but nothing largescale or coordinated. Of course, in some ways this is nothing new and generic edu islands seem to be doing OK (EduNation has new owners) so I'll give myself 1.

8. Takeup by education (as opposed to business) of the Second Life Enterprise "behind the firewall" product will be limited unless the pricing for the sector is highly competitive. The same is likely to be true for the Immersive Workspaces product.
SLE is now discontinued as far as new users are concerned and Immersive Workspaces doesn't seem to be making much visible headway. An unfortunate (for others) 3.

9. Sims will increasingly borrow concepts from the games domain, serious or otherwise. The dominant mode of interaction will still be via mouse and keyboard though the arrival of MS Natal will catalyse some community hacks.
Natal became Kinect and, indeed, there are some hacks and, of course, some history with SL. Gaming influences are evident in the Virtual Mine sim. With the advent of a new LL CEO with a gaming background, there has already been mention of gamification on the SLED list. A slightly grasping 2.

10. There will be increased use of SL by small groups in shared physical spaces, e.g. in libraries, using either projection or large LCD screens.
Not known but for inspiration see this for the use of 3D in classrooms, this as an example of use of multi-touch displays, this for the use of interactive whiteboards with virtual worlds, and this for use of a 3D CAVE with Google Earth. A rather unhappy 0.

Employing suitably festive grading criteria, I score 12/30 = 40%, similar to last year.

The giant genome in OpenSim (well, almost)

I haven't blogged for a while so thought I would just mention that I have most of the functionality of the walkround TB genome running on the USB memory stick version of OpenSim. I've had a few problems, e.g. I seemed to lose a few of the Molecule Park textures post-importing, and I initially had difficulties getting the gene marker to rez on parts of the genome. As ever, click on the image for a larget version.

It transpired that the latter was due (as far as I can tell) to OpenSim measuring distances a little differently to SL when it comes to the 10 m limit on scripted rezzing of objects. OpenSim appears to measure from the centre of the object while SL measures from the object's edges. However, you can adjust the distance in OpenSim by editing the .ini file so all is well, at least for the moment.

Currently the markers on the TB genome access web servers, both my own and third-party ones. It does strike me that there would be benefits in having at least some of the data served from the USB stick too so that the sim can run without web access. Having some automated means of booting the servers would become even more of a priority though.

I have also been playing with Terragen Classic and Bailiwick for the purposes of generating terrain files. Others have recounted the general approach which seems to work OK. I found that you also need to specify the maximum and minimum heights in Terragen. The terrain RAW file is loaded from the OpenSim command line, e.g. "terrain load hilly.raw" (where hilly.raw is the terrain file placed in the OpenSim bin folder) and you can fiddle with the elevation too, e.g. "terrain elevate 1.2". In my hands the terrain got copied by default to all four sims. The USB stick certainly gives students free rein to experiment with terrains on a scale that would be hard to support in SL.

So a few glitches but generally headed in the right direction, I hope.

[updated to amend command syntax errors]