The future may well lie in open-source virtual environments, created using tools such as OpenSim.
“We are really meant to interact in 3-D, with other people and with information,” Caltech astronomer George Djorgovski, director of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, told me today during an interview in Second Life. “Because this works so well with the human perception system, as soon as there is an easy and ‘good enough’ 3-D approach, people will switch en masse.”
German virtyou GmbH and Dutch 3DLES (3D Learning Experiences Services) join forces to provide a stable 3D environment for education and architecture in Europe.
Today we are happy to announce our collaboration with 3DLES, Netherlands. Nick Zwart, the founder of 3DLES has studied music, ICT and religion at Fontys University, NL. He’s a specialist and teacher in the subject New media in Religious Education and has been among Europe’s early adopters of Teen Second Life™ back in 2005. With the beginning of Opensimulator being a suitable platform for E-Learning, Nick Zwart has also become a well known specialist for SLoodle, a popular 3D E-learning System.
With the fabulous content creation and support of 3DLES, virtyou GmbH are currently hosting more than 25 regions with educational and community content.
virtyou GmbH provides premium Opensimulator regions for Educators for a special price. We are running servers in two European data centers, and can provide you with Relocation Services for your previous content, Inhouse Hosting Solutions and Virtual Servers upon request.
Every educational region will have his own set of Sloodle tools. A choice of selected freebie and virtyou specific objects like buildings, furniture, plants, clothing, translators, media players and full avatars will be provided with each region order.
If you haven’t yet, create a free account for the virtyou Grid, explore our grid, meet us at our in-world office hours.
We are especially happy to welcome the participants of the NIFLAR Project today amongst the VirtoUsers! NIFLAR, the Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research is a cooperation of eight European Universities, coordinated by the University of Utrecht, Nederlands. The Project focusses on Language Learning in Virtual Environments, and they have a long history researching both Opensim and Second Life under the aspect of Language Learning. The following video gives you a good introduction into the goals of the project:
NIFLAR will inhabit 3 Sims on the Maingrid, provided with Freeswitch Voice and a special environment to install preconfigured OAR files on-the-fly. We are currently reviewing the Whisper Voice Solution, that runs with configurable Speex Codec and promises to give a better speech quality. So, if you should meet Spanish, English, Portugese or Dutch Avatars on virtyou in the next time, give them a hearty welcome!
So this is what you get when you remove the first letter from our beloved Multi User Virtual Environment, and pimp the last a bit up.
The Cryengine-3 does different Stereo Modes with a new technology: Instead of rendering 2 complete images, the pixels from the rendered scene are shifted by the angle resulting from the deepness. This is said to eat up just 1.5% load, instead of 50%!
A few days ago I received an invite from our programmer tx Oh to his personal Opensim grid. After logging in, I got a first-hand demonstration of the new LightShare™ environment, and had the opportunity to play around with the Lightshare panel he has scripted.
What it Lightshare? If you have been into Second Life in the last few years, you have probably heard of WindLight. Back in 2007, Linden Lab acquired the new technology to render more realistic Sky, Clouds and Water from Windward Mark Interactive. The problem with WinLight is, that it is strictly playing on the client-side, like all rendering features. While all of the alternative viewers have been implementing WindLight, and it’s extensively used by Macchinima Makers, sharing the settings you have found with another resident is quite complicated: You have to save your current settings in an file, send it to the other person, make him or her install it in the deep space of their Client configuration settings, and then – after a restart, you can share the experience. Not quite so Fast-Easy-Fun, it seems, and certainly no RealTime collaborational experience. This is where LightShare comes on the plan: Invented by Meta 7, a virtual worlds hosting company, Lightshare allows you to do what the name says – share your WindLight settings with all visitors of the Sim, instantaneously, with no download required. This is done by some newly introduced Scripting commands and a compatible client/viewer, that receives the settings sent from the Sim it’s logged in, whenever anything is changing.
What tx is doing here, and the reason why he invited me to come over and play with the new stuff he made: He made a handy panel containing all the knobs and buttons for setting up a windlight theme, only he did it in-world! So we could just stand there (me in a pyjama, the inofficial Opensim standard outfit^^), fiddle on the knobs and change the blueness of the water, time of day, brighness and color of the sun and ambient light, all that – together , simultaneously. Just like anything you know from Second Life and Opensim, sharing the experience we create in realtime.
tx is making the panel available as a IAR archive on gridhop.net, so grab a copy, and check out the nearest OpenSim!
“Can I use that in Second Life too?” one might ask. No, not yet. They just need to hire (or re-hire) some developers to get that running. ;p
At this year’s SIGGRAPH, several groups are showing physical models of simulated objects to create the actual sound of these objects, fluids and breaking solids.
