nmc conversations

NMC Conversations #2
[download MP3] 13.9 Mb 20:18

In our second podcast, we turn to virtual worlds– as many people know, NMC has been heavily involved these past 15 months with our NMC Campus in Second Life, but wanted to point out developments we are tracking in broader realm as part of of the NMC Virtual Worlds efforts.

For this session, Rachel takes a turn at the host of the show. Also, as we test out our podcasting techniques (we are located in three different states, and depending on the time of year, two or three different time zones!), this type we held our conversation in a Skype conference call. Alan captured the audio using Ecamm Call Recorder (Mac OS X application) which can separate audio input and outputs to different audio channels. So tune in for some sterophonic effects!

As a reference to topics and sites mentioned in this show, see also:

• Eduserv Foundation Symposium “Virtual Worlds, Real Learning?” a conference from London streamed into three Second Life locations, one of them at NMC Campus.
• Workshop on Theater in Second Life
• Media Grid (Grid Institute, Boston College, Sun Microsystems) “a computational grid platform that provides digital media delivery, storage and processing (compute) services for a new generation of networked applications. Built using Internet and Web standards, the Media Grid combines Quality of Service (QoS) and broadcast features with distributed parallel processing capabilities.”
• Project Wonderland (Sun) “Project Wonderland is a 3D scene manager for creating collaborative virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and games.”
• Burning Man Earth (Google) “a 3D virtual representation of Black Rock City, including theme camps, art installations, structures, and activities, that will be available year round, so you can learn what was done, how, and who did it … you can also contact and connect with people who did your favorite projects. As such, it represents a mapping of the Burning Man cultural genome.”
• Torque Game Engine (Garage Games) “is a modified version of a 3D computer game engine originally developed by Dynamix for the 2001 FPS Tribes 2. The Torque engine has since been available for license from GarageGames to independent and professional game developers.” (description from WikiPedia)
• Croquet Consortium “a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable” — SDK 1.0 released March 27, 2007
• Second Life Educators Listserv (SLED)
• Second Life Best Practices in Education Conference 2007 (May 25, 2007, free!)

In addition, this story came in after our recording:

• IBM simulates business software in 3D game (CNET news.com) “Call it “SOA” for the gaming generation. IBM on Monday introduced a three-dimensional video game that puts a businessperson in a virtual office with the task of constructing a more efficient company. The game, called Innov8, is meant to address a lack of skills in understanding and improving a company’s internal business processes. “

Read on for a transcript from this conversation…

Transcript for NMC Conversations #2

Rachel Smith (RS): Welcome back to NMC Conversations. I am Rachel Smith from the New Media Consortium. This is the second in our series of podcasts. Last time, the first one, we talked about what the podcasts were going to be like. So I am here with Alan Levine and Larry Johnson. Hi guys.

Alan Levine (AL): How are you doing today?

Larry Johnson (LJ): Hello. How are you doing Rachel?

RS: I am doing great. Both Alan and Larry are really active in NMC’s efforts in the area of virtual worlds. As you probably know, NMC has been doing things in Second Life for over a year, many people are aware of that. But, what you might not know, is that NMC’s virtual worlds unit has also been monitoring what’s going on in other virtual spaces. Today, we are going to talk a little bit about that. Alan has just joined us from a virtual space, right?

AL: Yeah, in fact it has been quite a busy day on campus. Actually, from 1-9 am we were hosting a live video stream from a conference in the UK, and then around noon I was in Dan Zelner’s theater acting class, which is really fascinating. He’s teaching us kind of improv activities based on his Second City and likewise experience. We are kind of learning different kinds of movement and interactions in sort of the Second Life mode.

LJ: Dan’s up at Northwestern, is that right?

AL: Yeah. He is actually running two of these classes because he announced this one that we started in May and there was some interest from some folks in Australia and that part of the world, where the timing didn’t work out, so he is actually running two different classes. He did tell me today that the Australian class, he kind of said they were better. He didn’t really use those words, but he made it sound like…

RS: That the students were better?

AL: Yeah. He made it sound like the students were a little bit at a higher level. Maybe that is a technique that theater people use to prompt their actors to work to a higher degree.

RS: To get the best performance, right. What kinds of things did you do in the class?

AL: They sound rather simplistic, but we actually do things which are kind of like follow the leader, and then there’s this kind of scripted ball that we do these exercises and passing it around and you have to communicate and coordinate your movements to pass the ball. We sort of did some things with flying and trying to fly in formation, and then these activities where we are basically in an empty room but we have to express with our movements and the direction of our look that we are perhaps trying to portray that we are in an art gallery. So you walk up to a wall and you spend time with your avatar looking up. While you’re doing that, you can also zoom out and can sort of get the experience of looking at the other six or seven people in the class and see if their movements give a sense that you are looking at people in an art gallery.

RS: I guess “Eyes on your own paper” has a different meaning in a virtual world.

AL: Yeah. Definitely.

RS: You can kind of look around.

LJ: I think it is really fascinating that folks are wanting to express themselves in virtual worlds in this way. We know that the art in Second Life has been quite expressive with artists like DanCoyote and the ZeroG Sky Dancers. We have always had a good connection with the arts community in that world. But as we look at the challenges of doing the kinds of things that Dan’s doing, it not only highlights the promise of these technologies, but it also underscores that we are really right at the beginning, I think, of where we are going to ultimately find ourselves with virtual worlds. Rachel, as you alluded, we have been really trying to make an effort to watch the developments that are going on in virtual worlds because it is such a compelling space and people really do like to get together. I like to compare the state of virtual worlds today with two metaphors. One of them is that if you were to look at a platform like Second Life, the Second Life client is a lot like the Mosaic browser in that it is the very first tool that we have to look into what I am thinking of as the 3D web. It is going to be a number of years before we are all using the 3D Firefox browser or that equivalent. Similarly, I like to think about where video games were. There is a video game that I think about a lot, although I am not a big video game player, but I have watched this one. John Madden Football, in 1995, was a very cartoony-looking, flat kind of a game. The strategy was good, so the game itself was a fun game, but the graphics and the visualization and the way the players looked was not really terribly realistic. But if you look at John Madden Football today, it’s hyper-real. You actually see the sweat on the brows of the players as they are lining up for the plays. It’s a very, very realistic environment. I think that what we are going to see as the platforms emerge is that it is going to be going that way. We wanted to talk about a number of these today. I am going to start off with just kind of a little survey, and then why don’t we talk about some of the pluses and minuses of these as we go along. How does that sound?

AL: That sounds good. I did want to say, Larry, there some people who don’t like that comparison between the web browser and Second Life being that the web is decentralized and kind of arose from some agreed upon standards of users, and some people seem to think that Second Life is in the hands of Linden Lab. At the same time, there was never a community that came and developed the environment, and we started using Second Life because it was something out there where we could get this experience in virtual worlds.

RS: If you look at the technological comparison, though, I think it’s very apt. The state of the web browser at that time is comparable to the state of any virtual world client at this time, Second Life or otherwise. I agree that the way it came about is not the same, but I think technologically it is a good comparison.

LJ: There is another dimension as well. If you rolled the clock back to 1993-1994, the big players for most people when they thought about the internet were CompuServe and AOL. Most people didn’t experience the real internet until much later, 1997 or 1998, and even 2000, and people were working within these proprietary spaces. I think it’s a fair point to make. One of the things I am really excited about is the work that is going on with Media Grid. Media Grid is an organization based at Boston College. It works with the Grid Institute, and what they are trying to do is exactly that. They are trying to use internet and web standards to create a new set of standards that could be the 3D web. What they describe it as, the Media Grid, is a computational grid platform that provides digital media delivery, storage, and processing services across a new generation of networks. They have got partnerships with Sun, and quite a few other important organizations like Singapore’s Institute of High Performance Computing and so forth. Those developments, I think, are really, really exciting. So when I use that metaphor, I am looking past where we are today to where we might end up.

AL: So we would be able to move things between different environments. We wouldn’t be locked into one particular 3D.

LJ: I kind of think that we are so early in all of this that we haven’t actually figured out as a society what is the technology we’re going to run with. We are kind of back in the days of Beta versus VHS, with a number of potential solutions out there. But if we look at the ones that have prevailed typically in the past, then open standards have generally led the way. Another open standards effort that is very exciting is one also by Sun Networks. Sun Networks is working on a platform that they call Wonderland. It is part of their general work in 3D, and they’re billing it as a collaboration platform right now. But Wonderland is being distributed under the GNU General Public License, and is a space that explicitly is being designed where it could connect with other grids, so that it’s not meant to be a competing platform, but rather a platform that really gets into something I find really exciting, where we start thinking of “what if there was a world of grids of grids.” And then we really are starting to talk about something that really begins to feel like the 3D web.

RS: Yeah. That’s really interesting. What else is out there that’s sort of contributing to that or moving toward that sort of more expanded vision of the virtual world?

LJ: Alan, you and I were talking about what Google’s up to. They are always an interesting group to watch. Why don’t you tell us about some of the things that you have been watching with Google Earth.

AL: Definitely. For anybody who’s spent some time exploring the world through Google Earth, to me it’s got as much fun as flying in Second Life. In fact, more so, because I like to find real landmarks that I recognize and am able to see. Between that and their 3D creation tools of SketchUp, they have a fair number of the pieces to build a 3D world. The next thing to add on top of that is the ability for people to have social interaction and share those spaces. We just came across, recently, the announcement about Burning Man Google Earth, in which people are invited to create their own Burning Man-type sculptures and artworks in SketchUp, upload it, and have it placed actually onto an overlay of the area of Nevada where Burning Man takes place, and potentially the ability for people to be able to be there and experience this virtual art at the same time. Pretty much, it is not prophetic anymore to say that whenever Google moves into a new area, things are going to happen in a big way. It seems very likely that they’re going to be in a big way in the 3D space, whether it’s virtual worlds or some sort of combination of these current tools that Google has out right now.

LJ: Yeah. There are some really interesting things about what Google is doing. I would almost put it in the category of augmented reality. The main difference between what we are seeing with Google, I think, is that you don’t actually inhabit the space. You merely visit it, whereas the tools that we’ve been talking about for, of course, Second Life, and the Sun’s approach, and then old friends like Croquet, are all virtual worlds that you literally extend yourself into through an avatar and wander around inside, whereas with the Google approach you can build and you can contribute and all that, but you do it at a little bit of a distance. You stay on your side of the screen, is the way that I like to think about it.

AL: Yeah, but I do think that the way Google goes about things, they are looking for interoperability and leaving the doors open for developers to be able to add things or connect with that same data set. All the add-ons that people have done with Google Maps and Google Earth have been enabled because of that approach.

LJ: There is another aspect of this that is interesting because many of these projects, including Google Earth, are actively soliciting input from people on where these are going to go. For example, for the Sun Networks Project Wonderland, they have a wiki that you can include your desired features in that and contribute to the conversations going on there. Similarly, with the Google Earth project they are looking for input and they are looking for people to actually create content to help build out other experiences like what’s happening with Burning Man. Media Grid, also, is one that is very much community-based and drawing input from the community on that. What I would like to maybe think about as we get near the end of our time today, is some of the more creative types of things that are out there. One that is very interesting to me is Torque. Torque is described as a game engine, and in fact it is used to build the virtual worlds that many games inhabit, but in fact it is itself more of a tool for building the virtual world than for designing the game aspects of that. Have either of you had a chance to look at anything that is going on with that?

RS: I have just read about it, but I haven’t seen it.

LJ: There’s been about 20 games that are commercially available that have been developed on this engine, and if you go to Wikipedia and look up Torque, you can get a list of them; Dark Horizons, Magecraft, and Minigolf Mania. They all have the unique thing in common that they were built on this platform called the Torque Game Engine. It’s something that we are thinking very much on the NMC Virtual Worlds team about learning a lot about because we can see some really strong instructional implications for stand-alone virtual worlds as well as the ones that connect in grids, like Second Life or what Sun or the Media Grid folks are looking at, more in the sense of what Croquet is doing, which is to build an instructional experience that is 3D and very, very rich, but more purely instructional than social like some of these other environments might be.

AL: Right. There’s a lot of things happening.

RS: I have heard that Croquet is…

LJ: Yeah. They have released 1.0, the Software Developer’s Kit, the SDK. If you go to their website, there is a whole lot of information on where that project is going. We have a lot of folks in the NMC that are members of that consortium. We are always watching what is going on with that project because it is one that offers so much promise, I think.

RS: It is a pretty exciting space; virtual worlds in general.

AL: Makes you wonder where we will be a year from now.

RS: It does, doesn’t it?

LJ: It does. As we think about using Second Life, and of course we have been in it more than a year, and the whole time we have been talking about that our goal in there is to really become good at understanding how to use a virtual space as opposed to being good at Second Life. Inevitably, what happens, the more time you spend with a tool, you get very comfortable with it. We are really actively trying to look out as these new platforms develop so that we can establish relationships with these folks and try to become part of their efforts as well. I think it’s very important.

RS: I agree. I think some really interesting things can happen when groups collaborate and connect together. It is so important with virtual worlds to have people there, more so than the flat world. It’s the community that really makes it happen.

AL: Absolutely.

RS: I think that getting these communities to connect was a key step.

LJ: Yeah. I couldn’t agree with that more. If there is one learning outcome that I have had from our time that we have spent over the, gosh, for me it has been about 16 months, even though we launched the NMC campus a year ago, the one most powerful takeaway that I have discovered is how richly engaging the social interactions can be in some of these spaces. I think it really is the secret behind the interest in all kinds of massively multiplayer environments. I wouldn’t limit it just to Second Life. Second Life is unique because it really is not a game; it is whatever you want it to be. But I think that the same core, essentially human, desire to be with other people is at the core of what is happening with Second Life, and also what is happening with World of Warcraft, and I think you could extend that on down the line. People enjoy getting together with other people, and wherever people congregate there are opportunities for learning. That’s why I think it is exciting for us.

RS: Absolutely.

AL: The community built around that we have seen specifically in Second Life with the Second Life educators with us. There’s a conference coming up on May 25th that is basically, mostly, being organized by volunteers. The educational community gives a lot to each other. They are sharing resources, and they’re giving each other help. It’s just an incredible, vibrant community.

LJ: There’s a lot of them, too. The Second Life Educator’s List has over 2100 people on it right now. The NMC’s own lists related to virtual worlds are similarly growing at about 10% a week, actually. We are right now at about 4500 people that we can touch either through what’s happening on the NMC Campus Observer blogs directory or through the directories that we have in Second Life, so the community is really, really large. It’s only going to get bigger, as well, because the educational communities and things that we are seeing grow up, that NMC has several of them ourselves, are providing people a way to get in at really low costs. My advice, Rachel, is for everyone to continue to watch this space, because I think that we are right at the beginning of a period of time, a several year period of time, that I think is going to be very, very exciting.

RS: I think you’re right. That’s good advice.

AL: Yeah. Hey, guys. I think I have to go. I hear my avatar calling.

RS: Thank you very much, Alan and Larry, and thank you everyone out there in podcast-land for listening. I am Rachel Smith. I drew the short straw and was your host today. Please join us next time for the next NMC Conversation.

AL: Bye now.

LJ: Bye.