Vale: ABC Island in Second Life

As I wrote a few weeks back, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s presence in Second Life is about to come to a close. The 22nd September sees the curtain fall, but not without some festivities prior. Particularly this Saturday 22nd September when the final party occurs. (Here’s the SLURL to teleport to ABC Island)

I’ve been an admin on the island (in name only – I’ve had no active involvement really) since 2008 and I’ve seen it evolve and grow over that time. As you’ll see below, it’s made an impact on a lot of people.

I wanted to take some time to posts some memories from a number of people who’ve called ABC Island another home at different times since 2007.

Tiffy Vella:

So sad…I was born there, and owe many old friendships to SL’s ABC Island.

Laura Seabrook sent through these great pics and descriptions:

Australia Day picnic for that year. Elsie (my AV is sitting middle back in sun dress. At right is Wolfie Rankin

Special “Rockit” quiz show held on that day as well

Part of the anniversary fun was the building of a chute you could ride down by sitting inside a giant marble. Lots of fun in MOUSE view. This was the view at the end

Lecture held at the Island. Can’t remember the topic but I think it had something to do with law

Chatting with Wolfie while making an “Elphaba” outfit, in the entrance to the sandbox tower

Exploring Laneways in 2008, before it was demolished

Katisha Honi:
ABC Island for myself is, and from conversations with a lot of visitors I’m not alone, a place where we grew up as an avatar. ABC Island was and still is a friendly relaxing laidback environment, someone said it was just how the Australian-run sims that made them this way. Personally I had visited ABC within my first week of being in Second Life, and it was the friendships I made that kept me coming back. Once I had found my feet and was looking for “something to do” I wanted to give ‘admin-ing’ a go, I had always wanted to work in television, and well ABC would be the closest I could get.
Over the last 5 years or so, I’ve gone from doing sandbox duties to event runner and recently we got the keys to the sim and redesigned it. Finally, not only for me but for a lot of admins, ABC island was kind of like a big sandbox that we could play in. I think whether you ‘discovered’ ABC island 5 years ago or 5 months ago, the common theme has been “but where will I go now?”
Saying goodbye to ABC, is like saying: Goodbye….old friend
Juko Tempel:
One of my favourite things was the Sandbox, and in particular I remember a day when we built a pond on one level.. it was just a spontaneous group activity that started with one idea and grew and grew as we all found things in our inventory or built new things..http://www.flickr.com/photos/jukotempel/2420554975/in/photostream/. I had a similar experience when Diag Anzac and Gary Hazlitt and I got together one day to build the beach area on ABC Island http://www.flickr.com/photos/jukotempel/1678133214/.
 
One of the great things about SL, and the Island provided by the ABC, is the opportunity to meet people and do things together, to create fun ‘places’, with a real sense of the presence of those other people and a location rather than just a text box for interaction.
I wanted to give the final word to…
Wolfie Rankin:
Notice though, how many of us Second Life users still keep our SL names for our other Social Networks?I gained “Rankin” from there.Not long ago I seriously considered changing my name to Wolfie Rankin.

I didn’t go through with it because I realised what the advantages of having two names was to me.

SL gave me a lot of confidence in talking to others, which I didn’t have before that, and was a real boon when I was still recovering from illness.

Thanks ABC, and Thankyou to the other Admins.

 Now it’s over to you: post your memories, links to pics or related stuff in comments!

Mayo Clinic in Second Life

Looks like an interesting session of the non-profit commons in SL this Friday:

 

This Friday, September 14th, Nonprofit Commons is happy to feature Brian Kaihoi (Svea Morane in SL), of the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo Clinic has had a presence in Second Life since January 1, 2009, which has grown now to 4 regions. They have been working to provide consumer health information, patient care services, internal work team support, and even modeling physical spaces inside SL before they build the buildings. Most significantly, they have found many partners in SL who share similar goals and values, that can work with the Mayo Clinic to have a larger impact on patient care. This presentation will report on Mayo Clinic’s virtual world activities in the areas of patient care, research, education and administrative services.

Brian Kaihoi has been with Mayo Clinic for 35 years. During that time he has held a variety of administrative and operational positions. As a member of the consulting staff of Mayo Clinic, Brian has worked with the Mayo Medical School and Mayo School of Continuing Medical Education on content development and delivery strategies. Currently, Brian is the Mayo Foundation Web Administrator, working with all Mayo Clinic Web activities, and works with the Center for Innovation, which is finding ways to transform the way health care is experienced and delivered.

Follow him on twitter at @bkaihoi

About the Mayo Clinic:

Mayo Clinic:  Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit worldwide leader in medical care, research and education for people from all walks of life. Doctors from every medical specialty work together to care for patients, joined by common systems and a philosophy of “the needs of the patient come first.” Mayo Clinic is governed by a 33-member Board of Trustees.  Every year, more than a million people from all 50 states and nearly 150 countries come to Mayo Clinic for care.
www.mayoclinic.orgJoin us in Second Life!

Nonprofit Commons Weekly Meeting
Friday, September 14th, 8:30 AM SLT / PST
Plush Nonprofit Commons Amphitheater
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Nonprofit%20Commons/88/126/26

AGENDA

• 8:30 am Introductions
• 8:40 am TechSoup Announcements
• 8:45 am Mentors Central
• 8:55 am Main Speaker: Brian Kaihoi (Svea Morane)
• 9:30 am Open Mic / Announcements

http://nonprofitcommons.org

The mission of the Nonprofit Commons in Second Life is to create a community for nonprofits to explore and learn about virtual worlds, foster connections, and discover the many ways in which nonprofits might utilize the unique environment of Second Life to achieve their missions.

ReactionGrid retreats from OpenSim

Hypergrid Business has an interesting piece on the change in direction for ReactionGrid. We’ve followed them closely over the years (including our distinctly retro interview with CEO Kyle Gomboy back in 2009 and our Jibe walkthrough from earlier this year).

The changes aren’t a great surprise and funnily enough reflect my own thinking for my own studies where I’m pretty firmly in the Unity3D camp for what I need to achieve.

Here’s a snippet of what ReactionGrid have had to say:

Florida-based ReactionGrid, a pioneer in OpenSim hosting for corporations and educators, is scaling back on its OpenSim business in favor of its Unity-based Jibe platform, and considering closing down its namesake grid.

“We will focus on very high level OpenSim work only,” ReactionGrid co-founder and CEO Kyle Gomboy told Hypergrid Business.

However, the company will continue to provide hosting for JokaydiaGrid, which is focused on serving educators.

“We are pushing educators to Jokaydia,” Gomboy said.

Meanwhile. the company’s view of its namesake grid is “evolving,” he added, and the grid might even be closed.

“We’re debating that now,” he said. “I’d like to keep it up as a portal of sorts for a bit but we’ll be deciding that soon. The push is to promote Jokaydia Grid as our choice for educators which is who primarily use ReactionGrid the world.”

ReactionGrid was one of the first companies to offer OpenSim hosting, with brand-name customers like Microsoft.

You can read the full article from Maria at Hypergrid Business here.

As mentioned, it’s no great surprise but definitely an end of an area.

What’s your take on things?

The future of the Metaverse: If there has been a failure, it is ours

www.botgirl.com on Linden Lab’s recent moves:

Fleep Tuque posted a fascinating essay yesterday with the provocative title, “Why Anyone Who Cares About the Metaverse Needs to Move Beyond Second Life; Now, Not Later.” It was a lucid and heartfelt account of Linden Lab’s transition from an ideal-driven group of Metaverse enthusists, to a market-driven corporation going after the gaming market. She also did a great job describing the impact that the corporate changes had on the Second Life community, of which she has been a long-term leader.

 

I was one of the Metaverse idealists she described so well. I thought that there would eventually be a seamless integration between Second Life and OpenSim that would eventually be extended to other platforms via open standards. I also believed that virtual worlds would soon move into the mainstream and be commonly used in people’s business and personal lives. I was wrong.

 

Linden Lab is now actively working to distance Second Life from OpenSim. One of the leading OpenSim grids recently announced that they’re abandoning the platform to focus on its own Unity-based product. Although there seems to be some growth in hypergrid compatible OpenSim participation, proprietary 3D chat room and social gaming platforms like IMVU to have a lot more momentum.

 

Unlike Fleep, I’m not convinced that Linden Lab is the main cause of the virtual world’s failure to actualize our idealistic vision. Sure, they would have been more successful if they hadn’t wasted so much time and resources on their ill-conceived forays into chasing the corporate market; if they had communicated well and reached out positively to the Second Life community over the years; if they had not pulled the rug out from under us so many times, such as the OpenSpace fiasco and the elimination of educational discounts. But even if they had done everything right, I don’t think the Metaverse ideal would have been embraced now outside of the current small niche.

Project to Improve Graphics Rendering in Second Life

Via Linden Lab

 

One of the challenges that virtual world creators face is the trade-off between rich visual detail and geometric complexity. Ideally, by adding more and smaller faces to an object, a designer can model different surface textures and create realistic variations in the interplay of light and shadow. However, adding faces also quickly increases the size of the model and its rendering cost. Normal and Specular Maps are ways to address this by allowing for the appearance of a complex surface without actually modeling fine scale geometry.

A Normal Map is an image where the color codes indicate how the renderer should reflect light from each pixel on a surface by modifying the direction that the pixel “faces” (imagine that each pixel could be turned on tiny pivots). This means that pixels on a simple surface can be rendered so that they appear to have much more detail than the actual geometry and at much lower rendering cost. Light and shadow are rendered as though the surface had depth and physical texture, simulating roughness, bumps, and even edges and additional faces.

Similarly, a Specular Map allows each pixel to have its own degree of reflectivity, so that some parts of a single face reflect sharply, while adjacent pixels can be dull.

 

The open source developers of the Exodus Viewer are contributing Viewer support for Normal and Specular Maps, as well as some additional controls for how light reflects from faces. Linden Lab is developing the server side support so that this powerful tool will be available in Second Life.

 

Design and development are under way. Watch this blog and the Snowstorm Viewers page for information on when test Viewers with these new capabilities become available.

 

For additional information, or to learn more about how you can participate in the open source program, please contact Oz@lindenlab.com.

ABC Island to Close in Second Life

It’s not surprising but sad all the same: the wonderful community-driven project that is ABC Island in Second Life, is to close on the 22nd of September.

The island has been a staple of the Australian Second Life scene since March 2007, and it’s undergone a number of iterations since then (check out a lot of them here).

Given the relatively small number of Australian visitors the sim gets compared to its heyday, it’s not a shock that the ABC are redirecting the funds. That doesn’t make it any easier for the small and dedicated bunch of volunteer admins of the sim.

We’ll have more details on farewell arrangements / spontaneous wakes etc as we find out ourselves.

The End of the Second Life Community Convention

www.fleeptuque.com

Daden Unveil Oopal

Oopal (pronounced oo-pull) is Daden’s latest offering: a web-based editor allowing you to place and edit objects in a 2D environment, which will then roll out to the 3D environment (currently OpenSim and Second Life with Unity3D support coming in the next 6 months). Watch this brief walkthrough video to check it out for yourself:

OOPAL Quick Introduction from DadenMedia on Vimeo.

The full press release from Daden:

Birmingham UK, 27th June 2012: Educators and trainers can now create engaging immersive learning exercises more easily and rapidly using an innovative web-based application called OOPAL, developed by learning and visualisation specialists Daden Limited.

OOPAL (Object Orientated Practice and Learning) lets educators and trainers with little technical knowledge use the web to build 3D sets from an existing library of objects, and create, edit and manage the scenarios and simulations entirely from the web. Only when they’re ready to deploy do they need to enter the 3D virtual world and “push the button” to materialise the sets and exercises ready for students to use. With OOPAL, educators – and even students – can create and maintain worth-while learning experiences without needing to be virtual world experts.

Daden have been creating immersive learning experiences since 2008. Built on the success of their award winning virtual learning authoring software PIVOTE, Daden’s second generation system, OOPAL, makes exercise creation and maintenance significantly simpler – making it easier to involve tutors and even students in the design and build process.

David Burden, Daden’s Managing Director says “We found that the easiest way to describe immersive learning experiences was in terms of a drama – thinking about actors and props, the script and their behaviours rather than abstract concepts like nodes and links – and we’ve designed OOPAL to reflect that – considerably easing the process from exercise design to implementation.”

A key feature of OOPAL is that it allows educators to lay out the 3D environment using a simple 2D “kitchen designer” type layout tool. Drawing from a library of props and virtual actors, educators can assign behaviours to each object – how they will react when touched, pushed, spoken to or approached. Dialogues can even be assigned to the virtual actors for use within the simulation. Users can build just a single room or even a whole environment. What’s more – once they have built their set and simulation they can create multiple copies in their virtual world – again at the touch of a button.

Fundamental to the use of OOPAL, within a professional learning environment, is its ability to log and time-stamp every student interaction within the exercise. This can be reviewed within OOPAL, or exported in whole or part to a VLE or LMS. OOPAL also supports scoring mechanisms for in-exercise feedback.

David says “One of the obstacles in the adoption of immersive environments for learning has been the need for educators to be experts – not in their field of study but in building within virtual worlds. OOPAL dramatically reduces that barrier and gives educators and trainers the tools to create real-world learning experiences for their learners in a 3D environment”.

OOPAL can be accessed as a cloud-hosted service from Daden, or installed on an organisations’ own servers. OOPAL currently enables exercises to be developed in both OpenSim and Second Life. Daden plan to release a version for the Unity3D, and a web/iPad player in the next six months.

So what do you think? My initial impression from watching the video is that it would simplify things to some extent though the technical knowledge required is perhaps still a little high for some people. Personally I’ll be really keen to see the Unity version to see what it brings to the fray.

Linden Lab registers new trademark

has a great piece on a new trademark registered by Linden Lab. Sounds like the casual gaming approach is about to come to the fore at Linden Lab.

Whether this translates into anything groundbreaking or not, at least it’s a sign of life from Linden Lab, who’ve been a little quiet lately. Do you agree?

Euclideon pops its head above the parapet

</aIn August last year I posted the last of a few articles on promising new graphics technology called Unlimited Detail. As I posted there, the team were going to ground to work on getting the technology to a stage where they have something even more substantive to show off.

That may be a little while off yet, but xbigygames.com has an interesting piece on how Euclideon are doing. A snippet:

As mentioned when Euclideon was first revealed, this technology is something they plan to utilise not only for video games but also scientific research. Supposedly there will be “some Euclideon products released in non-games related industries over the next few months”. “There turned out to be a lot of demand for our capabilities across quite a few industries, so we have tried to put that demand in order and address each area one at a time. As soon as we have revenue coming in, we can expand our team into different departments to deal with each industry,” Dell tells us.

“I think it’s fair to say that people are starting to accept that the future of 3D graphics is atomic,” he finally points out. “Polygons will still be around a bit longer as an editing tool, but I don’t know how much longer they will remain for visualisation. So many games today have polygons that are so small that they are only a few pixels in size. When polygons become smaller than the 3 corner points that make them, there is no point in treating them like triangles anymore and it makes sense to use atoms instead.”

On the question, when we will get our next look at Euclideon powered gaming, all Dell responds is, “Well there is soooooo much I’d love to say about that, but I’m afraid that I’m sworn to silence at this point in time. My apologies, but I think you’ll find it worth the wait.”

So things are still progressing and we should start to see some implementations of the tech before the end of the year by the sound of it.

Thanks to Phillip Street for the heads-up!

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