CESI meet and presentation

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on September 28, 2009 | No Comments

We attended the Autum ‘09 CESI Meet at the Digital Hub in Dublin last Friday. The night was divided into mini-presentations (7 minutes), nano-presentations (2 minutes) and soap box corners. It was brilliantly organized and I loved the way everything was kept moving at a cracking pace by the merciless timekeepers.

I gave a talk on Opensim during a nano-presentation which followed an earlier talk on Second Life by Tim Savage from Trinity College Dublin. So virtual worlds were well represented on the night. Every talk was interesting but a few in particular stood out for me including Enda Donlon on Xtranormal (a wonderful text-to-movie web service), Stephen Howell on Pencasting (recording lecture notes and audio in a kind of hybrid podcast-screencast) and Ban Ryan on using the fun technologies that children love to teach them in class (eg. Nintendo DS).

Overall the night was a wonderful mix of inspiration and conversation, wonderfully organized by Mags Amond, John Heffernan and the rest of the team. Simon Lewis has written up a more in-depth review and you can see a few photos from the event below. Our first CESI meet will certainly not be our last.

Second Life training course at Dublin City University

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on September 4, 2009 | 1 Comment

We delivered a training course in Second Life to seven lecturers in Dublin City University on Tuesday. I have to say it was one of the most enjoyable courses I’ve ever delivered as the group was literally giddy with excitement all the way through.

We had a fascinating lunchtime chat about the potential for virtual worlds in language education and marketing. And on our return did a group field trip to Dublin SL, one of the best sims on the whole of Second Life. Dr. Theo Lynn captured a snapshot of our wanderings around Grafton Street -

Irish teachers experimenting with Nintendo DS and Wii in the classroom

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on August 11, 2009 | 2 Comments

When I attended the ICT in Education conference in Thurles recently I had the opportunity to meet with a number of inspiring educators.  But there was one in particular whom it was an absolute pleasure to finally meet in person - Ban Ryan.

@lismiss on Twitter had been piquing my curiousity for quite a while with tweets linking to and discussing many wonderful uses of technology in education. But there was an apparent anomoly. This woman had mentioned her grandchildren on several occasions and that just didn’t sit well with our preconceptions about Irish educators.  How could someone past the age of 50 be contemplating a DIY setup using Wiimote controllers to make a cheap Interactive Whiteboard?

What I eventually learned was that Ban Ryan had been a primary school teacher for forty-one years and a teaching principal for twenty-eight of those.  She continues to work with SEN children for a number of hours each week as well as acting as tutor/ facilitator to teachers interested in integrating ICT into their classroom practice.

But for those of us following her on Twitter Ban is simply a mine of information. And inspiration. Yesterday she published an article to the website of the Computer Education Society of Ireland about her experiments using the Nintendo DS and Wii gaming devices in her classroom -

I gradually extended the use of the DS to other areas of the curriculum, larger groups and eventually to the classroom itself as players can challenge up to 15 others by using DS Download Play on a single Game Card. The enjoyment and achievement factor contributed to the children’s personal and social development. I have found that children learn to work together, sometimes leading and other times following, thus engaging them in decision-making, being supportive of their peers and developing positive relationships. Their concentration improved also and all were highly motivated to improve on their personal scores, which in turn built greater self-esteem.

Make sure to read the full article and absorb the importance of what Ban is saying. I can’t emphasise enough how significant I think this article is in terms of the message it delivers to Irish educators -

In conclusion, the Wii and the DS, in my opinion, are great affordable tools to integrate into the curriculum as they are student centred. They help to build class cohesion, to foster whole class participation, to promote independent learning and healthy competition. We teachers are all working with students for whom interacting with some sort of screen is second nature. I personally like to take advantage of that when I can to make learning engaging for today’s students.

A breakout year for 3D

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on July 31, 2009 | No Comments

Yesterday Sky TV announced that it is to launch the UK’s first 3D TV channel in 2010. Hot on the heels of video sharing giant YouTube introducing 3D viewing options. And news that comes half way through a year already proving to be a breakout one for 3D movies on the silver screen.

So far we’ve had Monsters vs Aliens, Up, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Coraline and My Bloody Valentine. There are many more to come but the one we await with baited breat is Avatar, James Cameron’s first full length feature movie since oscar winning Titanic. Avatar is not only remarkable for the 4 years it has already been in production nor the $250m plus which has been budgeted, but primarily for the 3D camera technology which Cameron himself has helped to pioneer.

Cameron has been largely reponsible for influencing other Hollywood heavy-hitters, such as Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg to commit to a large number of 3D projects going forward. Indeed the Dreamworks studio has committed to producing all CG films in 3D and there are new releases planned over the next 6 months including  The Final Destination, re-releases of Toy Story 1 & 2, A Christmas Carol & Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Just as important from our point of view as these developments in movie making are the parallel advances in computer gaming. Big name game publisher Ubisoft is producing Avatar (the game) to go along with the movie -

Avatar is going to be the first 3D stereoscopic title in gaming history, and Cameron was very enthusiastic about the enormous potential he thought Ubisoft’s tie-in title would have. He promised that it would not just be a normal ‘movie game’, but rather an expansion of the franchise with new characters and a deeper exploration of the world than the film could provide.

If the game is as good as Cameron says it is, it’s could be a very big milestone in the history of gaming. We’ve been waiting a long time for a stereoscopic 3D game. Avatar has the potential to not just be a really entertaining game, but a ground-breaking one as well.

So, all-in-all a breakout year for 3D and proof that there’s no going back. 2009 will be remembered as the year that 3D stopped being a fad.

40+ virtual worlds with 1M+ users - kids

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on July 16, 2009 | No Comments

KZero is a wonderful source of statistics relating to virtual worlds. Thier lastest 32 page report on Kids, Tweens and Teens in virtual worlds includes overviews of many worlds in the sector as well as “strategies for success for both marketers wishing to take their brands in-world as well as companies considering developing worlds for these demographics.”

Socially Minded summarizes some of the other findings -

Kzero has measured all virtual worlds for kids and mapped them showing user age, length of existence and size of users. Nice.

So what is your precious under 15 year old doing these days (80% of all registered users of virtual worlds are teenages..). Habbo Hotel, the grand daddy of them all (and was a case study already inour book Communities Dominate Brands) is still the biggest, and now has 135 M users. Note that this is about 10% of all internet users. Are kids registered to play in the virtual playground of Habbo. Wow.

But they are not alone, no way (way! no way! Whey! No Wh-hey!). Neopets (average age 11) has 54 M users (Gosh, thats the size of the total population of Italy). Stardoll (age 15) has 34 M. Club Penguin (age 12) has 28 M. Wee World (14) has 27 M. And so it goes, Girl Sense, Nicktropolis, Whyville, goSupermodel, Spineworld etc etc etc. Millions and millions. Kids. All under the age of 15. Meanwhile Second LIfe you ask? Is biggest adult aged virtual world, smaller than all those, at only 19M users..

3D stereoscopic viewers for virtual worlds

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 16, 2009 | No Comments

I’ve spent as much time as I could over the last two days wandering around Second Life and our Gaelscoil sim on ReactionGrid.com, using Dale Glass‘ stereoscopic Second Life viewer while wearing the Red-Cyan anaglyph specs I brought home with me after  Spy Kids 3D a few years ago (crap movie!).

Not only has it been an eye-0pening experience but also an eye-popping one! It’s ironic in a way that most virtual worlds evangelists have been writing about 3D environments for years without ever having actually experienced them in true 3D - stereoscopic 3D. And the difference is truly amazing.

In fact it makes one realize that the term ‘immersive’ has been applied much too freely heretofore.  I can only imagine how thrilling it would be to interact with these truly immersive environments by using Microsoft’s Project Natal. Roll on the future.

[With thanks to drWhiet on twitter who helped me setup the viewer to browse our ReactionGrid sim]

Components of the Holodeck are at hand

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 13, 2009 | No Comments

It seems to me that we have all the necessary components for the Holodeck already at hand. Now all we need to do is put them together -

1) Cybercarpet / Cyberwalk / omni-directional treadmill

2) Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display

3) Project Natal

4) 3Dvisor

5) Opensim

“One small step for avatar, one giant leap for virtual worlds” — Torley Linden

What do “digital natives” look like?

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 11, 2009 | No Comments

H2 is a Dublin-based educational consultancy set up to assist organisations in designing and implementing learning based projects that utilise ICT and digital media.

On their blog they ask, “Ever wondered what a digital native looks like or how they behave? This video ‘A Vision of Students Today’ provides an insight into how sudents are using technology and multitasking, even when they are “supposed to be ” watching the blackboard.”

It’s very interesting to note how the video opens with a quote from the visionary Marshal McLuhan dated 1967 - “Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects and schedules”

Dynamically computing the sounds of a virtual world

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 8, 2009 | No Comments

“We have no way to efficiently compute the sounds of water splashing, paper crumpling, hands clapping, wind in trees or a wine glass dropped onto the floor,” the researchers [at Cornell University] said. Until now.

The video below is a startling demonstration that the problem has been solved. It’s incredible to me that a computer algorithm could compute the sound of fluid dynamics to such a convincingly realistic degree -

Multi-touch or no-touch? Notes from 3Dcamp

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 7, 2009 | 1 Comment

We spent Saturday at 3Dcamp in Limerick where a fascinating line up of talks included  “Wiimote interfacing and looking stupid while controlling a robot“, “AVATAR: a 3d museum exhibit” and “DIY Multi-Touch Haptic Interfaces”. All talks attended were excellent but we refer to the above for how they hint at the match between our interests and the topics of discussion - perfect!

The Multi-touch talk in particular excited us by showing how a device hacked together for a few hundred euro could compete with Microsoft’s several thousand euro Surface technology. Despite that it was Microsoft Project Natal which kept popping up during hallway discussions as the news item generating most excitement among this particular crowd of artists and hackers.

More details and videos keep dripping out in the wake of this week’s anouncement and Milo below just dropped our collective jaw, again -

This prompted me to ask the question - “is anyone developing an Opensim client viewer for the Xbox?” To which Kyle at ReactionGrid.com answered -“ Xenki is the most likely client to achieve this. It is .NET/WPF/D3D capable so watch Kevin (developer) as he progresses”

I pointed out that the reason for my question was the possibility of digital puppeteering in a virtual world, as well as interacting with numerous Milos. Kyle is excited by the same ideas and commented, “By years end OpenSim will likely achieved or be on the cusp of achieving freedom from the SL client in several forms. When we break free of the client, anything is possible….”