Life on Mars

This week has seen a substantial amount of work come into existence for me when my HE students began their adventures on a virtual field trip to Isidis Planitia, that’s on the surface of Mars, and not by coincidence the landing point of the Beagle2 spacecraft, virtual worlds are just great. If by chance you are up for putting yet another ‘e’ version of eLearning into operation then you may like to consider emmersiveLearning. The main project is to use solar energy to provide heating and lighting for some form of accommodation written in Java, such was the original design spec. At that time though the group had no idea as to what type of accommodation or its location, and that was presented to them in the last period Monday, welcome to Mars.

This week has seen a substantial amount of work come into existence for me when my HE students began their adventures on a virtual field trip to Isidis Planitia, that’s on the surface of Mars, and not by coincidence the landing point of the Beagle2 spacecraft, which you can just see in the foreground, virtual worlds are just great. If by chance you are up for putting yet another ‘e’ version of eLearning into operation then you may like to consider emmersiveLearning. The main project is to use solar energy to provide heating and lighting for some form of accommodation written in Java, such was the original design spec. At that time though the group had no idea as to what type of accommodation or its location, and that was presented to them in the last period Monday, welcome to Mars.

So they could get an idea about the temperature ranges on a typical day on Mars, I produced a small weather station, and it produces some reasonable values for wind speed, temperature and barometric pressure.

First off I put together new region in Open Sim, then terra-formed and textured the scene. I required some space type accommodation and variation, so that everyone could have a personalised space. I found a really nice solution Tube City at OpenSim-Creations, this is a free set of buildings that matched the requirement very nicely, though I did re-texture them.

Here you can see part of the collection they have to choose from, in fact I decided on some groupings first and then put them into a lucky dip that everyone drew from. Have received the components its was just a case of them taking a copy for each build.

Well that was Monday afternoon and writing this now on Thursday morning as you can see there has been some enthusiastic work going on. I have been making the odd voyage to the red planet during the day and usually find some of the group in there discussing and working away at the task . While I need no convincing as to the collaborative benefits that exist using these real time 3D environments, the experience this week has been very rewarding in itself.

Playing Media

I have been both acquiring a creating some help mkaterials for the new users of our Comenious project, generally in the form of help panels that have been placed into a small tutorial building on the sim. While these are fine, I did particularly want to get some video tutorials together. If you have yet on try this approach then let me recommend CamStudio as an easy to use screen capture desktop application, it comes with a number really useful and uncluttered features. The output files from CamStudio can be either avi of swf format, I used the avi format and then converted them into mov format, which you will need for OpenSim using the convertfiles.com websites, easy to use and did the job no problem.
The process of playing media in OpenSim is described on this page and it includes a Freeview script.
The script makes use of a notecard called bookmarks. It was when I was running the script for the first time that I recognised the dialog from a media viewer I had downloaded some time ago in Second Life. The thing is that the content of the bookmark notecard does have to be in a particular format namely: -

video descriptionurl

Examples
Prim Basicshttp://cd.bromley.ac.uk/bteccourses/video/build1.mov
Editing Clotheshttp://cd.bromley.ac.uk/bteccourses/video/editclothes.mov

Please feel free to copy the url's into a web browser if you would like to see the content.

The vertical bar if you have difficulty finding it, can be produced by holding down the Alt key and typing 124 on the numeric keypad then releasing.

From the screen shot you can see that the actual image is sandwiched between two signs saying Touch for Menu. In fact these are two surface of a cube that has been tapered, and between them the surface that plays the video. I did this because when I tried the video player with a viewer that supported Shared Media, I seemed to loose the Script Touch event for the dialog on the screen surface, it seems to work though.

I have a new student project underway, and will be posting on that shortly so please stay in touch for something a little different.

Vega

VW in HE report

The ascilite 2011 'Changing Demands Changing Directions' survey report into use of Virtual World in HE entitled 'How are Australian higher education institutions contributing to change through innovative teaching and learning in virtual worlds' is available here

The report provides a nice background and current snapshot of activities taking place in the various Universities that contributed to the report, including key drivers and the perceived advantages and some difficulties experienced in using a range of Virtual worlds platforms, well worth a read.

Vega