Vehicle builds uploaded

I have been busy uploading some builds to the outworldz site one of those is my small delivery. This a a circa 1940's van and while not a drivable vehicle in that you cannot actually get inside it does a couple of nice little features like the transparency used for the spoked wheels. 

The other upload is a model of the Austin 7 (large) from about the same era. Again the vehicle is not drivable, but like the van they looked good as part of the world war 2 sime that I created for me students assignment work.

When I say the vehicle were not drivable this is true, but they did drive themselves around the sim at random and I managed to implement this through the use of a tour script all the good effect
Please feel free to to download and make use of any of my byuils at outworldz and if you have any questions then please visit either Skipper Abel or Aso Galicia in SecondLife for more information

Westworld at Kitely

Remember that this week 21st - 28th August features as part of the Kitely History month the period 1800 to 1914 and Westworld, the hypergrid address is grid.kitely.com:8002:History Hub.

Image courtesy David Kariukiption

And be sure not to miss out on the Grand Ball on August 28th at 11 a.m. Pacific on the Kingdom of Florin region. Please be encouraged to get in role for this one.

If you would like to interested offering an historic world then please contact Serene Jewell in-world or at serenejewell@gmail.com for some lands and plots.

BIO Med Virtual Laboratory

Following my previous posting on the virtual laboratory this latest blog is by way of a progress report on that project. The building itself I decided need some small changes to internal textures, which simply meant renewing floors walls and ceiling. My first task surrounding the requirements for assets was to construct some suitable workstations.

Fig 1

The screen shot image 1 one show the Centre Workstation. At present the doors and draws are static, but I can animate these is that’s a requirement. The gas taps I intend will be interactive as function the functionality for the Benson Burners, and is the case for power sockets.

Fig 2

Talking of interactivity, the taps can be turned on, and producing a steam of water that flows and pools into the sinks accompanied by the sound of running water, all of which will go to increase the sense of real and hopefully immersive nature of the user experience see fig 2.

Fig 3

The screen shot fig 3, shows a similar workstation placed along the lab wall. I managed to download a nice microscope build as an iar file from opensimcity, and I want to work on these so that the eyepiece displays the media of a microorganism growth. I have included a negative pressure cabinet on either end of the workstation, but not sure until I meet with the team if they will require and interactive features, but far so good I feel. Please stay in touch for further updates.

Two new project requests

Following my presentation at the College HE day on the use of virtual worlds I have subsequently received two project requests, the first was from our Bio Med team who asked would it be possible to have virtual lab that students could use to become familiar with equipment and use. So first things first I went about setting up a sky platform and installed a build; I actually found this one at OpenSimCity, and after making a few texture changes fig 1.

Fig 1

I met with a couple of team members, where I am pleased to say they agreed and we talked about some details of use and functionality. 

The second request came from Functional Skills math’s, and just like with Bio Med, my approach basically was, can we get the virtual world to do something for us that the vle does not, and of course my answer to that is provide a simulated life experience, it really is important I think not to simply reproduce vle or documented content and drop it into a virtual world. And so my plan is to present students and staff with an urban set of life experiences, and as a starting point using a café facility where students can order beverages and food, work out their payment and change, then sit down chat and enjoy the virtual ambience see fig 2. 

Fig 2

This is the basic setup, and I have used an existing urban style sim that we already have running for this.  I will be getting my head down for some serious building and scripting in the days ahead on both projects, So if you are interested then please stay in touch and as always feel free to comment.

Crypto Island

Finally, I am getting around to mentioning my virtual world project 2015-16. I am yet to create a final user report for this, but it will appear in second life along with all the others at this slurl. The project was named  Crypto Island see fig 1

fig 1

and it gave me the chance to try out the use of \serious games as a tool for learning. And so instead the game is a medium through which one learns, presents the opportunity to consider the more intrinsically rewarding benefits of serious games, in essence that the game should not only be fun but produce emotional, behavioural and cognitive engagement, in a combination that is key to success (Iten., N.  & Petko, D. (2014). Learning with serious games: is fun playing the game a predictor of learning success? British Journal of Educational Technology doi:10.1 1 1 1/bjet.12226).

fig 2

The scenario placed my students back in Britain of 1942 see fig 2,

where they were tasked with decrypting enemy messages, this of course meant they first had to learn about encryption techniques. The game element I introduced was for them to decipher the codes before damage from nightly air-raids see fig 3, 4 reached a predetermined value. In the event that the target value was exceeded, then the encryption would become correspondingly more difficult.

fig 3

fig 4

Students start by learning the fundamentals of encryption based situated in an old factory learning space, see fig 5.

fig 5

Where materials are presented on notecard dispenser boards in a low resource demanding format. The emphasis at this phase is for collaborative problem solving, making successive attempts at testing and evaluating their learning using in-world online cryptographic engines. Submission uses notecards that are returned using covert drop points, in this case public letter boxes. Once the practice sessions are complete, actual messages are delivered through telephones placed at various locations around the sim; in order to retrieve message students would have to wait for a telephone call (ring), at which point they simply touch on the telephone to receive a notecard; a particular feature I felt had the further effect of encouraging exploration and collaboration. Once the cyphers have been decoded, they are once again recorded on notecards and returned using the drop point network. When all messages have been correctly deciphered, air strikes will cease, effectively ending the game.

Rocket Science in the virtual world

This has been a really good year for virtual world projects. My student project for the academic year 2014-15 level4 and 5 was Rocket Science. The benefits to my students I feel are twofold: first, in using the medium, they acquired the knowledge, understanding and competence to complete the task; second, they experienced the advantages of collaborative, virtual, social, synchronous communication afforded by the visual learning styles of the 3D environment. Virtual learning would be presented as a signposted, linear, walk-through workflow series of activities, from Orientation to Simulation, as shown below in Figure 1.

Fig 1

The main learning space comprised three tasks that cover Boost, Coast and Recovery phases of the rocket’s flight. The stages are presented as a signposted, linear, walk-through series of activities, carried out using similar workflows that are presented as:  introduction notecard boards, exercise boards, calculator boards and a drop box. Fig 2.

Fig 2

The final simulation stage draws the together the work of the previous stages. It presented the students with a full set of flight-profile calculations, dispensed once again from the notecard board. Upon completion, the notecard was saved and a copy dragged to the drop-box. Students could then check their results by launching a rocket: touching the green button at the centre of the launch console table produces a series of drop-down options prompting for input parameters, after which a soundscape introduces the countdown and launches the rocket.  Figure 3.

Fig 3

If you are interested in the reading more about this, my research proposal report has been published on the Compass website from the by the University of Greenwich. As an added incentive for me, I was given the Research Award for 2015-16 for research from BromleyCollege, very encouraging; there is a YouTube you can follow up on if you have moment.

The project in fact received even more exposure when I was asked to deliver an impromptu presentation to the JISC ConnectMore16 conference in June.

I have since been receiving requests from within College for more virtual worlds specifically Functional Skills and Bio Medical science, so please stay in touch for developments.

 

 

Treasure Hunt on an Alien Planet

The first virtual world project this year is basically a SciFi treasure hunt. A famous constellation class star-ship has crash landed onto an alien planet. The task for my students is that once in the virtual world, your task will be to explore the region for Dilithium crystals, these can be identified as small coloured cylinders scattered at random throughout the virtual landscape. Your task will be to identify the crystals by colour, allocated to your project using the table below. Having located a crystal, you should then record its x,y location. The data will then be used to write a desktop program capable of automatically navigating the map in such a way that crystal locations are avoided.

 

 

As you can see I have made good use of builds from OpenSim creations as well as creating a fare few of my own.

Comments welcome, regards Vega

The 2013 Project Commences

This week saw the start of my OpenSim project for 2013, which in the end saw a very different implementation from the original designs around a Formula 1 race circuit. As you can see from the screenshot we are using a residential centred approach, with the various builds acquired courtesy of OpenSim Creations and Linda Kellie, really worth a look if you have yet to visit these two sites. The sim will be in support of a Java desktop project , where students will produce a GUI app through which it will be possible to simulate control and status of electrical domestic appliances and produces summary power reports accompanied by an estimate of cost per Kw/Hr. A side effect of all this was that I finally got to seriously look at current charges per Kw/Hr, and subsequently found myself walking around my home in real life turning stuff off!

 

 

As you can see from this second screen shot the avatars are mostly arriving, one just in cloud state, and very much default in both clothing and appearance , though in my experience this will be just about the first thing that will change. Each of my students will be provided with a variation of appliance configuration that will be replicated in OpenSim and so will act as a control to the performance of their app. In the real world of course you could simply take yourself off and check the results you were getting with actual appliances, this not being particularly realistic, virtual is certainly the next best and possibly more fun thing. So what about actual appliances themselves, well I built most of these with one or two exceptions, they are turn On and Off using a Touch event and send data to a central meter that displays the consumption and cost as text, but first the students have the task of installing them in situ. This main building by the way was part of the Open VCE project and houses our SL Scripting exhibition built by Clive Pro.

Please stay in touch for updates, Vega

Forumla 1 circuit up and running



The formula 1 track is now functioning OK and the car itself is proving to be very drivable. At moment we have a Pole Postion lap time counter and a general lap counter with time logging also. Though the vehicle seems a little wooden as it were to drive in that there is very little in the way of banking motion, it does in all other respects feel, look and sound sufficiently OK to be of use to us for the coming project.

Bye for now Vega

News from the Race Track

Work has been going particularly well down at the virtual Formula 1 track in OpenSim this week. To begin with I decided to build a light rack system for the race start than runs through the Red, Amber Orange sequence and of course logs the lap time for the avatar, this particular version as I mentioned in my last post is just for Pole Position at the moment.

While the OpenSim Formula 1 racing experience will I am certain represent a valuable and popular aspect of the project, this will not be where the grades are to be found, they require my students to develop a desktop application designed in OO and implemented using Java. If anyone out there has tried to get Java to connect to a MySql database then you will know it either works first time or requires just a little attention to detail in getting the right drivers and permissions. Well I got them to work OK in the end, and if you are looking for a tutorial this is a very useful link  that you may like to follow. I have included a small screen shot here of my test Java app running in command line mode that my students will develop into a GUI version capable of processing the final collection of logged data.

The next stage for the OpenSim part of the project will be to develop a means of capturing the various lap counts and times, so please stay in touch for updates. Do feel free to comment on your own experiences with using OpenSim

Vega

The Race Track is Ready

Well its end of term now and I am busily spending some of my time working on the Formula 1 OpenSim project. Having cleared down the Mars base project from last year I converted the terrain to a 1m high flat island that covers the sim just short of the boundary limits so that we can have plenty of room for those different race tracks. One reason that I chose to have a particularly flat terrain though is that although the vehicles (Formula 1 cars) will appear to be grounded on the tarmac, in reality the script will be sensing land, so keeping land at a constant height should make for a smooth ride.

Choice of materials has been an important consideration in this project. For instance, the wheels of vehicles do not actually have to turn, you simply simulate rotation through rotating textures, and so you need the wheels to be made of the lowest friction material available, and this is glass! I also found that the crash barrier are also very sensitive to material type, and after a few tests found that metal gave the best results. I have had a good numbers of test drives around the circuit, tweeking and evaluating settings of the vehicle script and am happy with performance so far, though how things will work out with all my students driving at the same time remains to be seen.

One feature of the project that I particularly wanted to implement is the ability to log data i.e. driver details etc to an external web database. I had my first attempt at this today and it seems to be working just fine; please see the screen shot from my phpMyADMIN Sql query. There is of course some ground still to cover, excuse the pun, but things are looking particularly promising for this years project right now, so please stay in touch for more updates.

Vega

A Day At The Races

Well it’s coming to that time of year again when I need to start thinking about the project for my Foundation Degree students who are studying Object Oriented Design. As a supplement their actual project, that will be written in Java, I like to make use of our OpenSim Virtual World Platform here at the College. If you have been following this blog, then you will know that last year we had a Mars sim, were students could experience a virtual field trip to the red planet and gather data on temperatures, atmospheric pressure, wind and solar energy for their Mars base environment control application. Earlier this week I had a discussion with my new group and they expressed a particular reference for a gaming element in their use OpenSim, and in the end we decided upon a motor racing theme. The core project will be to create a desktop application that will store and allocate pole positions, calculate race points along with various driver, team and vehicle details. The simulator part will be in the form of designing and creating racetracks for the various events, where they will get be become the actual drivers, sounds fun enough to me. As a bare minimum, I thought it would be reasonable for me to at least provide the group with some basic components and from the screen shot you can see a quarter circle and straight section of track that I made. The cars, I actually acquired from OpenSim Creations by Garry Beaumont, I though I have decided to include my own version of wheels for the vehicles. As anyone that has tried the physics engine in SecondLife and then attempted to apply the scripting solution to OpenSim will know, its not that straightforward, but having said this, I have downloaded a script from OpenSim.org by Kitto Flora and it runs OK, and I am working on some small modifications over the coming weeks. My next task is to clear down and prepare the simulator some time this week ready for the project, I will for sure be posting more updates as we move along, so please stay in touch


Bye for now Vega

Two new regions ready to go

The end of term came with the arrival of two requests that I had been expecting for virtual worlds. There was some possibility of giving each its own server, but in the end I decided to make use of the server running our Comenius virtual world project. My first attempt to create a new region adjacent to the Comenius build did appear to make everything just a little to crowded, and so I decided to leave a sim space between each region. This created the desired effect and also means that avatars will not simply be able to walk over, though Teleporting is still possible.
I set-up meetings to discuss such issues as terrains, builds, scripting and use with both of my colleagues and managed to deliver the sims ready to go after a couple of days, please see accompanying screen shots. More posts will follow on these as the intention is for students to be introduced to the virtual world and their facilities during Induction this coming September.




I have also been busy uploading some more of my own builds to OpenSim Creations, and this week I delivered Solarum, a two floor low prim, low footprint solar home, which at the moment I see has been downloaded thirteen times. The residence can of course be enhanced by the inclusion of the wind turbine that I mentioned in the previous post, so happy with that.

Stay in touch for more updates, have a good summer, regards Vega

Terrains and Wind Turbines

Getting ready to meet up with our two staff members that requested an Open Sim instance for their groups, I realised this week that it would be a good idea to actually put together a small portfolio of terrains for them to choose from. So far I have managed assemble or create fourteen, and these range from equally sized small flat plots for individual projects too much larger equally sized plots for group project work. The others fall into a much wider range of island groups, coves, hilly, and mountainous. I am thinking about actual content, but for now leaning more in the direction of letting people create their own, it would be a good way getting building skills for our students.


I have also been continuing with my submissions to OpenSim Creations with a working wind turbine. One of the aspects about working in a virtual world that I really like is being able to create a real world simulation. The wind turbine, as you can see from the image here, is basically of the type that you would typically find installed in a solar home style of project. Given the fact that the wind, though be it virtual, does actually blow in the virtual world, then its really only a case of using the correct function to get the value that you need and use it in a straight forward basic formula for a wind turbine. Of course one of the more challenging sides to a project like this is getting the blades to rotate in the correct plane irrespective of rezzed position. I must confess to getting around this tricky though not insoluble problem, as you are equally likely to find that the issues can more often be those of lag, and so my solution was to use a turbine blade texture and simply animate it. While I have not put too much detail in this post, you can if you are interested grab a copy of my wind turbine from here, it comes with fully commented code and tutorial.

Have fun Vega

OpenSim Is Growing

Our work here at the College with OpenSim is looking increasingly promising with our European partners in the Comenius project requesting that we maintain the project for the coming year, which is very encouraging indeed. As part of out Teaching and Learning Conference here at the College recently the Comenius OpenSim was demonstrated as part of our workshop offering and following this I received two requests for islands for next year from our own staff, brilliant and I shall be sure to blog on the outcome of those.





For my own part I decided that it was time to start making some of my own builds available to the OpenSim community, and so I have been uploading to OpenSim Creations. The builds are freely available and distributed under the Creative Commons License and they are under the avatar name Vega, so do please feel free to download and any positive comments would be welcome.

Bye for now, Vega

Life on Mars Overview and Feedback

The Overview and feedback from a 32 question student survey of the Life on Mars project is now available in the small hall of the main building here at Shimmer Island in Second Life or from this web link. The project itself was the result of work carried out by a group of level 5 Foundation Degree students here at Bromley College currently enrolled on the Network Computing course. The project was established in order to provide students with a virtual world field trip to the planet Mars. The project itself was in support of a final year assignment to produce a desktop simulation for a solar powered lighting and heating control system written in Java. In order to give student avatars a realistic experience of the planet Mars the following was carried out: - the terrain was terra-formed and suitably textured. For effect, the sound of wind was introduced, as was the arrival of random particle dust storms. Each student was allocated a unique combination of building components, which they formed into a connected accommodation unit. A small weather station was placed on the surface that relayed temperatures and wind speeds throughout the Martian day that was reasonably consistent with those found on the planet. Finally, each avatar came ready installed with spacesuit, boots, gloves, helmet and backpack life support. Please feel free to download the pdf and comment to this posting.

regards Vega

Some useful stuff

If like myself you have moved into OpenSim from Second Life, then there is no doubt that you may be finding resources particularly free ones are somewhat thin on the ground and locating them can be time consuming until you locate all those sim and web addresses. So I was really pleased to find a newsletter posting that pointed to a Google Search facility - HyperFind: OpenSim Content Custom Search Engine' At the present time searches include http://www.onikenkon.com/UCI , http://thehypergates.com/, http://www.lindakellie.com/ , http://www.avaverse.org/ ,  http://thoughtfulmonkey.com/ and I image that more will be added as they become available.

Are you using OpenSim as an education tool, then you may well be interetsed in Opensim-edu http://opensim-edu.org/blog/ the site features
How to guides, places to visit, OAR's and websites, well worth a visit

Finally, talking of using virtual worlds for education, I came across this chat log Transcript of March 23 NPC Meetup with Global Kids on "Playing 4 Peace". Apart from the obvious interest in what was was actaully being said and taking place at the meet, there are some very useful web and sim addresses that you may like to follow up on.
 
 
Bye for now and feel free to comment, Vega

New Waves, Videos and Metrics

Just by way of making small improvements the Comenius Island
sim I added some ocean wave effects called ‘Ocean and shore waves’ by Vanish at Opensim-Creations.com. They perform really well and can take a good bit of stretching and still look good, so if you are looking for some waves then I can recommend these.












I have finally got round to uploading my tutorials and a Mars Walkabout onto YouTube, and if you would like to see them they are embedded here below.

Changing Clothes in OpenSim

Introduction to Building in OpenSim

Life on Mars

OpenSim and SL Metrics

On a completely different note has anyone noticed the latest trend figures from SlUniverse for OpenSim regions, a little disappointing really Click Here

If you take a look at Second Life Grid Survey - EconomicMetrics page SL by contrast seems to be holding up reasonable well, there are a whole wealth of data here and even an API. Are educators drifting back to SL, not sure, but if you have any views then please feel free to reply.

Bye for now Vega

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