Comenious island good to go

The Comenious virtual world is finally at the point where we have begun to create avatars for our members of staff here at Bromley and so far one from our partner in the Netherlands. The screen shot here shows the main island with its gallery display area, along with central meeting and tutorial hall. While I did create many of the builds here, including the little canal boat, others have been downloaded from OpenVCE project, Linda Kellie Creations and OpenSim Creations.
There an number of really nice builds available from OpenSim Creations, and of those two in particular caught my eye for this project. The first was this light house with keepers cottage. I did have to script the door and light beam but the rest rezzed just fine.
Having introduced the Keepers cottage, I could not resist the temptation to introduce a few furnishings, again some downloaded and others home brewed. One of the project team on seeing this suggested that the place could be used as a display area for student work also and why not, sounds good to me.
The second build from OpenSim Creations was a windmill complete with Millers cottage, and just off to the right out to sea you can just make out my clipper ship that sails around the island group.
As with the Light house keepers home, the Millers is also furnished along with bags of flour. This in fact was just to good an opportunity not to include a virtual mill effect, so you will find a rotating grinding stone accompanied by grinding sounds, just for a touch of realism.
The tutorial area has a number of screen shot and OpenVce panels and I will include some movies for things like, changing avatar appearance, building and texturing.
Well thats about all for now, but please stay in touch as the sim comes into use. regards Vega

New Freebie Store

While the work continues to progress with the commeneios project here a Bromley, I came across a really useful website just the other day http://opensim-creations.com/
The site features resources for opensim under the following categories Animations, Attachments, Buildings, Clothes, Objects, Scripts, Textures and Tutorials.


I downloaded a copy of the light house and installed it onto own Comenious project region. So if you looking for a good collection of freebies and even considering contribution then opensin-creations looks likely to become a one-stop-shop on the list.

Vega

New World Grid

If you have not come across the New World Grid yet in your travels of the virtual worlds, then I can recommend a visit, there certainly seems to be a lot going on. Based on Open Simulator this is non-profit French based service is open to all for avatar registrations.

I went along yesterday a registered myself an avatar, then responded to my confirmation email opened my Imprudence viewer and loggoed in using.

login URI :
http://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002

login page :
http://account.newworldgrid.com/loginscreen.php

The web site offers forums, live chat and of course a link to their Twitter feed,
I logged in, very nice indeed.

You can rent land and a full region land rental is available at

Price:30€ / month + 25 € setup
Primitives : 15000
VoIP included (vocal conference)
Dedicated simulator : the region is hosted on an independent “simulator” in order to optimize performances and minimize crashes impact.
Script usage and user traffic reasonable.
installed takes some 24 to 72 hours after payment.

Alternatively you can host your own and connect to New World Grid by downloading their free Diva Distro, that seems to come with some very comprehensive set-up processes and procedures. To add even more icing to the cake it seems that they have managed to implement a currency system.

Well worth the trip, Vega

Comenius Project Starting

After long long delays getting this one under way the projects has started to run with the uploading of student content to a display stand. the materials are ComicLife presentations that have been produced by our students. This particular display is for our own college and will eventually be joined by similar exhibits from schools in Holland. We plan to inlcude a meeting area for real time conversations and a free building platform probably an small island for development work.

Please stay in touch for upldates

Vega

Collection of freebies

Given that the resources for Opensim are still a little thin on the ground when compared to those of Second Life, I feel that this collection made available from Linda Kellie is really worth a visit. Do take a look at the license for their use, and thank you Linda

regards Vega

Getting ready for LSIS

I am looking forward to presenting at the Technology for Efficiency conference at the Hallam Conference Centre in London, where I shall be proposing the use of virtual worlds, in this case OpenSim. I did consider using one of our own college sims for the task, as would have the advantage that delegates could get the feel of social engagement, but given port issues I thought it would be wise to find a safer route, namely sim on a stick; Port Pen . The advantage I guess will be that at least delegates can take away their own version and plug it in most anywhere. The specific area’s of efficiency that I am going to talk about are Meeting spaces, Timetabling and resource management. The inclusion of resource management is going to focus on rooming, we planned a room some time ago, and feel sure that had we produced a virtual version in the first place then the final outcome would have been very different and much more conducive to a teaching environment.

regards Vega

OpenSim an Educators Perspective

I came across this posting from Peter Miller from University of Liverpool on Open Sim entitled 'an Educators perspective'. This is really worth a read as it covers so many aspects of Open Sim in particular show casing some really excellent examples of sim builds. Well worth a look and keeping in touch with.

Vega