Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

What did I do over the long weekend? Touring in the Forbidden City, literally. Last Friday, IBM launched the first Chinese 3D virtual tourism platform - Beyond Space and Time (The Virtual Forbidden City). In partnership with the Forbidden Palace Museum, IBM invested 3 years of time and over 3 million dollars to re-construct a 3 dimensional replica of the world largest Imperial Palace standing today, the Forbidden City of China. The Forbidden City was built from 1406 to 1420, consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms and covers 720,000 square metres. It is also the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

Similar to the Great Wall of China, Forbidden City has been the one of the "must see" tourism places in China. I have been there a dozen of times since age of 3. The Virtual Forbidden City enables visitors to interact with others and with a growing knowledge base of the historical site. Learning materials are being generated by tourists, volunteers, staff and data collecting scripts. As they explore the Virtual Forbidden City, visitors can choose to simply observe the buzz of activity, participate in activities that provide insights into important aspects of the Chinese history, or even take guided tours that uncover new insights into the stories of the Forbidden City. It's a combination of 3D Simulation and Machinima experience in my opinion. There are also a few mini-games embedded in the exotic gardens and amazing architectures to keep the audiences entertained.

Registration

To get started, go to the Registration Page to get an account and an avatar icon. This will allow you to save, share your virtual tourism experience with others. Your avatar can take the form of any of several people dressed in Qing era clothing.

Download and Start the Tour!

Upon the completion of the simple registration process, you will be lead to a page that allows you to download the software which will run the Virtual Forbidden City tour on your computer. Please note, you don't have to have an registered account, you may visit it as a guest after install the software.

The following are some photos taken by the virtual tourists and shared over the web. There are much more to it than a simple walk through. I encourage you to try out the platform yourself. It's free, and best yet, no advertisement attached to it "yet" (other than the IBM trademark everywhere of course). It's a really effective way to refresh your memory or give you a sneak preview of the amazing palace!

This is a back-dated blog post, due to attending NMC 2008 conference at Princeton.

Learned from Julian's blog, the June update of Cobalt is now available. Kudos to the developers lead by John Dougan and Mark McCahill.

cobalt-base-current-build-20080608.zip

According to Julian, the following features are applied to this update:

- Cobalt can now punch through the NAT firewalls.

- Cobalt now has an OpenAL null device class that will be used if the OpenAL libraries are not installed or if they have a startup problem (special thanks to Mike Klein for this code).

- Hitting the Esc key while the mouse is over the menubar no longer causes the menubar to disappear.

- A patch to make embedded applications work is now integrated into Cobalt.

- "Message not understood" no longer thrown when closing the 3D Painter tool in Cobalt.

- Cobalt's harness classes and their support are partially refactored.

- A race on quitting was removed by carefully timing the Tweak shutdown relative to the morph delete.

- Various packaging clean-ups were done.

- Minor fixes to the ASE import around some of the texture name handling code and more logging to aid in future fixes.

- New code to import a new mesh collection for the avatar (switch avatar functionality) has been updated to handle ASEs as well as the obsolete MDL format.

Julian Lombardi showed us the first application build of Open Croquet - Cobalt on the first day of the "Harnessing Virtual Worlds for Arts and Humanities Scholarship Summit" at Menlo Park, CA. This is a really exciting milestone for the Croquet consortium in the sense that developers across the globe can now systematically build out virtual worlds using given Croquet functions. I will not spoil the launch of the application and leave the excitement till next week. Get ready to download it at opencroquet.org

*update* The sound recording of the session is here. It's in mp3 format.

It's happening right now... Join us at Sun Microsystems in Second Life: 123.23.63

This meeting is a follow-up to the Education Grid discussion that started at the Boston Summit a couple of weeks ago. Three platforms will be discussed: Second Life, Croquet and Wonderland. Discussion Guideline include:

1.0 PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM + EDUCATION GRID OVERVIEW
1.1 EDUCATION GRID KEY FEATURES AND CAPABILITIES
1.2 FIGURE: PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM + EDUCATION GRID
2.0 EDUCATION GRID BASELINE REQUIREMENTS UNDER CONSIDERATION
3.0 EDUCATION GRID TIMELINES
4.0 COMMUNICATION AND DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES

The full discussion outline is posted here.

My director, Dr. Ulrich Rauch was invited for one of the 2007 Educause Podcasting sessions where he talked about the Ancient Spaces project, Arts Metaverse project, Croquet, immersive 3D platforms and social networks.

He starts from how the Ancient Spaces project was initiated by the students and then being supported by the academics. He also explains how Croquet is perfectly connecting the projects. The podcast covers much of what we have learned from the Ancient Spaces project and what we are aiming for in the Arts Metaverse project. Sharing experiences of how to facilitate creativity and explaining the "object oriented" knowledge distributions with the "ARTS" point of view. It ends with a little insight of UBC's IT infrastructure - the "decentralized collaborations".

Listen to the podcast here. or download the mp3 file here.

Kudos to Julian Lombardi and Mark P. McCahill and the rest of the team at Duke university. They just received the 2007 MATC (Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration) for leadership and development work on the OpenCroquet project. Julian and Mark were both among the original architects behind Open Croquet and they are currently dedicated to push the Croquet platform further into the open source community. Congratulations!

You get Edusim, a powerful way to engage students by bringing a 3D virtual environment to their finger tips (literally). Edusim has successfully created a classroom tool to engage the young learners by combining Open Croquet and a very compact eBeam input device. The following video shows you the wonderful result.

More videos on Edusim3d's web site.

Learned this from Julian's blog, "Squeak by Example" is a good book for people who want to learn the open source development environment Squeak. The book is intended for both students and developers. The great part about the book is that it's under the Creative Commons Attribution -ShareAlike 3.0 license, which means you can download the PDF version for free. To show your support, buy the printed version at lulu.com.

In a recent post on Julian's blog, Doug asked:
"I know Croquet is an SDK, not an application, but I don't see how to connect to other people outside the local area network."

Here's how, the most straight forward way is use the SimpleDemo(Master) as a starter, you will notice there is a menu bar on top for this template. Choose Tools -> Connect to Another World.

A new panel appears, if you drop down the "nearby world", you would see your own world's name (Simple Demo World (your ip address)).

Then somewhere in the bottom of the panel, you see "Postcard as XML", with some xml code in the box:

Copy and send it to your friend whom you want to connect. You can do it via email, im or whatever. They can be as remote as on the other side of the globe. What they need to do then is to do the same as you did, open up SimpleDemo(Master), choose Tools -> Connect to Another World. Then copy and paste the information from you into the fields, the critical ones (must fill ones) are:

Router Address (get it from routerAddress tag), Router Port(from routerAddress tag), Session (Island ID) (from routerId tag), Name (from routerName tag) and Viewpoint Name (from vpn tag).

You can skip the manual input if you can setup Jabber. Anyway, we have used this method to connect to groups in Washington DC a few weeks ago and the connection was quite smooth and we managed to show case our Arts Metaverse project over Croquet platform. You do want to apply the newest patch first though. Give it a try.

Julian wrote a post today to give his view on the comparison between Open Croquet and Second Life. He describes it as a comparison between apples and oranges. I support Julian's points. Using my layman's term, this is how I see it: if Second Life is acting as a social network platform such as Wikipedia, then Croquet is like a web hosting platform (say Apache + PHP + MySQL). You may publish any contents in various of media format in Wikipedia, but you are still limited to the fundamental rules of Wikipedia. But the hosting platform may allow you to be much more creative and set up different content management systems or web applications. I don't know if this make sense... Just my 2 cents...

This is a work in progress. Uli and I are invited to do a pre-conference workshop in collaboration with friends from SURF, Netherlands at this year's Educause in Seattle a week from now. It is a continuing workshop from our last year's Educause pre-con workshop on Pachyderm. The workshop on our side will be covering concept mapping tools and rich media. We will introduce a new tool which will convert Pachyderm presentations into standard concept mapping XML and then one can use open source concept mapping tools such as VUE to outline the entire Pachyderm presentation or even browse through them screen by screen!

The simple reason behind this is because Pachyderm presentations are hardly linear, the object oriented designs can easily get the learners (even the designers themselves sometimes). Therefore, a tool to sketch out the package outline (like a site map for a site) is very much needed. In order to demonstrate the tool, we created a Pachyderm presentation on Arts Metaverse which we will be handing out to the workshop participants and ask them browse through the presentation. Then we will ask them to use the tool and convert the presentation into a concept map to see if it would help them to further understand the topic. As I said, it's a work in progress. But feel free to check out the Pachyderm presentation on Arts Metaverse and Ancient Spaces. Stay tuned for further information.

Open Croquet 1.0 SDK kept on crashing when we tried to connect multiple world. Then I learned from a conversation with Mark McCahill that the fix to the crashing issue is available using Croquet's built-in update mechanism. Here's the step by step instruction of how to get to the update for the connection crash fix:

1. Left click somewhere in the Croquet desktop to open the World menu, and select the "open" item. (for mac, use the normal click)

2. Open a Monticello browser.

3. In the right pane of the Monticello browser, click on the line that says "http://hedgehog.software.umn.edu:8888/Contribution" then click on the "open" button at the top of the Monticello window. A new Monticello window appears listing the categories within that repository.

4. Click on the refresh button, then scroll the left pane of the window and look for a bolded category name. If you have never performed this update, you should see the category "Wisconsin" is bolded. Then click on the category "Wisconsin".

5. You will now see that the right pane has a list of "Wisconsin" packages on the right pane. They look like "Wisconsin-hrs.1XX.mcz". The most recent is at the top of the list and bolded if it is not installed. But you should start upgrade from the lowest BOLD package. Click on it to select it. You may have to wait a little for Croquet to download the package from the network, but once a local copy of the package exists, the "load" and "merge" buttons will be enabled.

6. Close the Contributions repository window, go back to the first Monticello browser window and close it too.

This should fix your crashing upon connection problem in Croquet. Try to apply other updates if you can, it's a good idea to keep your Croquet image up-to-date.

My Dell XPS 1710 was sent back for a fix due to the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX failed. The dell technical team replaced the old card with the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GTX. However, it comes with a specific driver. After re-installing Croquet, it keeps crashing upon starting the world rendering. The error message looks like this:
"Sorry but the VM has crashed.
Exception code: C00000FD
Exception address: 69929A87
Current byt code: 241
Primitive index: 120"

After checking the crash.dmp file located at the Croquet's root directory, I realize it is a graphic rendering issue could be caused by the graphic card driver...

Then I learned from an email at the smalltalk user list written by Jeff McNeill:

If I understand the issue properly, the new Nvidia drivers are optimized for duo core systems (when present), but the application Croquet is not, so there is a need to force the app to use the Ogl as if there was a single core processor on the computer.

He suggested to turn off the OpenGL Threading Optimization. I went ahead and changed mine, it fixed the problem instantly. Here is how to do it with a nvidia driver, goto display properties, "settings" tab, "advanced" button, choose the GeForce XXXXXX (your video card)" tab, "start nvidia control panel". for GeForce Go 7950, it should look like this:

Then look for a section under "3D configuration", look for a setting for "threaded optimization", it should be put on as "auto" by default, change the setting to "off". Mine looks like this:

This should fix the crash right a way, no need to reboot. Jeff also suggested to modify the registration if you can't find the thread optimization setting with your video card driver:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\
{1714F987-8B2B-498D-A45A-FB2AE3436429}\0000\
_Croquet.exe:Ogl_ThreadControl=dword:00000002

I didn't need to try this, but you can if you know what you are doing.

Oui, we got Wii remote working with Croquet this afternoon. We were preparing for the 2007 UBC Townhall tomorrow and a funny thought came to my mind – why can't we use wii remote to navigate through Arts Metaverse? This way, we can get some audience up to the stage and wii their way out our Arts Metaverse!

My co-worker Liang kindly brought over her Wii remote and we hooked it up to an iMac (configured using DarwiinRemote). Then we fired open Croquet and voila it worked beautifully.

We configured holding down B key and tilt (or rotate) the wii remote to walk around, A to move objects and windows, - for changing perspective (camera position), + for panning view points (camera angle), press 1 or 2 to stop using the Wii remote. I attached a diagram to illustration the configuration:

Check out the following video to see it in action:

Basic navigation inside of Open Croquet using a Wii Remote! Walking, and moving objects demostrated in this video.

Explaining wii remote configuration in Open Croquet...

Liang practicing wii remote in Open Croquet

The Arts Metaverse web site is updated! We added a few updates on recent developments and a dozen of new images. Oh, don't forget to check out the new video clips...

Here is another video of the Arts Metaverse UBC Campus where the avatar travels into a gallery showing the both 2D and 3D of the original textures on Ancient Mayan vases. Dr. Marvin Cohodas is the academic we are working with on this particular project. He has been struggling for years to find a way of showing the students the textures in 3D dimension. This is important because the Mayan vases are being used to record history where stories are being painted onto the vase. It is critical to “see” the art works continuously in 360 degrees rotation rather than starting from one point to another. Many of them have no “beginning” and “ending”. The flat texture scrolls in 2D simply destroys the story line. Modeling the vases and applying the textures on to the 3D objects would be a better solution for the students to visualize the story much accurately...

Thanks to Open Croquet, we are able to bring in high resolution textures and user defined natual light sources.

Here is a sneak preview of what's to come with Arts Metaverse. The video shows a draft campus of Arts Metaverse in Open Croquet, Some buildings are resembles of Rose Garden, Chan Centre for The Performing Arts, Buchanan Tower, Morris & Hellen Belkin Arts Gallery, and of course, the UBC Clock Tower.

BTW, the Arts Metaverse's web site is updated. We will be presenting the project in this year's NMC summer conference. Please excuse the poor quality of the clip, it seems youtube has really compressed it.

More videos are to come, please stay tuned!

I am attending the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface Conference at Durham, North Carolina in the next few days. Arts Metaverse will make its first appearance in the conference during a panel session Uli and I will be a part of. Here is a quick screen shot of the simulation we will be showing. Thanks to my co-workers at UBC Arts ISIT for their hard work in the past few weeks! The flight is leaving in a few hours, I better catch some sleep...

Yes, we are now officially a member of the newly established consortium (March 28th, 2007) – The Croquet Consortium. This consortium is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing and promoting the widespread adoption of open source, Croquet technologies for research, education and industry. Here in the Faculty of Arts, we value the Croquet technology being the open source solution to our scholars whom want to research and develop educational based metaverse. We are currently actively using Croquet in the Arts Metaverse project.

I am looking forward to the upcoming involvement with this exciting community. I am already learning so much from the Croquet developers' list.

Upon releasing the Open Croquet SDK 1.0, the Croquet Consortium was formally launched. It is a non-profit foundation aimed to promote the Open Croquet technology. It will strengthen the communications between the developers and users of Open Croquet SDK and it's related products. This consortium offers an avenue for academic, corporate, and individual members ensure the long-term viability of the community by federating their Croquet software development projects mobilizing distributed resources on their behalf.

For more information, read Julian's announcement here.

Croquet SDK 1.0 is released! Kudos to the Croquet development team, and the Open Croquet Consortium. I first learned this from Julian's blog. It's great to see Croquet is finally out of it's beta series. This new release is more stable and easier to use. A lots of bugs I have experienced in the beta releases have disappeared (e.g. Single right click “teleport” you). I can't wait to generate collaborative working spaces in the new version for the Arts Mertaverse project.

Here are a few new functions would defenitley benefit the Arts Metaverse Project:

1). The “mini-world” object can serve as a “portal” to enter a new space. This would allow us generate “previews” of the ancient world and the students can “jump” into the world at any time by walk over the mini-world object.

2). Users can easily create light sources in the world. This will allow the visitors to light up a “torch” in a dark world. This way and the world creators can focus on more precise implementations of the settings. (e.g. I want to create a cave, but don't want to put any lights in there to mis-lead the visitors. It is important for the visitor to explore the dark space in their own manner...)
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3). Simple primitives like cube and sphere can be created inside of the Croquet world. But with the mesh import features, you don't really need to us this to build 3D objects inside of the Croquet World. I suppose this is for the people whom don't want fiddle around with Blender or 3D Max...
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4). Use “ctrl + A” to toggle the viewing perspectives. Thanks guys! How many times I heard the question “how do I get rid of the giant rabbit head so I can see the world better?!”
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5). Built-in camera and audio functions, use the KAT demo and goto new Video Camera Output and Microphone Output, you can instantly video conference with everyone in the world! I remember Julian was showing us this in UCLA. Unfortunately I don't have a camera installed on this machine, gonna try it out tomorrow with my co-workers
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6). “what is my location” instantly shows you network information of the terminal computer you are using, you can send “xml post card” like this:
where your friends can join your world instantly
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7). The “admin” menu gives you detailed system information about the world for debugging and traffic monitoring purposes.
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8). Last but not least, one can easily browse the world wide web from inside of the Croquet world by “new” -> “desktop” -> “the url to the web site” in the KAT Demo
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Two new features I would like to explore more but no time right now is: “Robot Play/Record” and “Remote Desktop Configuration”. I believe the “Robot Play/Record” function allows you to record in-world activities such as avatar gestures and much more...
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These are just the obvious functions I could pick up in the last couple of hours. But I am sure after going through the programming tools more thouroughly tomorrow, more exciting features will come out.

BTW, did I mention that I am blogging this from inside of Croquet?!
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Some of my blog readers have asked me the question that Second Life have made the move toward open source by releasing their code for the Second Life Viewer. I just want to quickly note what they have released are the code for the client side application, not the server technology. Without the server being open source, Second Life is still a proprietary system. In another word, Second Life is a server based technology that allowing multi-users to log on and share the simulation experience, without the server, the client is only a useless portal to an empty space.

The next question would be will this hurt Linden Lab's business? The answer is not likely. Sure people can reverse engineer the Second Life server and then “duplicate” the entire second life technology, but what's more important is the business model and service model behind the business. This reminds me when Macromedia just released their Flash Viewers' code, both Adobe and Corel came up with their own Flash authoring applications (Adobe LiveMotion and Corel R.A.V.E.). However Macromedia didn't lose much of their flash application buyers at all. I do need to point out Flash is not a server based technology (all flash animations are rendered on the client side). So, Linden Labs is, of course, in a much safer position. In order to replicate Second Life, one needs to create their own server to work with the clients.

Then why would Linden Lab do this? I don't know, and I don't understand either. Because many of the open source network based applications I have come across with are poor user interface on the client side but solid server architecture. This is because most of the open source projects do not have hundreds of marketing specialist and support staff to feed the users' need back to the developers at a timely basis. From a pure technical point of view, I personally think companies would benefit much more by releasing their server side technology rather than the well thought and well designed front end applications. Linden Labs is doing exactly the opposite by releasing the client side codes only and hide the server side code from the Open Source community. This way they lose the opportunity of having hundreds and thousands of brilliant open source developers to improve their server side technology.

Croquet, needless to say, it is a complete open source product. In fact, you can even start your own company based on the code.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so... - from Croquet License page

However, I do respect the effort of Linden Lab making the client application code available to the developers, it is a baby step towards the open source community. I am looking forward to see them working out a better strategy, a plan that is win-win for both them and the the open source communities. That, of course, will always benefit us the end users.

In extension of the Ancient Spaces project, my team has recently launched the Arts Metaverse project which will focus on developing an open source platform to accommodate the need of sharing high quality 3D models in a synchronized multi-user environment. This is an ambitious goal so we need a “giant's shoulder” to stand on. The Open Croquet Project is going to be the giant. For those of you may not know,

Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and Metaverse that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices. - definition from the Open Croquet Consortium website.

I first learned about Open Croquet in early 2006, through a conversation with Scott Leslie. I was coordinating the technical development team on the Ancient Spaces project at the moment. After a few hours of fiddling, I got the beta Croquet installed and working on a Windows machine. However, it took me months to understand and appreciate the power behind this genius system. It then quickly obtained my attention from further developing the Buchanan Island in the Second Life system. Many people have asked me why? Without going into the details of the differences between Open Croquet and Second Life, I can give you two main reasons of this shift: Open Source and high quality 3D modeling. Second Life island cost a lot of money and all objects in the world of second life must be created using the basic primitives. Open Croquet allows me to freely import high quality 3D models from any professional 3D authoring programs like Blender, 3D Max or Maya 3D. Besides these two differences, there are also some other key advantages with Croquet:
- A powerful P2P net work support. When I run Croquet in my office, it automatically detects other computers around me that are running Croquet.
- The portal technology allows application sharing between different operating systems. Say I can play a PC game with my Mac friends.
- Video conferencing and other communication tools without using server technology.
- Allows users freely define the space being created, this will provide the “land owners” (the academics) complete customizable controls of the environment. (e.g. not just define the gravitational force in the land)
- Easy to back up the contents published using Croquet, easy to take them on line and off line, this avoid many copy-right issues.
- From some aspects, a structured p2p Croquet net work is much more secure than a server based large scale metaverse.

Late in the year 2006, I had the honor to attend the Open Croquet presentation at UCLA given by one of it's original architect, Julian Lombardi. It was a further eye opening experience for me. Julian explained the history and vision of this project. He also shared the industrial interest in the product. Those of you have paid attention to the Open Croquet project would have noticed it's official web site is changed. You can go there an learn more about the project development and the consortium. There are two email lists: the users' list (none programmers) and the developers' list (programmers and administrators). Subscribe and let's together develop something exciting in the open source community.

*Recommend* Watch Julian's presentation on Croquet!

Arts Metaverse Machu Picchu Models 01 in Open Croquet

Arts Metaverse Machu Picchu Models 02 in Open Croquet

Arts Metaverse Machu Picchu Models 03 in Open Croquet

Arts Metaverse Machu Picchu Models 04 in Open Croquet

Arts Metaverse Machu Picchu Models 05 in Open Croquet

Arts Metaverse Machu Picchu Models 06 in Open Croquet

Arts Metaverse Machu Picchu Models 07 in Open Croquet