Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Today at 4:00 PM EST, over 60 avatars gathered on the Sun's island in Secondlife, cuing up to get a "ticket" for the first experimentation of the Wonderland Project by Sun's Microsystems. The event was organized by the MediaGrid which is a computational grid platform that promotes 3D virtual learning environment. The event had a slow start, mainly due to the registration process. However, many of the crowds managed to download the newest edition of Wonderland and got onto the platform. The system seems to be stable and here are some screen shots from the event:

Everyone cued up in Second Life, getting ready for Wonderland...

Picture taken from The Princess of Yaximixche's Blog...

One of the highlights at this year's NMC summer conference is seeing how the consortium is moving towards the open source immersive 3D platform created by Suns Microsystems - Project Wonderland.

On June 12th, Kevin Roebuck and Jordan Slott showed a slick demo of the yet to come Wonderland version 1.0 at the 2008 NMC summer conference. The platform seemed to be very stable and efficient. Jordan also showed us a cool 2D tool which would make the 3D world build relatively easy. Since the entire project is done in java, tools can be "easily" embedded in web pages to provide precise control of the 3D world. Another word, a true bridge between the 2D web interface and 3D metaverse can be established. It seems there has been some serious re-development of the platform we were looking at. Jmonkey engine has been introduced in the newer version of project.

On June 13th, Larry Johnson and kevin Roebuck further explained the NMC Open Virtual World project. The 2 main reasons behind the open source initiative are exactly aligned with the Arts Metaverse project here at UBC:

1) Intelectual Property ownership need to be more flexible and better facilitated;
2) Complex 3D models and precise digital reconstructions bring the true meaning of 3D metaverse in the high education communities.

These two reasons drove us to drop Second Life and stared using Open Croquet for the Arts Metaverse project. I am happy to see NMC is moving forward with this initiative. According to Larry, we should see some serious collaboration between the Wonderland development team at Suns Microsystems and NMC members in the next six months.

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

Flying to Princeton for this year's NMC summer conference with my colleagues from UBC: Cyprien Lomas, Joel Chauvin, Natasha Boskic and Negin Mirriahi. Diana Oblinger, President of Educause opened this conference with a powerful speech on her visions of e-Learning 3.0. All of the key note speaks can be found here. Stay tuned for further updates...

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.