Tim Wang's eLearning 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.

Remember this article on Chinese Gold Farmers where people are playing games 24/7 to “dig” gold and treasure out of on line multi-player games? Well, I think re-organizing the talented players to develop virtual properties in Second Life and then sell them to the Americans would be much more profitable. Think about it, while there are thousands of western individuals make a living by buying empty land, developing the land and then selling the land, why not officially start a company in India or China to do formal development in SL where the labors are much cheaper! There is my business idea of the month! I wonder if there have been people doing things like this... Gonna go do some digging...

LOL, guess what?! This idea has been long implemented by Anshe. Read the amazing story! The lady is originally from China and she has a studio in Hubei China where two dozen of local developers are doing virtual realty development in SL. I knew about anshechung.com, but didn't know their developers are in China. Brilliant people...

With all the hype about Second Life and virtual simulation platforms used in education, here is a quick review of the UBC Arts Campus – Buchanan island.

The island was purchased early 2006 by Arts ISIT, thanks to the grants from Dr. Marvin Cohodas, a fine arts faculty member here at UBC. It is a small island in the Second Life virtual space, we named it after the Faculty of Arts' main building – Buchanan. Everything starts from the scratch, modifying the terrain, land texture, and geographical planning.

(Island Type 3, and olive shaped island)

(Me standing "over" the island)

The very first thing we built was the Rose Garden and the Flag Pole which is a symbolic site of UBC. Of course we included the "Plaza".

(UBC Rose Garden and Flag Pole in Second Life)

(the "Plaza")

The first architecture we attempted to build was the clock tower and the water fountain besides it.

(UBC Clock Tower in Second Life)

The Helen Belkin art gallery was the next in line and as you can see, we have modified the concrete roof into a glass panels for extra lighting and easy navigation access.

(UBC Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Second Life)

We had a lot fun building the Chan center (it's big!) which we will attempt to use it for film and creative studies courses.

(UBC Chan Centre in Second Life)

The immediate academic purpose of building the island is to recreate the Bonampak building in order to accommodate the artistic paintings on the interior walls. Until today, Marvin's students are learning the paintings through books and photos where the stories are not connected and spaces are not defined. With the building in SL, students are able to browse through the paintings “room” by “room” in the virtual space.

(Bonampak in Second Life exterior)

(Bonampak in Second Life interior)

We have also filled the gallery with rotating vases where the scroll on the wall is changed according to the vase you choose and the vase will rotate in order to illustrate a continuing visual art story of ancient Maya.

(Maya Vases in Second Life)

Yep, they are doing it! Linden Lab has increased the price on private island purchases. The price has gone from $1250 to $1675 and the monthly maintenance fees increased from $175 to $295. This really makes me to think if Second Life is still a sustainable tool for education.

In the meanwhile, it's amazing to think about how one could of "made money" off this price surge. The "black market" on SL private island is really heating up due to the previously purchased islands owners pays a much lower maintenance fee.

Should I say we are "lucky" that we have one island already? Or it is time to "dump" it...

The market of virtual property trade is growing at an amazing rate: 900 million US dollars annually! Most of the trades are conducted by the computer game players in buying and selling virtual currency and character based virtual properties (using real money to sell / purchase virtual weapons, cloth, etc.) However, what people don't know is that most of these trades are illegal because the properties are owned by the game manufacturers not the players. Most of the games come with an "end-user agreement" document which no players ever bother reading, in the documents, there is always a written agreement like this one: " the ownership of the characters and merchandises in this game are belonging to the manufacture, not the player". This simply forbid virtual property trade in the real market between the players. Many game producers have practiced this right by eliminating player accounts that are associated to the virtual property trades, terminating web sites which facilitate virtual property trades. So, next time, before you buy any gold for your WOW character, read the software end user agreements first.

There is a video clip released on YouTube describing a new profession in China, the online game workshops. They gave the workers an interesting name: Chinese Gold Farmers.

The business idea is simple, you have hundreds of teenagers playing popular international online games (e.g. World Of Warcraft)days and nights (I mean 12+ hours a day), eating boxed food, sleeping on the floor (for a very short time), open up the curtains a couple of hours every week! From the intensive team plays, these players get high level characters, rare weapons and virtual gold. Then the company put these virtual merchandises onto eBay, get bought by the American and Japanese players.

This idea may sounds tedious, but the truth is there are hundreds of this types of "Game Workshops" opened in China and there are well organized "outsourcing" infrastructure behind these commercial "services". The profits are real and the business are expanding.

What I like about this is that soon people may find thousands of best WOW players in China. What I find sad about is the gamers are taking these
"virtual products" way too serious! The hours of online playing are destroying their life and health. But hey, like the kids in the video say, I am earning money while playing my favorite game, what else can one ask?!

Another discussion on virtual properties

Just read some news on Chinese gamers’ network, a new profession is expanding rapidly – Professional Gamers. Here is a real story: 4 high school teenagers played several online games as a team to gather virtual properties like weapons, magic items and virtual cloths for one year, and they made over 80,000 RMB which is a lot of money for the Chinese teenagers. Here is a price list of some virtual items in a popular Chinese online game:
Ocean-Star Sword: 4,000 RMB
Golden Bo: 5,000 RMB
Black Magical Necklace: 6,000 RMB
Blue Magical Ring: 8,000 RMB
And mind you these are real money players need to play to obtain these virtual items. Some of these items are even more expensive than a real item in the real market. (e.g. a Pearl Necklace)

This tells us that there is a new generation of players/learners that us educators need to face in the immediate future. They are familiar, and some even addicted to a virtual environment – a world our generation created for them. They spend more time in learning, communicating and living in that virtual world than they do in the real world. We must adopt and study these behaviors and act accordingly or otherwise our traditional education will no longer be qualified in their world.

Have you ever experienced playing an online game for 72 hours none stop, by killing the 5000th monster, you finally found the axe (very unique, cost 10000 gold to buy and you get 1 gold per hour of game play) you have been looking for, you feel like the luckest guy in the world. Log off the online game, sleep for 12+ hours, and the first thing you do after wake up is to log back into the game and try out your new weapon, and BAM, you realise the axe is gone due to a service failure. You contact the game service provider, and they tells you to get lost, it’s only a game. The rage makes you want to sue them, but you then tell yourself that’s just rediculous… Well, you don’t have to feel that way anymore, go ahead and sue them, and you will win. The above was a real story happened last December in Beijing, China and the court ruled the game service provider to restore the the lost property in the virtual game environment.

According to the defendant’s lawyer, many virtual items in the online games can be considered as personal propeties since it cost the player’s time, knowledge and hard work to gain and thurs they should be protected by the law. There is a legal committee in China which includes over 20 lawyers currently fighting for approval of the new law to protect the virtual property. Heck, maybe it’s time to start a Virtual Property Insurance company…