Vicroads Virtual Worlds Lab

On July first 2010 I helped Mandy Salomon facilitate a 'Virtual Worlds Lab' at Swinburne University for Vicroads. The aim of the day was to explore the future potential of virtual worlds. After some initial discussions, participants created 'avatars' and were able to experience life in a virtual environment, exploring, designing, and socialising. They were then able to attend a virtual conference and tour by the CIO of the City of Edmonton in Canada, Chris Moore.

The full blog for the day can be found here.

Update - Connected Lives, Virtual world builds for Victoria University; School of Construction, Monash University; School of Pharmacy

It's been a while since the last post, lots is happening.

Connected Lives is just about to wrap up, we are currently in the process of writing the project up. The general theme of the paper will be 'Increasing the social connectedness of young people with Asperger's Syndrome through the use of collaborative virtual environments.' We have also been meeting with a wide range of people in the telecommunications, education and health services industries in order to look into where the project might go to from here. One part of it is digitalrespite.com which should be ready in around a month and worthy of another post. The other side is pushing for more individualised and specialised education programs for those with Asperger's.

Also at Victoria University we are continuing to work with the School of Construction Industries in virtual worlds. We are currently working with specialists across a range of areas to create engaging, 3 dimensional, interactive assignments. After a crew meeting last week I am quite excited, we have some ideas which are perhaps not so new to gaming, but new to virtual worlds and new to education.

At Monash University we have been working on a couple of projects which are part of Pharmatopia, a virtual environment in Second Life which involves over 12 schools of Pharmacy from around the world.

The first project is a Virtual Sterile Clean Room. The aim of this build is to train pharmacy students in clean room theory and process.

The second project is an artificially intelligent virtual patient bot, which will be used by medical and pharmacy students for interprofessional development.

Another fun thing I am involved with is leading the 'Dev Lab' fortnightly on Friday afternoons at Melbourne Grammar School. The Dev Lab is a place where technically minded folk can gather and work on projects together. Current projects include a couple of websites, the Epic Lan, and some virtual world activities.

I am also working on a few other projects, including some virtual worlds work with Swinburne and Vicroads. I hope to have a lot more news to share shortly.

NYE Art Project

This is a featured project at Instructables, which is pretty cool after all I have learnt from that site.

Craig helped. He needs a website I can link to.

Article for Australian Teacher Magazine

Here is an article Stefan and I just wrote for Australian Teacher Magazine, about the use of virtual worlds in education.

Article about the Avatar Project in The Age

First time I have bought the Age in 5 years. Looking good guys!

Click here for the online article

Other links;
Stuff.co.nz
Vodpod
Sydney Morning Herald
SL
and many many more, it's amazing how fast news can spread.

Connected Lives Video Interview for Vichealth

This is a video of Stefan, John and I explaining the project we are doing in partnership with Vichealth and Interchange Gippsland.



TRANSCRIPT

"What we are really interested in is seeing how these technologies can positively impact the sense of connectedness of young people with disabilities, particularly with Asperger's Syndrome and related conditions. I guess this has been inspired by some of our students at the uni who had Asperger's Syndrome, and we found that they used virtual worlds to practice being social, at the same time they were really good at computer skills themselves."

"We will be working with a group of up to thirty young people in a range of activities within a virtual world. These activities will be designed to engage them in social interaction and a range of other areas. We will be measuring that interaction to measure how this technology impacts these young people."

"The project involves Interchange Central Gippsland who are connecting us with the younger people, and it will be researched by Victoria University. I am really looking forward to the project, it's a great opportunity to work with cutting edge technology and young kids who really need it."

TUG Engine

Another description I have posted recently on the site of one of our major (and most enjoyable) projects at the uni, the TUG Engine.
This should be ready for testing in a few weeks.


TUG is an open source educational games engine.

Funded by the Victorian State Government and administered by Victoria University, Australia, TUG is a 'game engine' using Second Life/Open Sim, PHP and MySQL which can be used for education and vocational training. The project also includes a research component.

All of our work is open source - scripts, models, textures, PHP code, MySQL databases, and other intellectual property.

Osvr.net

From the description I just put up on the site, this is a dream project for me.

OSVR.NET is an open simulator network administered by Victoria University, Australia and supported by various institutions including Vichealth.

The purpose of this network is to provide a safe, configurable virtual environment for institutions to hold activities in. More details about the background of the project can be found here.

In addition to this, there is a research component which provides extensive data on activities within the simulator.

Working with Secondary School Students in Virtual Environments

These are a few examples of the work I have done with Secondary School students over the past couple of years.



First up is a Virtual Make Poverty History Concert held at Melbourne Grammar School as part of their annual Leadership Conference.







The week after this virtual concert I went to Sydney with a group of students for the Skoolaborate Congress.

Using machinima characters to tell stories is a great way of getting kids to document events, we did the following one a couple of weeks after the conference. It allows kids to add a personal and creative touch without exposing themselves too much.
The background is a simple image slideshow(easily done in Sony Vegas, you can automate the import effects and transition times etc.). The foreground has the Second Life avatars of the kids, originally filmed in front of a virtual green screen whilst speaking jibberish into a mic to get the speech animations happening. The voices we recorded in a stairwell on a mobile phone - the only place in the school we could find some peace.



Here is what the workshop I was helping facilitate at the conference in Sydney produced. Students from New Zealand and Australia(and teachers from Australia, US and NZ) worked together to create this virtual news report.

Videos of Victoria University Student Projects

Below are some videos which show the range of work we have been doing in Second Life, and now OSVR. Creating work which can be captured as a video and then uploaded to youtube is often appealing to students, it gives the work a sense of purpose.

Future Melbourne 2051
This was one of the results of my first year using Second Life with students in Interactive Storytelling and Writing for Multimedia classes at Victoria University.
This class chose the topic(a futuristic, post-apocalyptic kind of Melbourne) themselves and then developed stories and builds to suit the theme.
More details on this project can be found at Melbourne2051.com.



The following year at VU we decided on a more restrictive theme which would also place more individual responsibility on the students. It probably worked for the better students.
The task was to create a 'Seinfeld' like short machinima. Each student was given a small apartment space in Second Life to use as a set.
Here is the class blog.
Here are a couple of the better results;

Terence & The Metaphysical Mushroom



Around the block



The students that did well with this exercise continue to do well at uni or in the industry. I think it was a good exercise for gaming and multimedia students as it involved a high level of organisation and a wide range of production skills - although I must confess a lot of 18-21 year olds seem to think Second Life is not very 'cool,' for lack of a better word.