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.

Avatar Project wins Community ICT Innovator of the Year

Avatar Project wins Community ICT Innovator of the Year

For the past two years the Avatar Project has developed a community of young people creating, building and interacting in virtual worlds, with some tremendous outcomes.
My project blog has some examples of the work we were doing, the research outcomes are due later this year.
We are now in the research and writing phase of the project.
A highlight of receiving the award was going up to Sydney for the ceremony and conference where Mark Pesce, the inventor of VRML was the MC. I remember around 8 years ago struggling to make a 3 dimensional nightclub using VRML - it was one of my first forays into virtual worlds - so finally (very briefly) meeting him was the perfect end to a great project.