Deformed: Virtual Worlds & 1970s Computing History

Location: Watching Douglas Engelbart's "The Mother of all Demos"

image credit: New Media Consortium at Flickr

Many of us who have dabbled with virtual worlds have wondered how they could form a constellation of networked systems, in much the same way as the Internet's servers do today. Whatever the fate of this niche technology called virtual worlds, from the failure to run on mobile devices to the inherent boom-bust cycle of Second Life's particular brand, the road not taken always beckons.

There is an historical precedent here, and it's one that has a happy ending. Could the same be true for virtual worlds?

Today's Internet: Clarke's Law in Action

For a moment, consider the complex and delicate magic that occurs whenever we use the Internet. My university server talks fine to Google, for work such as the just-completed Usher project. Whenever the Outlook mail client randomly eats student file attachments sent to me, I smile. Ah, Microsoft's wonderfully Byzantine and wonderfully doomed, technology, eating even its own Word files. Cue Apple and Google, as the Ottomans on the horizon, slowly gobbling up a once mighty empire.  Good riddance.

Then, because of the lack of monopoly that Microsoft coveted and almost got, I have the students try, try again with Gmail. Excede's servers send me the results and, once I type, transmit my thoughts--profound or inane--from home travel via satellite to Google.  When I send notice of this post to interested folks at Twitter or Facebook, the servers hosting that data all "talk" to one another.

Types of Gardens and a World-Wide Web, 1975?

Compare that to virtual worlds technology, ostensibly part of the Internet since that is how we access it. Second Life, InWorldz, and many others that share core technologies could, in theory, speak to each other. Had development not branched off as it has done, Linden Lab and a few other grids might have pioneered a system for avatars and inventory to travel from world to world.  That happens with OpenSim Hypergridding, a technology that John Lester promoted, before his work for Reaction Grid turned to Jibe-based 3D worlds.  But "interoperability" died years ago at Linden Lab, and it seems unlikely to return.

It's curious, this set of walled gardens. If today the Internet resembles Borges Garden of Forking Paths, Virtual Worlds resemble something else: the road taken in the 1970s toward personal computing.

I realized that while reading John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said, a history of early computing got influenced by the American Counterculture:

When personal computing finally blossomed in Silicon Valley in the mid-seventies, it did so largely without the history and research that had gone before it. As a consequence, the personal-computer industry would be deformed for years, creating a world of isolated desktop boxes, in contrast to the communities of shared information that had been pioneered in the sixties and early seventies. (179)

The Internet did not begin with Al Gore, whatever he may have claimed. It did not begin in Jobs' family garage and with Steve Wozniak's brilliant hardware hacks. It did not begin at Xerox PARC with the Alto. The personal computer with a GUI and mouse? Yes, we can credit or blame Xerox and Apple for that.

But years before, nearly every element of the modern Internet would have been possible with the Augment system, developed under the leadership of Douglas Engelbart. Yet that development stalled and ended, a revolution stillborn.  I think we can see an analogue for what is going on, at this cultural moment, with user-generated virtual worlds.

Engelbart's Mouse

Want to see what might have been for the Internet? I am convinced that had something like Augment  been made less opaque for casual users, we'd have had an academic, and perhaps consumer Internet in 1975. Engelbart gave a show-stopper of a demo in 1968, with mouse, text-editing with clipboard and copy/paste, multiple files, graphics on screen, electronic mail, hyperlinks tagged to graphics, and remote visitors via a network.  You can see what he was doing with Augment at these videos from Stanford.

The reasons for Augment's failure are complex; Markoff's book does justice both to the creator's vision and his ultimate failure to produce a widely adapted product.  What happened, however, for consumers was the emergence of walled gardens and proprietary systems from Apple, Microsoft, Digital, Tandy, and other competitors forgotten except by historians of technology.

When the Internet emerged, it came late to a culture of desktop boxes that could not, generally, talk to one another.

What if the personal computer revolution had begun with networking? And similarly...

What if Virtual Worlds Had Begun with Interoperability?

I'm writing an article about one group of USENET hobbyists who have made the jump to Facebook, because the old .alt group proved too chaotic and full of spammers, trolls, and other bottom feeders. They also made the leap because, frankly, .jpgs and text import and export well between applications. Text did in Engelbart's day.

Little aside from these, plus Collada files and some other graphic formats, can move between different virtual worlds.  Standards for inventories, for avatar meshes, and for "land" templates are different. In this technology landscape, OpenSim grids serve as today's Augment. Managing a bunch of avatars and a region in OS is hard to master, not stable in my experience except in the hands of a pro, but interoperable. Running an entire campus-hosted grid would be lovely, but it's beyond my time or expertise to learn.

Other products with potential beyond SL's technology, such Unity 3D and Jibe, produce elegant worlds, but they don't talk to other worlds and expert designers need to craft objects. They do offer vast potential, according to OpenSim pioneer Adam Frisby, for scaling, running on mobile devices, and improved grahics.

That sounds great until one considers faculty skills-sets and what it takes to build with Unity or Jibe. As noted  before in this blog, developing for these platforms may be within reach for architecture and engineering students, but at my university, it's challenge enough to get students to juggle multiple e-mail accounts and embed files from YouTube into their blog posts. We faculty lack time and incentives to do more with them, let alone learn 3D applications such as Maya or Blender.  Yet nearly all of us at my school have created content, mostly with text and images and sometimes digital video, and shared it on the Internet.

For all its limitations and toxicity as a brand, Second Life and, lets amateurs with a copy of Photoshop build easily. I'm told that Cloud Party does too, and I will soon try again with Cloud Party's latest build tools. Scripting remains something for those not faint of heart and projects to make visual scripting tools, such as MIT's Scratch for SL, remain as stillborn as Augment.

What it will Take to be Disruptive

Here comes a sweeping generalization, and I'm ready to fall on this sword if some wise person can prove me wrong. Virtual worlds will never be a disruptive technology, in Tim Wu's sense of the term, until they become an interoperable and popular tool for everyday life, as the Web and e-mail have become.

Had virtual worlds begun with a series of collaborative academic ventures rooted in common standards, rather than a group of for-profit start-ups from The Valley, we might have that disruption and a 3D Web today.  Then the profits would follow, because in 1968, who could have foreseen eBay or Amazon or Facebook?

Right now, however, it's still 1968 and we've all seen the potential of a disruptive technology, as those who watched Engelbart's presentation did.

So today, who will build the 3D Web?

The Dream of Reason (Again) in OpenSim

Location: Virtual House of Usher

With some instructions from Jokay, I was able to configure the Firestorm OpenSim viewer to log right into the build of Nevermore, transported (far as I can tell) seamless from hosting by Reaction Grid to Jokay's new host.

The transition was really smooth, though Roderick rezzed as Ruth (quickly fixed).  I've now saved his usual outfit as an outfit, replete with skin, shape, hair, AO...something I've long done with Iggy in Second Life but just forgot in OpenSim.

My plan would be to use Jokay's grid as my Lifeboat in case the looming changes in the SL viewer render our campus desktop Macs and PCs unable to run their latest client.

Stay tuned for more about the plant to use SL, one final time, for what may be my last hurrah in virtual-worlds teaching: my final exam suing the SL build of the House of Usher simulation/improv for the History of Cyberspace course.

From Scratch, Key Elements For an Educational Virtual World

Location: Thinking Cap in Place

After my few posts about Cloud Party and Glitch, I began pulling together a list of features that I'd want in a virtual world if I had unlimited funds and time to build one myself.

I plan to put this list of features to the vote with colleagues in VWER, before we hold a meeting about "What I learned from a silly game called Glitch" early in August.

• User-Generated Content: The killer feature for virtual worlds used by educators. We can make and share our creations in a world that is, essentially, a big sandbox
• Collaborative Permissions: Creators can transfer full ownership for shared builds so backups and exports are possible. Mixed-permissions builds in Second Life are a nightmare
• In-World Building with Simple Tools: Again, for collaboration this seems very popular with educators
• Offline Building with Professional 3D Tools: For advanced builders with 3D modeling skills
• Local Hosting Options: Educational Institutions like to own their hardware and make backups frequently
• The Illusion of a Contiguous World: World maps are available for Glitch, most OpenSim grids, and Second Life. In Cloud Party, to my knowledge no map is available
• Several Means of Travel: All virtual worlds include point-to-point movement such as teleportation.  Those making simulations in a world, however, should be able to turn that feature off, so participants are forced to walk or ride to a destination. Second Life manages this well with settings for parcels and regions
• Freedom of, and From, Adult Content: This will be contentious even among educators. I'd suggest that pornography is not needed in an educational world, but adult content, such as art-museum nudity or discussions of sexuality, is necessary for many educational purposes
• Simulations Tools, Including a Physics Engine a Combat System: My students asked for this again and again in reviews of my House of Usher simulation. In realistic simulations, bad decisions have consequences.  Avatars in these settings should get tired, hungry, injured when appropriate. They might be able to "level up" for accomplishing goals in a course or assignment. This idea got suggested in Edward Castronova's Exodus to the Virtual World and I like it a lot
• Simple Help Tools: Glitch wins on this. The designers' humorous approach to FAQs and the Pet Rock charm me every time I log on.

What did I forget? Sound off!

Like Jilted Lovers?

 
Location: Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

image credit: Grizzla Pixelmaid at Flickr


I forget who at one of our VWER meetings told AJ Kelton, aka AJ Brooks, that he acted like a jilted lover when Linden Lab fired its education team and hiked our tier prices. But the simile is apt for me too; it explains some of our community's enthusiasm for Cloud Party, noted in my last post. There's not much at Cloud Party yet. When you cannot sit on your new couch, that shows we have a ways to go. But the will to "go" is there.

Slowly but surely, my own wonder and love for Second Life drained away. For students it was too hard to learn, too slow to use on wireless and their laptops. For me, it meant 200 hours of development for The Virtual House of Usher, a project that we ran a few classes through before my co-developer lost his job, our island closed in SL, and I needed to move on to other pursuits.

I get as much credit, and probably more, in my annual review for a published article. I could have written a few in those 200 hours.

Some of the reaction by SLers trying Cloud Party's new virtual world is predictable: soured on Linden Lab's mismanagement of a once-revolutionary online space, we either wish to punish the Lab or simply try some competition that is easier to master than the largely DIY spaces of OpenSim grids.

At our most recent Roundtable, I found myself spouting these words:

"I have come to hate Linden Lab and don't want them taking my money any more." You can read the rest of our exchange here in the transcript.

I did not get crucified by the assembled educators for saying this. Few SLevangelists were present, so the remarks were civil as we discussed what "special sauce" SL still has. The answers? Good content and community.

Linden Lab is repsonsible for neither of these. Stability, a third common answer, is their doing, but Cloud Party offers that one already with only a few weeks since they opened their world in open beta. The other two will follow.

So how can a firm such as Linden Lab win back our trust? To continue the romantic simile, they cannot or cannot in any span of time worth noting. If we look for exceptions in the history of technology, there is one.

It took decades for Detroit car makers to woo back those jilted by their crappy 1970s cars.

Linden Lab did not sell us a Chevy Vega or similar lemon. It sold us a lovely but doomed Corvair Monza and refused to listen to customers who bought into that dream or decided that they really wanted a Mustang instead. Recent efforts, such as Linden Realms or Wilderness, brought only yawns from our group of educators.

Clearly, Linden Lab lacks Detroit's time and government support. If Cloud Party flops, it's just a start-up firm, but Linden Lab's failure would make big news, even in media outlets that have at best sniggered, and mostly ignored it, since 2008.

Spaceports Saved, ISTE Island Closes

image credit: Scott Merrick's Flickr Photostream

Today, welcome and sad news in one dose. First, the International Spaceflight Museum was saved, by the action of "a higher-up Linden" than the staffer who denied Katherine Prawl's request to restore her sims. See the comments at New World Notes for more details.

Thus one door creaks open while another door slams shut. Alerted by a Tweet from Jokay Wollongong, I discovered that the island for The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) in Second Life will close as of March 1.

Scott Merrick's blog makes it clear that while ISTE will lose a region, the organization's virtual-worlds initiatives will not end. Scott notes that "The task force that examined options recommended two of them to the ISTE administration and and they accepted one, which involves rental space for ISTE" at Eduisland and a new ISTE region at Jokaydia Grid.

ISTE has long been a major player in the SL educational community, and it provided a popular orientation spot for new student and faculty avatars seeking to avoid the freakshows of the public welcome areas.

Now ISTE appears to be making the same moves I saw in my survey of educators: a smaller spot in SL to support educators and a larger one outside it.  This will save ISTE money, while maintaining their work with 3D immersive learning, given that tier fees for Jokaydia Grid run about 1/12 of what one would pay Linden Lab for a similar product that does not offer offgrid backups.

Thus, the SLexodus continues. Go by ISTE Island to thank them and bid them a fond farewell.

Poll Results 2012 of Education and Land Use

Here we have the results from 35 recipients who took the poll. Last year, I did leave the poll open longer, and as a result in 2011 I had 104 responses.  Perhaps this poll might have included the option that one respondent noted, namely "we own the same amount in SL as we did a year ago."

I like that idea, but I wanted to 1) repeat the questions as posed last year and 2) abide by the nine-question limit that Vizu provides for free polls. Here are the 2012 results:

 
And the 2011 results:

 

I hesitate to draw conclusions from a small sample size of 35, for a poll advertised on two e-lists related to virtual worlds. The data suggest that more people are paying out of pocket and more people in the past year, as compared to the  year before, have given up land in Second Life after the tier-discounts for education and nonprofits ended. 

I do not know who to interpret the "own no land" results. It's possible that many of the respondents are new to virtual worlds and have not made a decision. They may, in fact, be sharing parcels or islands with others, a result that is little changed from 2011.

An educator in the VWER group suggested that I poll educators again in the summer, when the two-year contracts for reduced tier end.  I would also like to know where educators have do their work, both in SL and outside it. Some questions worth asking:

• Do those remaining in SL use mainland parcels? University islands?
• Where are they going? To OpenSim grids? To Unity 3D and Jibe? Somewhere else?
• What factors most contribute to their decisions about renting server space (or hosting it locally) for a virtual world?

2012 Survey: Education, Nonprofits, and Virtual Worlds

Last year, in the wake of the decision by Linden Lab, I posted a poll of educators and those in the non-profit sector. The results can be found here.

One more year on, I'm repeating the survey. It is open until Feb. 1.

Update: Jan.  12: Hamlet Au reports Tyche Shepherd's figures on the number of private regions lost in SL in 2011: 879. I presume that most of these would not be educational sims.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Mesh & Educators

Location: SL with Mesh, OpenSim Without

The new meshes for SL, in some quarters, get depicted as the savior of the virtual world.

Um, okay. That's worth its own post...I don't know that Linden Lab will see tens of thousands of new and tier-paying users just because their world looks better. But educators, busy with so many other things related to their teaching, may not even know what the fuss is all about.

So here are a few premises for those new to Mesh, before I moderate next week's VWER meeting, entitled "Mesh In SL & Education: Boon? Bomb? No Big Deal?":

• We've always had a mesh system in SL. The new one simply provides more realism such as clothes that move with the avatar better and, mostly, fit well
• The new system requires a new viewer and, for developers, new out-of-world tools for making 3D content
• Gradually, viewers based on the 1.23 code will not be worth using, as Mesh content will be invisible. I saw this last week at VWER, where an early-adopter's mesh cat avatar remained invisible, except for her sculpted head and tail
• Prims, sculpted or Euclidean, won't vanish. Nor will our clothing layers, unless there's another nekkid-avatar bug like those in the early SL Viewer 2 code
• SL Viewer 3 is not the only option. Thank God. I'm biased against the Linden product after the lag-fest I've had with Viewer 2. I downloaded the Firestorm Viewer 3 Beta, and it permits seeing the new meshes
• Overall lag with the new viewers remain to be seen; I need to test Firestorm against the crowd we get at VWER.

Now for a short editorial. I just finished more building in Jokaydia Grid, using in-world tools and Photoshop. With Mesh, however, I cannot do collaborative builds in-world with a team, and acquiring the skills-set for the new content isn't worth my professional time. In this pic, I used a cylindrical prim to put a rotten corpse into a tomb, the sort of thing that could look downright terrifying with the new meshes.

But I doubt that my students will spend more than 30 seconds at this particular spot. What price in time and energy to take the next step to more immersion?

My evaluators could care less about mesh, and to be fair, why should they? For assessing educational outcomes, they don't need to know a sculpted prim from a Slim Jim. My colleagues working in virtual worlds will need to ask themselves some hard questions, unless they work at a school where students have the skills to create items using the new meshes.

Good Educational Sites In SL, 2011 Roundup

 
Location: VWER meeting


image at Flickr by Grizzla

Readers new to virtual worlds for education, or perhaps looking for new places to go alone or with students, should have a look at the transcript posted from a large group of educators at the VWER meeting of August 25.

It's doubly useful in how I aggregated recommended sites, by academic field, at the start of the transcript.

My sense is that while schools are generally downsizing their SL presence and educators are moving some work to OpenSim, much great SL content remains.  In fact, I'd hazard a guess about why the Reaction Grid region for the 1939 World's Fair appeared.  It's one of the few well known quality builds outside SL for educators.

I'm hoping that in comments to this post (and the post at VWER) readers can suggest other sites, particularly those outside SL. Ener Hax will, I hope, discuss what is going on at I Live in Science Land, and we'll get other non-SL updates useful for "back to school" planning for sites such as Heritage Key, where I've not been in some time.

An Illusion of Distance For Immersive Learning

Location: Nevermore Island, Jokaydia Grid

Immersion in a roleplaying setting means that, while exploring a doomed family's mansion and grounds in the year 1847, one should not glimpse Tesla Coils and trees the side of skyscrapers. When I did, I realized that raising some mountains would be in order.

My neighbors in Jokaydia Grid have some well conceived builds. I just don't want my students to see them, as they take on the role of Poe's narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher."  Unlike what I did in Second Life, here I'm not interested in having them experience a world: I want them to experience a closed simulation. So I began to raise the borders of the sim; gradually the Mountains of Nevermore got very steep.

When my geomancy was finished, the result amazed me. The borders of the sim now seem very far away. This too will become part of our roleplay.

Parts of the island are now very hard to navigate, and the difficulty increases as an avatar walks toward the mountains that ring all of the island except near rocks where the shipwreck of Grampus rests. That hulk contains some important clues about the dark history of the Usher family.

I've been playing with the idea of having several ghosts near the ship and on the land, instead of simply in the house; most of these spirits will help the students by giving them hints and clues. I may have one or two who are malicious. I've also hidden clues in the swamps and woods near the mountains.

When we run the simulation, I will turn flying off on the island. In the end, I hope we have a place where avatars who leave the House will get lost in a space that seems larger than it really is.

When I ran the Poe build in Second Life, in theory anyone could come by the site. My fears were that some exotic-dancer avatar, in pasties and g-string, would burst in using IM-doofus text chat during a crucial moment of the roleplay. I suppose we'd have pretended she was the ghost of some mad Victorian harlot.

Second Life users are mesmerized by the coming of more advanced mesh items to that grid. I am curious on several levels, but in particular I wonder if the added complexity won't slow to a crawl any systems save for high-end desktop computers. That would be a terrible outcome for educators who remain there. In leaving SL for my work, I've given up many things--namely, the loss of great inventory available at very low prices. But going back, at Linden Lab's rates for tier, is simply not an option.

And, gradually, as the Jokaydia Grid sim comes to life, with content mentioned in my prior post, I think we'll have ourselves a wickedly immersive time in our new home, even without the bells and whistles SL can provide to those with very fast computers.

Mr. Wild Frontier Man, Roderick Usher

Location: Jokaydia Grid, Nevermore Sim

Okay. I get it now. It only took a friggin' hour to make my AO work. I now know how an AO script works.

But I am giving away barrels, darn it. This is the joy and frustration of working in an OpenSim grid. In Second Life, I'd run to some store or the Marketplace. Here, if you want something, you either turn to the wisdom of the community or you learn to DIY.

In my case, being a somewhat experienced builder but the worst scripter in history, at OpenSim Creations I found what I needed for some interior bits for The House of Usher.

Then I gave Vanish and his buddies a copy of my House of Usher barrel.

Admittedly, this frontier trading-post is rough and ready. It's a place where we belly up to the virtual bar and slap down our coon-skins in exchange for local knowledge and a bottle of rot-gut. Even a guy like me, who never got better than a C+ in a computer-science class, can at least offer a few objects and some witty descriptions...if you cannot blind them with brilliance...and so on.

I was telling my literature students in my Invented Worlds class that some peoples define themselves by the presence of a frontier. That's the lore of Americans, Aussies, and perhaps the Russians who brave Siberia to make a life for themselves. For lots of other folks, however, a physical frontier is not as necessary.  They find that thrilling encounter with the new online, making things.

I suppose that, as a greenhorn, I'd have "died" out on the OpenSim frontier already, without the experience of the other pioneers. But so far, with two months to go before the students rezz in Jokaydia Grid, I'm thinking that the frontier may be opening up at last.

Back to School: Good EDU Sites in Second Life? Other Worlds?

 
Location: Planning VWER meeting

I'm going to crowd-source these tips before Thursday's meeting of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable. It's a back-to-school special, and I want to compile must-see sites in SL or outside it for education.

In the comments, list the site, the grid (and Web link to its site). If it's in SL, please supply a SLURL. For any grid's content, please type a few lines about why the content seems worthwhile.

I don't mind content on the 2D Web, but it should in some way be helpful to teachers in planning to teach in immersive 3D environments. I've given an example below.

I'm interested in the arts, in science, in information resources such as libraries or coding help, even builds in virtual worlds that merit a visit simply for their exemplary content. Flag anything that might be adult, just so our educators don't get into too much trouble :)

I'll stir the pot with two sites:

OpenSim Creations: Tip of the tophat to Vanish, who showed me the way to this archive of open-source files that can be downloaded as .zip archives and then uploaded for use in OpenSim worlds (and I suppose SL as well). Proper attribution should be given to the creators of content, and the creators should be informed when a member gives away the content again.

Svarga: As close to a living museum as one will find in SL. It showed many of us what is possible in a 3D world. Though technology and design have passed it by in some respects, Svarga has a place in many hearts as capturing the unique ethos of Second Life as it began.  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Svarga/128/128/28

Poe Flies a Kite in Kitely

Location: Writing Annual Report (grrrr)

AJ Kelton has planned a field-trip to the on-demand virtual worlds host Kitely, and to test how it works we uploaded an OAR file from Jokaydia Grid. Not everything has rezzed yet, but that Kitely can support OAR uploads from other grids is a game-changer.

The picture is of AJ's avatar on Kitely.

What a timely application for educators. For a very low cost for a few avatars, we can run simulations when needed. Most of the work I do now does not require a persistent world that is empty when no one logs on.  And I don't plan to send students into large social worlds since my current assignments do not envision that sort of engagement.  I do, however, want them to use premade avatars for literary work in an immersive setting.

Special thanks to AJ Kelton for experimenting with this. I will provide a full report on my work in Kitely next month.

Maria Korolov to Speak at Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

Maria Korolov, editor of Hypergrid Business, will speak to VWER members this Thursday, starting at 2:30 Second Life Time. AJ Brooks will interview Maria in voice, and yours truly will transcribe voice-to-text.

Maria has strong opinions and lots of contacts in the world of non-SL grids, and I look forward to her discussing the state of the metaverse beyond Second Life. She's pictured at VWBPE 2011, where she gave an interesting talk on this topic.

Join us for Thursday's event, and put questions to Maria in a Q&A following the interview, at VWER's new home at Bowling Green University's virtual campus in Second Life. We meet 2:30-3:30 SL time at this SLURL:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/BGSU%20Community/54/85/25

See you at the Roundtable!

Turning an OpenSim Bug Into a Feature

Location: Falling Into an Abyss

One side-effect of "lifting the skirt" of Nevermore island to make mountains has been to reveal an OpenSim bug. I have not encountered this in Second Life for a LONG time: falling off the edge of the earth.  I've asked Jokay Wollongong for a history of this fascinating bug.  If you know more, share in comments.

The avatar steps or falls into a space that is no space, a void that gradually darkens as the Z coordinate races into the negative. Soon, the screen grows black and still the avatar falls into infinity. A teleport or logout solves the problem. But why waste such a delicious doom?

With the flaw in mind, I have found a way to kill unwary student-explorers who venture too far in search of hidden knowledge. If a student falls into the abyss, we will assume that the simulation has ended for that participant, and the team must venture on without that person's help.  Roderick may even wish to lure one or two meddlers to their deaths.

Of course, hints and clues abound, as do stone markers near the verges of the island, inspired by an actual warning sign I saw, a decade ago and more, in rural Wales:

While a quotation from Poe himself might be best for this situation, something from "Manuscript Found in a Bottle" or "Descent into the Maelstrom," I think I'll leave the evocation of mood to Poe's literary descendant, H.P. Lovecraft:

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. from "The Call of Cthulhu."

Just remember on your journey: mind that gap. You have been warned.

Case Studies, Project Links, and More at VWER

Location: Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

Some time ago, Hamlet Au pondered if there were any case studies, with empirical evidence, demonstrating learning in Second Life as compared to other methods of instruction.

I took him up on his challenge, offering the success of the U Texas system's venture. He was not impressed, though we both agreed that Ken Hudson's Canadian Border-Crossing Project did demonstrate the validity of immersive learning.

With this in mind I did a short literature review, a useful "twofer" since I was also doing research for a forthcoming article written with Viv Trafalgar. We have not found any case studies of the use of SL or OpenSim in a literary-studies setting, the focus of our article.

Two studies surfaced. One showed some benefits, but with a small sample size and no control group, and another showed no benefit in an engineering program where, the authors note, they had not provided a good orientation for their students.

With these articles under my virtual arm, I put a question to the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable in a session called "Making the Case for Avatars": What are the Advantages over Teleconferencing?

I was impressed by the responses, and you can read a transcript of our talk here. Note that for those not wanting to wade through a HUGE text transcript, I aggregated all links at the start.

The Mountains of Nevermore

Location: Doing Geomancy

"So I can move your island," Jokay Wollongong began.

"No, let it stay as-is," I replied.

It's not as though I dislike the idea of a giant Tesla coil visible from my land. Not at all. At the same time, that's not very 1847.  It also blunts the immersion I want on this space.

So I decided, from right behind the Usher family cemetery Poe briefly mentions in his tale, to raise some mountains. The Mountains of Nevermore: sounds like a lost Yes recording from 1972.

The OpenSim terrain-edit tools, just like those in Second Life, remind me of the good old days in Sim City 2000, right down to the bulldozer icon.  They lack subtlety at the strongest settings, hurling needles into the sky much like a Lovecraftian landscape where mad gods flop about to the discordant music of eldritch flutes held in nameless paws.

There. I got to use "eldritch" for the first time since college, when in my D&D game we had an artifact called "The Eldritch Cleaver."   My snark has a long history...

So to make the island of Nevermore more immersive and interesting, I massaged the land ever upward, then put a line of dark pines into the passes between the hills and at the shore's edge. Soon the sparkling coil could not be seen, even by an avatar who wanders into the water at the shoreline. When I'm done, there may be NO shoreline beyond a few rocky inlets. I want that Poesque feeling of claustrophobia and depression to haunt my visitors.  I've enough prims to make things difficult for them by providing no long vistas of the space.

With luck, I'll hide some clues on those eldritch slopes for my fall class that will use Nevermore.

Avination: This Calls for The Grip, Kungfu

Location: Avination Grid

In the June issue of Prim Perfect, I'll run a review of this fast-growing grid derived from OpenSim.  I am still working on the piece, so I will just note a few highlights now:

• There's an active user-base that recruits new residents by word of mouth in SL.
• Concurrency runs about 300 and active logins per month run over 4500.
• The grid offers gambling and adult content without age verification (ouch).
• Avination has a working currency and easy conversions from Linden Dollars or Paypal (I bought 1000 credits to kit out my avatar, freebies being very scarce, and uploaded some clothing textures).
• Many well known content creators from Second Life have added stores in Avination, as they have done in InWorldz. Reasons? No hypergrid, strong IP protection, very restrictive freebie policies.  Not a place for educators, but I can see the lure for RPers and social users.

I found the grid's residents eager to have me tour around, something that offset my disappointment that this grid is primarily for socializing, roleplay, shopping, and gambling. Perhaps all of these closed grids will trend that way, as we educators seek something different.

Given that the grid restricts name-choices in much the same way that SL has done, I picked a last name from a list. Seeing "Kungfu" and being reminded of my favorite GI Joe, the African-American Adventurer, I knew what I had to do: Grip Kungfu was born.

The default dark-skinned avatar was nice. I purchased some good hair with a long queue in back, bought an AO called "Danger Man," and I was ready for whatever Avination tossed my way. I can take it. Before I had avatars, a long time before, my bud Gary and I made up tons of stories with our GI Joes.

You can guess who the coolest GI Joe was.

Meta7 Virtual World to Close

Location: IP Pondering

Reading a response by Ann O'Toole to a New World Notes post, I visited a forum notice for the Meta7 virtual world. I'd heard enough good press about it that I'd planned a short visit for a future issue of my "Gridnaut's Journey" column at Prim Perfect.

After April 30, however, Meta7 will be no more. Despite the somewhat snarky graphic I chose, I'm sorry to see an OpenSim world that had good press close.

It seems that an IP conflict lies at the heart of the legal proceedings that led to the shutdown:

Another company, that has trademark rights to the use of a similar logo used by us and the name 'Meta7' is forcing the company behind Meta7 to stop using the trademark commercially. . .Meta7 has been opposing this until recently, but does not have the resources in time, people and money to battle this action against it.

Content creators have a grace period to back up their items but no region-wide OAR file can be provided, "as we can not verify the ownership of all the items in the region."

Nike Japan seems to be the other company noted. I found this about an advertising campaign:

Illustrator Paul Huang, creator of Nanospore, teamed up with animators Chris Riehl and Sean Starkweather to create this playfully original, yet oddly familiar spot for part of Nike’s new viral campaign to promote the Nike Free Trainer 7.0, which gives you the power of flight and exempts you from noodle-bowl lines.

We have the power of flight without special shoes in virtual worlds, but the reach of lawyers is long, like the arm of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.

The lesson is, I suppose, know your small-grid provider well. I never thought I'd have to do a Google search before choosing a provider, but I think Jokay Wollongong, no stranger to cease-and-desist orders, chose her grid's name well.

Poll Results: Educators & Virtual Land Ownership

Location: Surprise

In March, I asked educators on the SLED and EDUCAUSE Virtual Worlds lists to tell me how their ownership of land in virtual worlds compares to their holdings a year ago.

Here are the results.

Analysis: No Mass Exodus

I had expected a larger exodus from Second Life, but the survey design made it hard, without biasing its design, to factor in the two-year pricing Linden Lab offered nonprofits and educational institutions.

The two-year reduced tier may have swayed many colleagues with ongoing projects that are hard to transplant to stay in SL.

With 15.4% noting that they would own more land in SL, and 23.1% noting that they would own less, there's hardly a mass migration out of SL to OpenSim or anywhere else. There may be a slow erosion of the user base among educators, but more data are needed for such a claim.

A difference of 8% between contraction and expansion might sound alarming to a company in other contexts. I could imagine executives losing sleep if their aggregate sales figures showed a similar change: more companies in the prior calendar year expanding their trucking fleets with more Chevy trucks than Fords, or more firms supplying their employees with Windows 7 rather than Blackberry smart phones.

For virtual-world users, however, the choices are not either/or: it is quite possible to rent server space from several providers to enable different projects.  The survey respondents could, for example, have cut land holdings a little in SL, while renting server space for an OpenSim installation (or hosting it on campus).  My own response would include "own less land in SL" (our campus presence has gone from a full island to my office, on a 512m mainland plot for which I pay no tier) and "own more land in non-SL grids" (I rent a sim in Jokaydia Grid).

With 27.9% noting more ownership of non-SL real estate than a had been the case a year ago, versus 1.9% saying less, educators are clearly trying other grids, perhaps as secondary experiments alongside work done in Second Life.

Faculty may simply be hedging their bets in case further changes from Linden Lab prove unsuitable to their needs, or they may be staking an early claim if OpenSim grids evolve in ways that make them match or exceed SL's stability and quality of content.

One telling statistic: nearly a third of respondents pay out of pocket for their work in virtual worlds.  That makes any further increases to tier difficult. For those paying the non-discounted tier in SL, it will be interesting to look again in a year, to see how many educators have changed their plans or stayed with Linden Lab's grid.

Public knowledge of OpenSim has certainly grown; a year ago at the VWER meetings, we had to explain when OS is. Now folks know, even if they have not spent much time on a non-SL grid. In time, more will travel, and their experiences with grids not quite as evolved as SL's may influence future survey results.

Room for More Data

A different survey might ask respondents if they pay more, less, or the same tier as a year ago, or the size of their SL and other holdings.

Moreover, another survey might break out the sorts of non-SL worlds that educators frequent. InWorldz, for instance, offers stability and the presence of many content creators; it is very different from smaller OpenSim grids with Hypergrid access and mostly DIY content.

I hope, however, to administer the same survey a year from now. These numbers could be very different, and one survey cannot reveal a trend.