I just wanted to let everyone know that I did a video podcast interview on a program called FLOSS Weekly:

FLOSS Weekly 123: Open Wonderland

FLOSS is an acronym for “Free Libre Open Source Software” and the show is hosted by Randal Schwartz. I was pleased to discover that the co-host, Aaron Newcomb, is himself a former Sun employee who had experimented with Wonderland while at Sun. He asked a question about Darkstar during his introduction to the show, which I realized on listening to the show, I neglected to answer. I thought I would take the opportunity do it here.

Project Darkstar, which is game server infrastructure that provides a platform for scalable communications and persistence, was a parallel project to Wonderland in Sun Labs. In fact, it was the Darkstar team that got us started. In 2007, they were looking for a way to demonstrate their server technology. They knew that our Collaborative Environments research team had been inspired by a challenge by then VP for Eco Responsibility Dave Douglas to “build Sun’s next building in the virtual world.” We had gotten as far as forming a reading group to investigate the use of virtual worlds for business collaboration when the Darkstar team asked us if we could quickly pull together a virtual world demo built on top of Darkstar. They needed the demo in three months for their booth at the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC). I’m not quite sure how we pulled it off, but we joined forces with the Project Looking Glass team and created both the Wonderland platform as well as the virtual world called “MPK20: Sun’s Virtual Workplace.” Here’s Karl Haberl, who was the manager for both Wonderland and Darkstar, demoing Wonderland for the very first time in the Sun booth at the GDC conference in March 2007:

Like Wonderland, the Darkstar project has continued to thrive as a community-based open source project since our “liberation” from Sun. The forked version of the code is now known as Red Dwarf.  If you would like more information about the current architecture of Wonderland – which has changed substantially since that first demo version -  and how Darkstar / Red Dwarf fits in, there’s a diagram and a brief architectural overview on our Developer Resources page.

Aaron, I hope that helps to answer your question. And thanks for the opportunity to speak on the show!

As part of the +Spaces project, we at the University of Essex have been tasked with the job of exploring ways in which Virtual Worlds like Wonderland could be used to capture users’ responses to polls. As a first step, we identified two dimensions that could characterise a poll:

• Visibility—other users can determine that a user is engaged in a poll
• Privacy—other users can determine the answer(s) that a user has given to a poll

Combining these two dimensions gives us four possible kinds of poll. To explore how these might be used, we created some throwaway demos, as follows:

1) An invisible, private poll—the users clicks on an object in the virtual world, which in turn opens a web browser on the user’s client. The url used by the web browser may include the user’s credentials. The video below provides an example.

As an alternative to this approach, the poll could take place in the Heads Up Display (HUD), as shown below.

2) A visible, private poll—the list of users currently taking a poll is displayed in the virtual world, but the user interacts with the poll itself via the HUD. For example:

3) A visible, public poll—the user positions his/her avatar in a location which determines whether s/he agrees with a question. Users can determine that other users are participating in a poll and users’ responses are not private. The video below was inspired by work undertaken by Drew Harry in his InfoSpaces project.

Finally, the last of the four combinations is an invisible, public poll which doesn’t seem to make much sense in a virtual world.

The demos have raised some interesting issues, especially the visible public poll. Questions include:

• when does the voting finish?
• if I leave the carpet is my vote lost?
• will users be persuaded by herd instinct?
• could I silently leave something behind on the carpet to indicate my vote?

One of the benefits of being to be able to create these demos so easily is that we don’t have to invest too much time in the technology and yet at the same time we are able to use them to prompt our users to come up with questions and ideas.

Please feel free to contact us for more details,

Bernard Horan & Michael Gardner

Once again University of Alberta Professor Eleni Stroulia, whose students created the Bicycle Game for children with cerebral palsy, reports on an interesting student project:

Several types of 3D software visualizations have been developed to communicate information about the products and the development process of software projects. These visualizations have been limited in the degree of interactivity they enabled (primarily panning and zooming) and in their accessibility (since in most cases they assumed a particular client platform). We recently developed in Open Wonderland WikiDev3D, a 3D visualization of the data collected and extracted in our collaborative software-development platform WikiDev2.0 (see description at http://ssrg.cs.ualberta.ca/index.php/WikiDev_2.0).

The visualization adopts a city metaphor, similar to earlier work, but advances the state of the art by providing a web-accessible distributed 3D environment where multiple users can explore the same project. A video demo of the tool can be found at http://ssrg.cs.ualberta.ca/index.php/WikiDev3D_Video.

This is collaborative work by graduate students Marios Fokaefs and Diego Serrano, who are members of the “Service Systems Management” research group at the University of Alberta. For any questions, please contact the team leader, Prof. Eleni Stroulia (stroulia@ualberta.ca).

It seems like there is an increasing interest in using virtual worlds for health care applications. You may recall the recent COMSLIVE Wonderblog post describing the health care communication project at Birmingham City University.

Birmingham City University's new Open Wonderland hand washing module that assesses who has washed their hands and how often

To learn about other projects related to virtual worlds and health care, you may be interested in attending the “Virtual Worlds and Social Games for Health” day, which is part of the “Games for Health” conference. I have been invited to speak on using Open Wonderland as a platform for creating health-related virtual worlds. Here’s the agenda for the day:

Virtual Worlds and Social Games for Health (pdf)
May 25, 2010
Boston, MA

If you’re planning on attending, please let me know.

We are pleased to announce that the Open Wonderland 0.5 Preview 4 release is now available.

The major change in this version is the new branding as “Open Wonderland” every where in the UI:

Open Wonderland Branding

In addition, there have been a number of important bug fixes and minor features, including:

• Web server stability and scalability improvements
• Removed the flashing on Windows
• Fixes to initial object placement
• Lot of internationalization updates
• Configurable HUD size
• Support for webcams requiring authentication

Also check out some of the interesting new modules in the module warehouse:

• Poster
• Particle system
• Scripting
• Tooltips

Comments? Questions? Bugs? Discuss on the forum and report bugs (and suggest patches!) on the issue tracker.

Today’s Wonderland Wednesday World Building session served three purposes: to help people learn some world building techniques, to start the process of creating of a new Wondertown community space, and to test the build candidate for Open Wonderland v0.5 Preview4.

The group decided at the end of the session that the build was just about ready to release. Two of the major bugs – the web server hanging problem and the terrible flickering on Windows clients – both seemed to be resolved. A third fix, to improve the way turning gravity on and off behaves, wasn’t quite right, so Jonathan is going to take one more stab at fixing that before creating the final Preview4 release in the next day or two.

In terms of the session itself, we began with a Wondertown Planning Board meeting, brainstorming about the layout of the “town” and the types of content we might want to include.

First Wondertown Planning Board Meeting

We also reviewed some world building tips, including:

• Look for “blue ribbon” models in the Google 3D Warehouse – these tend to perform well in Wonderland
• For best performance, only use models that are 1MB or smaller
• For models that do not include a .kmz download link, download the most recent SketchUp version and then use File –> Export –> 3D model to save as .kmz.
• Most SketchUp models look best when you uncheck “Lighting Enabled” in the “Model Component” property sheet
• Use the Top Placement module to quickly arrange models
• Use the “Details” pane in the Edit tool palette to precisely place models

We then broke up into three groups, each working on a different type of content. The “Higher Ed” team spent most of their time learning and practicing world building techniques, so they didn’t get too far along on the design of their space, but they did find a nice university building to experiment with.

Beginning of Higher Ed team's space

The “Space” team got started on a Solar System simulation, finding models of all the planets and placing them the correct distance apart. They made good use of the Poster module for labeling the planets.

Start of a Solar System simulation

The “War Room” team found an interior space to use as a war room and placed it on an island in an isolated mountain terrain. They used the Poster module to hang a sign above the door.

Entrance to Wondertown War Room

They also used the Top Placement view to move around the terrain so that the building was centered in one of the lakes.

Top view of War Room

This yielded a nice view out of the windows.

War Room interior with view of mountain terrain

In under two hours, the group made a great start on building out Wondertown. We saved a snapshot and will periodically do more group building sessions to continue to develop this new virtual space. Others are more than welcome to join these follow-on sessions. Please visit the events portion of the Open Wonderland Facebook page to find announcements of these and other events. If there are groups of community members in either Europe or Asia who would like to participate in a world building session, let me know and we can arrange some sessions at more convenient times.

This week’s Wonderland Wednesday session will be a bit different from others. Taking an idea originally proposed by community member Morris Ford, we’ll be using the newest version of Wonderland to work together to build “Wondertown.” I’ll start things off by running a short brainstorming session on how best to organize the space and then I’ll providing some tips on finding models from the Google 3D Warehouse that perform well in Wonderland. After that, the group will break up into teams of two or three people and each group will work to create a piece of Wondertown. I don’t expect that we’ll finish the project in one session, but I’m hoping we can get a good start.

We have started using Facebook to organize Open Wonderland community events, so please visit the Wonderland Wednesday event page for the complete announcement. We’d appreciate it if you could RSVP so we have an idea of how many people to expect, but you’re always welcome to join even if you didn’t RSVP.  If you plan to join us, please download and install Google SketchUp if you do not already have your own copy.  Also, we ask that everyone participating also join the #wonderland chat channel on irc.freenode.net. This enables us to communicate with everyone in case we run into any problems or need to make any last minute server changes. For example, if we have too many people interested in this session, we’ll start up another server and break into two groups.

I gave a rare in-person talk yesterday at the Immersive Education Boston Summit. Robin Heyden wrote up the first day of the conference, including a detailed summary of my talk in her blog article Immersive Education Summit (Day 1). My favorite part of the talk was the Q & A session where members of the audience chimed in to answer many of the questions asked. It’s exciting to have so many members of the Wonderland community gathered here.

Tonight we’ll be having our first face-to-face Open Wonderland Foundation board of directors meeting. And tomorrow I’ll be doing an extended demo and Wonderland World Building workshop as well as participating on a Future of Immersive Education panel.

If you’re interested in hearing what’s going on live at the conference, follow the Twitter hashtag #iED.

An undergraduate student team at the Computing Science Department of the University of Alberta just developed a game in Wonderland to help with the rehabilitation of children with Cerebral Palsy.

Screenshot from bicycle-controlled game

They have instrumented a special bicycle with SunSPOTs to control a collection game in Wonderland.

Bicycle instrumented with a SunSPOT and a Wii Remote

Pedalling the bike moves the avatar forward. Turning the handle bars with the Wiimote steers the avatar.

You can see a video of their demo at http://ssrg.cs.ualberta.ca/index.php/SunSPOTs-in-WL.

This is part of the SmartCondo project, an interdisciplinary project among Computing Science, Rehabilitation Medicine, Industrial Arts and Design and Pharmacy at the University of Alberta and the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital.

For any questions, please contact the team leader, Eleni Stroulia (stroulia@ualberta.ca).

I realized after I gave a talk in the Smarter Technology series, that I should have blogged about it ahead of time so people who were interested could sign up to attend. So in an effort to tell you about things before they happen, here are some upcoming Wonderland-related events:

Wonderland Wednesday – Drag and Drop Applications
April 14, 2010 – developer-focused session
Wonderland Community Server

Immersive Education Boston Summit
April 23-25 at Boston College, Boston, MA USA
Multiple Wonderland talks, including my keynote on the 23rd

MetaMeets 2010
May 7-8 in Dublin, Ireland
I’ll be doing a remote talk – schedule TBD

I would be particularly happy to see as many of you as possible at the Immersive Education Summit in Boston. Not only will I be there in person, but almost the entire Open Wonderland Foundation board of directors will be attending. The program is filled with Wonderland-related content. In addition to my keynote talk, Professor John Belcher from MIT will be talking about his use of Wonderland in physics education, Michael Gardner will be giving a talk on three Wonderland projects that he’s involved with at the University of Essex (MiRTLE, SIMiLLE and +Spaces), and a student from Aizu University in Japan will be describing his work on a new music browser for Wonderland. I’m particularly interested in learning more about the work going on at the IAVANTE Foundation on immersive medical training. Finally, there will be “Wonderland Behind the Firewall” workshop.

If you are able to attend the MetaMeets conference in Dublin, please let me know. I’m looking for someone to help “drive” Wonderland during my talk.

I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible, either in person or in Wonderland, in the coming months.

Join other Wonderland developers in an informal walkthough of the MTGame code. Wonderland Wednesday sessions are intended to help bring developers up-to-speed on the existing Wonderland code base. As preparation for these events, it’s a good idea to download your own copy of the source code.

MTGame Walkthough

Wednesday, April 7, 2010
6:16pm EDT
(translate timezone: http://tinyurl.com/ykm2t6)
Location: Community Server
RSVP: Facebook Event Page
irc://irc.freenode.net #wonderland

Please note that we are now using a Facebook Event page for RSVPs. It’s helpful for planning purposes to know how many people will join.

After two successful developer-focused sessions, the group has decided to settle on a regular meeting time on Wednesdays due to the much larger turnout on that day. We are thrilled to announce that the entire jMonkeyEngine core team has agreed to attend this week’s session to give us a briefing:

JMonkeyEngine (jME) Briefing

3:15 PT / 6:15 ET, Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Leader: jME core team
Location: Community Server
irc://irc.freenode.net #wonderland

For those who may not know, jME is the graphics sub-system that Wonderland uses. It is a modern 3D game engine written entirely in Java. jME provides core graphics APIs, including graphics primitive and shader support. The Wonderland graphics system is based on these core APIs, with some extensions from MTGame to support multi-threading.

Wonderland APIs - the diagram shows where jMonkeyEngine fits into the Wonderland client architecture.

Please put Wonderland Wednesdays on your calendar and plan to join us for one or more of these developer-oriented technical sessions. One of the main goals of these sessions is to help bring more developers up-to-speed on Wonderland development in an informal, highly-interactive environment. If you have ideas for future sessions, or even better, would like to volunteer to run one of these sessions, please add your ideas to the Wonderland Wednesdays Wiki and make a note if you’re willing to lead the session.

Yesterday’s impromptu developer session turned out to be a lively and informative session led by Open Wonderland architect Jonathan Kaplan.

Open Wonderland developer session on "Using Wonderland with NetBeans"

I captured the session on video, which I will post shortly, but I wanted to give as much advanced noticed as possible about the next developer session:

Sample Module Walk-though

3:15 PT / 6:15 ET, Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Leader: Ryan Babiuch (aka Jagwire)
Location: Community Server
irc://irc.freenode.net #wonderland

In this informal technical session, Ryan will lead the group on a walk-through of the sample module code. You might want to browse through the code ahead of time to bring questions with you to the session.

Please make sure your Wonderland and audio setup is working before joining this session and also please join the IRC chat so we can get in touch with everyone in case of technical problems. The link above takes you to a web IRC client, but you may prefer to use a program such as Pidgen (all platforms) or Colloquy (Mac).

If you follow the Open Wonderland Forum, you know that Morris Ford has been organizing bi-weekly community meetings. These meetings mainly focus on how community members can help move the project forward. In today’s meeting, one of the suggestions was to begin to hold regular in-world developer-focused sessions. Everyone was so excited about the idea, that they wanted to get started right away. So if you’re a developer and interested in the topic, please feel free to join in tomorrow:

Using Wonderland with NetBeans

11am PT / 2pm ET,  Sunday March 21, 2010
Prerequisite: Download and install NetBeans and check out Wonderland trunk
Location: Community Server
irc://irc.frenode.net #wonderland

NetBeans running in a Wonderland world

If you plan to join the session, please make sure you have a working headset and test your audio ahead of time. In addition, please join the IRC chat channel in case there are any issues connecting. While the session will be quite informal, the goal is to focus on the topic, so please troubleshoot any connection and audio problems ahead of time.

Ryan Babiuch, aka “jagwire” on the Wonderland forum, has agreed to organize future sessions. The ideas we came up with so far include:

• A code review of an area of the code that needs work
• Wonderland debugging strategies
• As a group, select a bug and work through the issue

What other topics would you be interested in hearing about? Please post all ideas on the forum. If there are developer sessions you are willing to lead, please volunteer to do that as well.

Thanks to a huge effort by many, many people in the Wonderland community, I am extremely pleased to announce the birth of Open Wonderland – a fork of the Project Wonderland code. Along with the new open source project, we have launched a non-profit, called the Open Wonderland Foundation, to act as the governing body for the open source project.  Here is the press release that explains the transition. The new pages to bookmark are at the end of the post.

Open Wonderland Foundation Launch

St. Paul, Minnesota, March 10, 2010 – Today Ken Miller, the CEO of Virtual Learning Labs, announced the formation of the Open Wonderland Foundation and the creation of the Open Wonderland virtual world platform. The Open Wonderland platform is a “fork” of the Project Wonderland toolkit originally developed by Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Miller, who will serve as the Foundation’s first President and Chairman of the Board, explains that the non-profit Open Wonderland Foundation will provide direction and governance for Open Wonderland (http://OpenWonderland.org), a free and open source platform for creating 3D virtual worlds for education, business, and government applications.

Miller also announced that Nicole Yankelovich has accepted the position of Executive Director of the Open Wonderland Foundation. Yankelovich, who initiated and ran the Wonderland project during her tenure at Sun, will oversee the transition of the project. “While leadership of the Wonderland project is now in the hands of the Foundation and the open source community,” she explains, “many important aspects of the project will remain unchanged. Many of the original Wonderland core team members will continue to contribute to the open source project and the new leadership is more committed than ever to advancing both immersive education and business collaboration.”

Miller says he is pleased that Aaron Walsh, Grid Institute Director and head of the Immersive Education Initiative (http://ImmersiveEducation.org), has assured him that Wonderland will continue to be an official Immersive Education Initiative virtual world platform. “Both the platform and the content are open,” explains Walsh, “which is vital for education in both the short and long term.”

Others who have indicated they will continue to support Wonderland include Darwin Dimensions, the creators of Evolver (http://evolver.com), a compelling web site for creating avatars, including ones that can be used in Wonderland worlds. AmphiSocial (http://amphisocial.com), a provider of next-generation 3D collaboration and training environments, is also moving ahead with plans to use Wonderland as one of the platforms underlying their new product.

Unlike other open source projects that fork, there is no acrimony involved in this instance. On the contrary, the same people who were passionate about Project Wonderland, both from Sun and in the broader open source community, are taking the initiative to advance the technology under the Open Wonderland umbrella.

Among the Sun team members transitioning support to the new Open Wonderland project is Wonderland architect Jonathan Kaplan. “Now that we have the new open source project established on Google Code, we’re actively preparing for the next software release,” he reports. “This will be an incremental release that includes some important updates.” Since leaving Sun, other members of the team have been working on new modules to contribute to the Wonderland Module Warehouse – a clearinghouse for both free and commercial Wonderland extensions.

In addition to the former Sun employees, a group of dedicated Wonderland open source community members from around the world have pledged to support the new Foundation by donating their time to maintain web sites, create 3D artwork, teach tutorials, provide publicity, and help out in variety of other ways.

On the leadership side, Miller has put together a board of directors made up of an elite group of educators in the forefront of applying advanced technology, such as 3D virtual worlds, to teaching and learning. For example, Professor John Belcher from MIT makes extensive use of technology for 3D visualization in his Electricity and Magnetism courses. In addition, he was involved in starting the MIT OpenCouseware initiative to publish almost all MIT course material on the web. “One of the best things about Wonderland,” says Professor Belcher, “is that it is designed for collaboration. I was able to run our LabView application unmodified in a Wonderland world and allow groups of students to interact with it while viewing and discussing a dynamic 3D visualization. Thanks to the existence of the Foundation, I am moving ahead with confidence on my next project to bring our entire TealSIM physics simulation environment into Wonderland.”

Michael Gardner, another Open Wonderland Foundation board member from the University of Essex, was one of the first adopters of Wonderland. He and his colleagues created MIRTLE, a mixed reality solution which uses Wonderland to augment live lectures for remote students with high-quality voice, shared applications, and video. MIRTLE is now being actively used by two departments at Essex. “Based on the success of MIRTLE,” Gardner explains, “we are using EU funding to launch a new Wonderland-based project called +Spaces (Positive Spaces: Policy Simulation in Virtual Spaces). The establishment of the Open Wonderland Foundation gives us assurance that the Wonderland platform will continue to evolve in a way that will enable the success of this new initiative.”

Andy Zbinden, the Technology and Development Leader for the ShangAI Lectures at the University of Zurich and also on the board states that “We chose Wonderland because it is fully open source, thus giving us complete control in adding logging facilities and other extensions. Additionally, it gives an excellent feeling of immersion due to its stereo sound. We are gearing up to run another iteration of the Wonderland-based ShangAI Lectures course in the Fall.”

Board member Warren Sheaffer, Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Saint Paul College – recently voted the top 2-year college in the country in student degree program satisfaction, manages the Virtual Northstar project. The aim of this project is to develop, deploy, and use virtual worlds based on the Wonderland platform for applications in distance education and learning in virtual environments. “I have been working hard to help get the Foundation going,” he says, “because we see Wonderland as an important technology for the future of education as well as for the future of communication.”

The Open Wonderland Foundation will be supported by grants, private contributions, and non-profit and corporate donations. To try Open Wonderland, join the open source community, or provide financial support to the Foundation in carrying out its mission of continuing to evolve the Open Wonderland platform, please visit http://OpenWonderland.org.

All Wonderland activity going forward will take place on the Open Wonderland sites. Please update your bookmarks:

Open Wonderland Project Website
http://OpenWonderland.org

Open Wonderland open source site
http://code.google.com/p/openwonderland/

Open Wonderland developer forum
http://groups.google.com/group/openwonderland

Open Wonderland Facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/openwonderland

Open Wonderland Twitter feed
http://twitter.com/openwonderland

Wonderblog
http://blogs.openwonderland.org

We look forward to your active participation in the Open Wonderland community!

Nicole Yankelovich
Executive Director
Open Wonderland Foundation

I have the pleasure of introducing another guest blogger today. Nigel Wynne is a Senior Academic in Learning and Teaching within the Faculty of Health at Birmingham City University in the UK. In this article, he describes some of the very exciting work he and his colleagues are doing using Wonderland in a variety of health care related projects.

It’s always struck me as slightly odd that many virtual world platforms divorce the user from the tools they use every day as they communicate, collaborate and work with colleagues. One of the strengths of Wonderland is its capacity to integrate real world tools within a virtual world setting. Staff within the Online Simulation and Immersive Education Research Group, Centre for Health and Social Care Research, at Birmingham City University, UK, are applying Wonderland in order to enhance Communication Skills Learning amongst learners preparing for work within the National Health Service. Following a nine month scoping exercise during which a range of virtual world platforms where explored in terms of their potential application to communication skills development, we decided that Wonderland could have a significant transformative impact in this area of our provision.

Most of the unintended mortality and morbidity within the health sectors in the UK and USA have communication deficits as a contributing if not root cause. How then can Wonderland help to provide a more creative solution to what is a very real social imperative? Well, when we break down communication we get three rough subsets: verbal, non-verbal, and written components.

Verbal communication within Wonderland is enhanced by its support of 3D immersive audio. Here, for example, learners are aware of the direction from which verbal communications and sounds emanate and may be more strongly prompted to respond to verbal communications by facing the direction from which they came and by facing the person they are communicating with.  We think that this will add significantly to the fidelity associated with the learning activities we are planning.

Non verbal communication can be facilitated by the gesture controls that learners can activate when communicating with other learners. How do they acknowledge understanding and receipt of a request, do they use non-verbal communications to emphasise their own verbal communications? By encouraging deliberate use of non-verbal communication in Wonderland, can we help support more effective communication within real world settings?

Within the health care sector, practitioners are required to record every aspect of the care they are associated with, to follow protocols, and use proformas. Written communication skills are therefore essential. Using the Open Office word application within Wonderland, we can encourage learners to collaboratively complete care plans, patient assessment forms, and observations charts as well as access policy documents, just as they would in the real world. If we can enable access to Wonderland from within a Trust either by deploying behind their own firewall or by providing access to a world hosted elsewhere, then hospitals could have a very powerful tool with which to train their staff to use the systems that they are legally required to use and are judged against in the real world.

In addition to the above, Wonderland allows teachers to open up a fully functioning Firefox browser. Whatever one student views in the browser is viewed by all other students co-located in the same space. We believe that this application on its own adds incredible value to our virtual world learning scenarios. If we look at virtual world technology as a simulation technology, then it is impossible to simulate the real world without enabling learners to access the web in their virtual world. From a pedagogic perspective, we can use the browser to transfer any web-based content into a trigger for collaborative learning, all within a 3D immersive space!

For example, as an adjunct to our virtual worlds work we have developed a wide range of online patient simulations using software known as Virtual Case Creator (VCC). With VCC simulations, learners find problems, solve problems, and make decisions. One aim of our project is to explore how effective VCC learning is if students collaborate in-world as they access the VCC simulations using the web browser.

One more feature of Wonderland that attracted us to this platform is its telephony integration. So many referrals within the health care sector take place over the phone. Nurses have to communicate patient information via telephone in order to persuade doctors to see their patients, for example. So important is effective telephone communication that in health care we have communication protocols to help ensure that staff can bundle and convey information as effectively and efficiently as possible. Within Wonderland, our students will assess a patient and then make a phone referral in-world to a phone in the real world. If their  referral is effective they will persuade a doctor in the real world to attend in-world. How cool is that!!

One of Wonderland’s unique selling points is the utility it affords teachers. By this I mean the ease with which scenarios can be created. Using the drag and drop feature, images, 3D models, and PDF’s can be dragged from a desktop into the world. A great example of this is the Wound Care learning activity we set up in 20 minutes. We simply dragged and dropped some wound images into world, dragged in a PDF document with information about wound care practice, (which automatically opened in its own viewer), added some care plans and an assessment chart for students to complete collaboratively and then added a poster with guidance for the learners.  For a little extra context, we dragged and dropped in some models from the Google 3D Warehouse or from our own Wonderland inventory. Hey Presto!!! With no scripting or modeling required, we created a rich, student-led, activity-focused learning scenario.

There are lots of other reasons why Wonderland seems such an attractive choice for teachers and trainers including, authentication, 100% Java, being free (yes that’s right, free!). I already stand the risk of being accused of blog hogging, so I need to quickly move to a close!

Our COMSLIVE Project aim is to design a communication skills Wonderland environment and assess the extent to which this fosters real world change within our students as they engage within our high fidelity simulation centre learning activities. We are also exploring how scalable Wonderland set up is in terms of the number of worlds we can run concurrently, the number of scenarios in a world, and the number of avatars in a scenario. This is all looking good at the moment as we conduct a series of stress tests. In common with most Faculties of Health, we have high student numbers. There are 3000 student nurses in one course alone.

The project is funded by the Joint Information Services Committee with a significant additional contribution by the University. We  have also partnered with Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust and Middlesex University.

More information on COMSLIVE can be found at the JISC project website and at the Birmingham City University project website (very nascent). For more information please feel free to drop me a line.

Nigel Wynne

National Teaching Fellow
Senior Academic L&T
Head- Online Simulation and Immersive Education Research Group
Faculty of Health
Birmingham City University
nigel.wynne @ bcu.ac.uk

Due to our recent “organizational changes,” I never got a chance to write a blog post about the fun and interesting community test event on January 28th, but you can see snapshots from the event on our new Project Wonderland Facebook page. At that event, we heard an update from University of Oregon researchers Kathryn Aten & Taryn Stanko, and we learned more about the scripting module from Morris Ford. Our last presenter, Ryan Babiuch, known as “jagwire” on the Wonderland forum, demonstrated a new particle capability. Ryan is a developer on the iSocial project and an undergraduate at the University of Missouri studying Computer Science and Information Technology. He has been a developer on the iSocial project since before the stable release of Wonderland 0.4. In today’s guest blog post, Ryan describes the Particle Capability that he created and shows some examples.

One of the aspects of computer graphics that I’ve always found interesting is the notion of special effects driven by particle systems. Upon test driving the Marbelous module, I immediately recognized the particle effects on the marble. The marble emitted a red glow as it traveled down the track towards its destination. I had to know how it worked, why it did what it did, and if I could do it differently. After a bit of trying, I discovered it was quite easy to add a particle system programatically to a cell, but that wasn’t enough. Why couldn’t one add it to any cell at runtime? I was able to develop a cell capability which would allow particle style effects to any rendered cell.

After installing the Particle System Capability module, the Particle Capability can be added to an object (cell) by opening the Object Editor window and clicking on the add (+) button found on the Capabilities panel. The default particle system automatically appears in the world and the user will be presented with a set of properties to manipulate and configure the visual effects for that particular object. Any other additional objects in a world can also take advantage of their own particle capabilities.

Let’s take a look at some examples. Here’s a particle effect that looks like snow:

And here are the approximate settings for the snow effect (click on the image to see enlarged):

Here’s an example of a particle effect that looks like fire. The effect has been applied to the telephone model:

To get this effect, you must change settings in three different panels.

All settings were tweaked a bit to make the effect look the way it should. The settings are a bit loose as every effect is different based on a certain amount of randomness.  Believe it or not, I applied the snow to the phone as well. The idea with the snow is to invert the direction of emission from up to down (-1 on the y-axis) and then I raised the starting position sufficiently high enough above the avatar’s head, as depicted in the snow settings screenshot.

In its current state, the capability is rather primitive. The system as a whole has basic configurability including changing colors, timing, speed, as well as position, rotation, and size. The properties interface still needs some polish and better organization. Finally, the current shape of each particle is a plain circle.

As functionality progresses, the plan is to add more configurability to the module to include the following:

• Configurable shape of the particles.
• Configurable shape of the emitters, or source of the particles.
• Configurable layers of particles to give the illusion of multiple of effects at once.
• Configurable environmental influences such as swarming and gravity for better natural simulations.
• Built in environmental settings for a world as a whole for weather simulations.
• The ability to add particle effects to one’s avatar.
• Event triggers.

As you experiment with the Particle Capability, please send me feedback and be sure to post your screenshots on the Wonderland Facebook photos page along with the settings you used to create the effect.

Ryan Babiuch, aka jagwire