Immersive Virtual Environments at Saint Paul College.

Warren's blog

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Revitalized Virtual Northstar Team!

Posted Thu, 11/12/2009 - 18:24 by Warren
This has been a terrific month for the project team. As anyone revisiting our website can see we have modified our presentation, installed a new test facility at St. Paul College for Project Wonderland, added two new graphic designers, and are beginning the process of training these new team members on the technical aspects of installing and deploying a Wonderland instance. On our website please pay particular attention to our new team members blogs. They are Josh, Aki, Michael and Marcus.
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Merlot and More

Posted Fri, 08/15/2008 - 22:16 by Warren

A lot of action!

This has been a terrific last week on our project. We are pretty happy about the progress at least in so far as the creation and deployment of worlds is concerned. We have now successfully created and deployed 6 "worlds". We are getting better and better at this and plan to expand our work a bit. Some of this is listed below.

Harding High Virtual Tutoring Center

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Back Again!

Posted Wed, 08/06/2008 - 17:28 by Warren

WoW! what a busy summer.

Virtual Northstar Progress

Our Hardware and Software Stack

We get a lot of questions about the hardware and software used in our hosting.

We have put up a number of virtual worlds this summer. Basically we are using our old Sun servers and have used a one-world per server deployment strategy.

This has worked so far but the older servers are sluggish and we have some problems with voicebridge on them.

Our flagship world, MnSCU Island runs on a Sun 4100. This machine seems to be ideal for hosting a Wonderland world.

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Where the heck did the week go?

Posted Sun, 05/11/2008 - 13:37 by Warren

University of Oregon and Saint Paul College Work

This project has been great for both teams. The project wiki has been a good tool and the contributors through the artwork stage have really been doing a great job.

All artwork is done through the Wonderland Format

We are now working on deployment. Art tool path complete, (with some pains)but it is complete.

Deployment is vexing and I am sure glad I know a bit about XML and Ant. Will need now to focus on the Java code. We probably need a programming student on this full-time as my schedule remains full.

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Developing around Wonderland - U of Oregon and Saint Paul Teams

Posted Wed, 05/07/2008 - 10:50 by Warren

University of Oregon and Saint Paul College Team to Deploy in Wonderland

What a nice experience working with Jonathon Richter and his team at CATE at the University of Oregon.

We started this project 6 days ago and have really accelerated our experience with the Wonderland platform.

We have both completed the artwork and model construction part of the process. Now the models are in Wonderland format and ready to be deployed on our respective servers.

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May - Presentations and Workshops

Posted Sun, 05/04/2008 - 09:35 by Warren

The area of virtual worlds has sparked a great deal of interest in a variety of areas across the state of Minnesota. We have been invited to give a number of talks about the technology during the month of May.

Thought I would post them for your information.

May 8th - Virtual Worlds and the Sun COE

In cooperation with John Drozik I will be presenting at Ruttgers Lodge to the MnCCECT Conference. This is the customized training organization for MnSCU Institutions.

May 21st - eLearning Summit - Normandale Community College

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University of Oregon (CATE) - Saint Paul Project

Posted Sun, 05/04/2008 - 09:21 by Warren

What, Why, How, and Results

What?

We are partnering with the University of Oregon, Center for Advanced Technology in Education in joint effort to go through the entire deployment cycle for a 3D Immersive Environment based on the Sun Wonderland Platform.

This effort envisions both teams utilizing Second Life assets as prototypes and tracks the conversion of the assets through deployment on the Sun Wonderland platform.

Primary responsibilities are shared, the work relationship is informal and each partner is expected to contribute to the learning process.