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.

The mini-project is headed up at Oregon by Dr. Richter and at Saint Paul by Warren Sheaffer.

Teams will work collaboratively sharing work product and will utilize a set of Web 2.0 technologies to enable agile development and deployment on a highly compressed timeframe.

Why?

There are a multitude of reasons for the collaboration but the dominant theme is to reduce the learning curve for producing usable virtual environments on the Wonderland platform and to fairly assess the deployment time, cost and complexity compared with an available platform such as 2nd Life.

Since Oregon and Saint Paul have by coincidence identical deployment platforms joint efforts will be very productive since both teams will essentially be looking at the same problem.

Oregon and Saint Paul are using the same software tool chain so comparable metrics about time and effort can be developed.

How?

FAST AS POSSIBLE!

The project was envisioned as a crash effort. While metrics about platform are important, metrics about process are also important.

It was determined from the outset to use a project wiki and its use and effectiveness in bringing a product to production so to speak are going to be evaluated as well.

To enable the shortest possible time to start to work the wiki was set up on www.wetpaint.com as it is more mature than our site and it was felt we can learn from wetpaint and implement the results here.

Results

There are lots of questions surrounding the application of this technology in any number of settings.

We are looking to determine:

1. How long does it take to deploy a modest site in elapsed time?
2. What needs to be done to move a model from 2nd Life to Wonderland?
3. Is 2nd Life a good prototyping tool?
4. How effective is "in-world" asset creation vs "software tool chain" asset creation and what are the relative advantages to each approach?
5. What is the cost in terms of time for management, design, model creation, deployment, debug and test?

Other unanticipated results will be reported as well.