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.

We use the following stack:

Sun 4100 Server
Solaris 10 patched current
Java 6, Ant, CVS, SVN
Wonderland Development Release

This is a semi-pure Sun stack and has been our best performing and most reliable. The older machines run Ubuntu 8.04 with the same development stack. This has be nice as well but the older hardware give us problems sometimes.

New Virtual Worlds

This summer we have implemented a number of additional virtual worlds which correspond to our projects. These are:

UN TVET

This project is being done in conjunction with Felix-Fechenbach BerufsKolleg in Detmold, Germany. The objective is to initially provide the UN Technical, Vocational Education and Training mission with a meeting place. The room is modeled after the boardroom in Bonn Germany.

The thought is the mission will eventually work with the user community around the world to enable more effective technical training through virtual educational facilities.

We look forward to advancing this notion.

Sun Center of Excellence at Saint Paul College

This project is to recreate in a virtual sense the three lecture rooms and server room which will be used in the Sun Center of Excellence at the college.

We envision this being used to conduct lectures in computer science and research into virtual worlds.

Harding High School Virtual Tutoring Center

This project is very exciting for us. It was brought to us by Harding High School here in Saint Paul.

The idea is to use the metaverse metaphor to enable our students to do some service learning by tutoring students who need help in the local school district.

We created this virtual world and intend to add functionality once the Harding students return from their summer break.