kevin roebuck's blog: My Almost Daily News

This is one announcement I hope to change. This is one I would not.

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on the amazing virtual 3D camera magic behind avatar, it's cool to see WETA using MySQL too. The processing power required to render these new ultra-realistic digital worlds includes 40,000 processors, 104 terabytes of RAM, 17GB/minute of storage for the final cut making WETA's renderfarm #196-199 on the Top 500. As John Lasseter always says, "the art challenges the technology and technology inspires the art". I cannot wait to see the worlds our students will create in an inter-connected network of 3-D Wonderland servers and hope it's powered by Oracle-Sun systems.

I saw Avatar in IMAX 3-D last Friday. It is simply an amazing cinematic experience and great to see 3-D now hitting the big screen, TV screens and of course the web. Here's a cool video about some of the technology behind the scenes in case you missed it. Hats off to Mr. Cameron and his crew.

Michael posted a new video this morning of the progress with the language learning project called SiMiLLE taking place at Essex University and in Wonderland

The folks at Birmingham City University are moving along well in building their new communication and training models for healthcare professionals using Project Wonderland. The photo below shows some of the fine modeling work, most of the apps they need running in-world and even new Evolver avatars!

Here's some info on the latest Wonderland effort as part of European FP7 initiative. Dr. Michael Gardner at Essex who headed up the MiRTLE Project with us is the PI now on + Spaces.

New EU FP7 project +Spaces to start in January 2010

Recently funded by the EU Framework 7 ICT programme (call 4), the +Spaces project (Positive Spaces: Policy Simulation in Virtual Spaces) will start in January 2010. The value of the award to the University of Essex is 316,000 EURO over 30 months, and the project involves partners from IBM, Fraunhofer, ATOS Origin, University Leuven, Athens Technology Centre, University of Athens, and the Hellenic Parliament. The PI at the University of Essex is Michael Gardner. This project will be building on the well established work in developing virtual world and mixed-reality applications using the open-source Project Wonderland toolset from Sun microsystems. +Spaces aims to provide novel technologies and instruments that will allow government bodies to measure public opinion on a large scale and maximise the outcomes of prospective policy measures by leveraging the power of online communities. From the +Spaces perspective, virtual worlds form a vast reserve of group knowledge that, once aggregated and properly processed, can be incorporated in the policy making process

This is a first look at use of the Glasshouse plugin API, with a plugin that allows ad-hoc query building via the 3D environment! Multiple datasets can be correlated and compared. Here CEO Ben Lindquist shows some analysis of firewall log activity to and from China

Here's the latest video from the Sun Center-of-Excellence for Project Wonderland at Saint Paul College. You can learn all about their development, curriculum and technology initatives at the Virtual Northstar Project site.

PEOPLE2PEOPLE - Using Virtual Worlds for developing Leadership and Conflict Resolution Skills Among Arab and Jewish Israeli Students. Announcing the Opening the Immersive Education Middle East Virtual World Project supported by the Grid Institute on Sun Microsystem's Project Wonderland platform.

Join this morning's Sun in Education Webcast series live at 10am pacific featuring a discussion and overview of the rich media initiative work done with Georgetown University, Sharestream and Sun.

Please welcome our latest member addition to the Wonderland business community, Amphisocial. Whether it's bringing Google apps into Wonderland, virtual project meetings or creating role-playing games for educators, Anu and team are the latest innovators now experimenting and building in v0.5

Victoria School, Singapore has won the CHAMPIONSHIP for National Infocomm Club Awards organised annually by Info-communications Development Authority of Singapore for innovative ICT school projects in Singapore. Under the training and tutorage of Open Systems Innovation (OSI) Singapore, Victoria School has been using Wonderland to introduce 3D virtual worlds and providing tutorials for the students on creating and building their own virtual worlds with Wonderland.Under the training and tutorage of Open Systems Innovation (OSI) Singapore, Victoria School has been using Wonderland to introduce 3D virtual worlds and providing tutorials for the students on creating and building their own virtual worlds with Wonderland. OSI has taught over 1000 students at high School level on Wonderland.

Today it was announced by the IDA of Singapore that Victoria School who has adopted Wonderland for Infocomm Club, designed and developed a virtual space for Youth Olympics which will be held in Singapore during August 2010. The YOG world is designed as an information and collaboration site for the visiting Athletes and Officials to meet socially leave messages (post it notes) as well as have meetings in the world. Open Systems Innovation is further developing their involvement with Wonderland and Education with developing Lab Sessions in the 3D world for students as individuals or groups, as well as tutorials (involving the teacher) these will be in subjects like Physics, Chemistry and Biology, and will follow the GCE 'O' Level curriculum. Used extensively in Europe Asia and Australia, these Lab sessions are being developed with pedagogy experts from various schools and National Institute of Education (NIE) and they will be developed with Wonderland 0.5.

Walkthrough of Victoria School Singapore Youth Olympics Virtual World

We are having a live webcast Thursday morning, 9am Pacific, to provide an update on the new Wonderland v0.5 platform and share of the success from the Immersive Education Iniative. Join us if you can. Register here.

Two new videos are out this week from the Immersive Education Group on the Rocket World Project with Nicole and Jon helping to show Aaron some of the new amazing new features of Wonderland v0.5 for teaching and learning.

Drag and Drop : World-building from the Desktop

Recording in-World

Our Educause Press Release went out this morning featuring our friends at the University of Zurich and their ShanghAI Lectures initiative on natural and artificial intelligence starring Project Wonderland.

A nice meeting this morning in with the great team at the University of Zurich on their new v0.5 Wonderland server world. The ShanghAI Lecture Series is a pioneering effort to bring new technology to inter-disciplinary learning to a whole new level. Things are moving along fast as they now have more than 340 students on 5 continents who will be going live in Wonderland v0.5 on 10/29 and Nov. 5th. We've got Nigel working overtime in pursuit of supporting the in-world video requirements for their sessions. You can see the cool app they wrote in the photo below that tracks users through their experience as a form of analytics and feedback for the instructors. They will also have some nice tutorials and use case scenario's to share back to the community. I'll plan to demo their environment in the Sun Booth at Educause next week in Denver.

An interesting week as several projects coalesce around the notion of setting up networked 3-D labs for conducting experiments and simulations in the sciences notably focused on undergraduate studies. In Europe, it's the LiLa Project, or Library of Labs, which has already selected Project Wonderland as the user experience virtual world platform based at the University of Stuttgart. Also in Europe at the University of Technology in Graz, researchers are heading up a similar and inter-connected initiative called CLISE to bring the same vision to life along with the pioneering efforts of MIT's i-Labs program in collaboration with the EU. In America along with MIT, the Rocket World Project takes off soon at the Immersive Education Initiative where our investment in the Alice 3.0 authoring environment and it's integration with Wonderland will provide another amazing showcase of innovation as kids design, build and launch virtual rockets while engineers from NASA supervise and mentor their work.  We'll showcase it all at Educause in Denver in a few weeks. As my friend Aaron always says, "Tally Ho!"

Now! This first test is going to be very, very basic. We'd like to see how many low-quality avatars we can get into an almost empty world. Here are the guidelines for participating:

* You should use a computer that has successfully run Wonderland in the past

* Before connecting to the test server, set your client to use one of the low-quality avatars (cartoon or toy)

* Please use headphones

* Don't do anything in the world other than open HUD windows, talk, and walk around unless asked

* Set up your environment to collect data as described in the Testing 101 tutorial: (http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javadesktop/WonderlandTesting101#Data_Collection)

* Connect to the #wonderland IRC chat channel on the server irc.freenode.net

We'll be using the Colloquy IRC client on our Macs:

http://colloquy.info/downloads.html

Keep in mind that the server will likely fail at some point. Our goal is to figure out where that point is. We'll use the IRC channel to communicate with everyone, so please be sure that you're set up to connect to that chat channel prior to the test if you'd like to participate.

Sorry for the late posting. Here's the server we'll be testing today:

http://coherent.sunlabs.com:45874/

Please remember to wear headphones. Even iPod-style ear buds will help prevent echo in the world. In addition, review the other requirements below.

Innovation does indeed happen anywhere. Check out the cool work going on in at the Chemistryt Department at University of the West Indies, Mona campus in Jamaica where they are running several Wonderland servers on to bring chemistry to life in Wonderland. Click on the avatar to learn more about their work....

It is really great to see Warren getting the kind of press he deserves for all his great work. Not only as a prototype Sun customer, but as a super person and friend. Well done Warren. Congrats. Click on his photo to learn more.

Check out Bernard's new video showing some early features on how you can  record movies in Wonderland. Should be a nice feature for capturing in-world sessions for watching later as machinima.

This week saw another very cool project launch from the Immersive Education Initiative that includes Project Wonderland and our corporate investment in support of the Alice 3.0 programming environment. We'll use Alice as an entry-level IDE for students to build and deploy rockets for test flights in the immersive worlds. Here's the announcement on Monday from the Media Grid.

Here's the new content piece for promoting Wonderland to our student communities around the world

Here's the video snapshot from the Team Marbleous entry from the Wonderland Week of Code.

Yesterday, we saw a bit of a milestone for us as we reached 1,000 members in the Sun Immersion SIG all interested in seeing the attempt to bring Project Wonderland, Project Darkstar and SunSPOT technologies together into a single open development and deployment 3-D Web platform strategy for education, business and entertainment. It was also great to see the latest project videos that Shamini posted yesterday including the Yumin Primary School Virtual Classroom and Uniquely Singapore ICT2010 worlds. I can't wait to see what they can do with v0.5.

Yumin Primary School Virtual Classroom

Uniquely Singapore

Here is the new promotional video for the Roxbury Institute of Technology, the World's First 'Immersive Education High School' where Wes and team will be using Project Wonderland and other virtual technologies to reach out to students and develop new leaders in the Boston community.

The new James Cameron 3-D epic Avatar sure looks good and the preview goes live on the net tomorrow so watch for it. It's great to see the momentum around immersive experiences these days. We're going to show some cool stuff in Wonderland v0.5 at Educause this year in Denver in the fall so come by the Sun booth or drop in on my talk at the event. The 3-D web has arrived.

This is just a quick reminder of an interview today (Tuesday, August 18th) at 4:30pm Pacific Daylight Time (US) with Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs. They'll be taking about the impact of the Internet on culture and society. http://www.conversations.net/forum/topics/howard-rheingold, or log in directly to the Elluminate session at http://tinyurl.com/convnet. The session is hosted by Steve Hargadon, Founder of Classroom 2.0 - Visit at http//www.classroom20.com/

Now that's immersive.....

This week pits Team Marble-ous against Team Timeline in the fabulous Wonderland Week of Code to demonstrate the all-new capabilities of the v0.5 platform capabilities by building two demo worlds in a week. The friendly competition is underway. I am a part of Team Timeline and even though I was bummed to miss the start of the week to fly out to DC to meet with our peers at Oracle, today I submitted my timeline idea around the Apollo Project to put a man on the moon. There's still two days to go and I've got some real work to do tomorrow, but I hope I get to see the Apollo spiral as one of the sample models at the end. I'm bringing the video camera too so I can get a quick interview and demo of the new Alice drag-and-drop integration with Wonderland. And just in time for the new movie!