Wonderland Challenge 2009

Here are some cool YouTube videos from the Wonderland 2009 Developers Challenge held at Kasetsart University in Bangkok

Posted at 08:35AM May 22, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Success at Saint Paul

The new page on Sun.com dedicated to the success story at Saint Paul College is posted. Thanks to Chuck for helping get the message out and to Warren and team for all their great work along with Robert too.

Posted at 10:56AM May 21, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

New Logo

My favorite version of the new logo ideas for Wonderland

Posted at 07:37PM May 18, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Project Wonderland 0.5 Preview

Nicole has posted the latest preview video and details for the Wonderland 0.5 dev release on the Wonderblog. The team has done an amazing job with the new graphics and avatar systems, collada support and even federation for jumping from world-to-world safely and securely. Too cool to qualify.

Posted at 03:30PM May 14, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

AGENDA: Open File Formats Technology Working Group Meeting Agenda, 2009-05-15

Meeting details for this friday's Immersive Education meeting of the Open File Format Working Group. Project Wonderland will be announced as fully compatible with COLLADA for Create Once, Experience everywhere initiative.

WHAT: OFF.TWG UPDATE AND PROJECT OVERVIEW MEETING IN-WORLD
WHEN: Friday May 15th at 11am ET (Boston time; 9-10am Pacific / SL time)
WHERE: Second Life http://slurl.com/secondlife/Smithers%20Bluff/45/204/92
AGENDA:

1 hour meeting where Open File Formats Technology Working Group (OFF.TWG)
co-chairs will provide an overview of the current status of OFF.TWG off-list
activity and progress, along with an overview of the "OFF.TWG MESH RENDERING
PROJECT" that has been under development for the past five months.

During this meeting OFF.TWG members will see screenshots of the same 3D mesh
objects in both Wonderland and realXtend, and also in the OGRE rendering engine.
The ability to render the same 3D mesh objects (models) across all three
Immersive Education virtual worlds platforms is the overarching objective
of the "OFF.TWG MESH RENDERING PROJECT" that will be discussed next Friday.

Below is the meeting agenda:

+ Welcome and meeting overview

+ Gather attendee roster [meeting roll call]

+ Brief review of OFF.TWG "3D/VR File Format Requirements" and corresponding
   "Request for Information (RFI)"

   - OFF.TWG 3D/VR File Format Requirements
     http://MediaGrid.org/groups/technology/OFF.TWG/public/out/3DVR_Requirements

   - OFF.TWG 3D/VR Request for Information (RFI)
     http://MediaGrid.org/groups/technology/OFF.TWG/public/out/3DVR_RFI


+ Responses to OFF.TWG 3D/VR Request for Information (RFI)
    - Khronos Group: COLLADA RFI response
    - Web3D Consortium: eXtensible 3D (X3D) RFI response
    - ECMA International: Universal 3D (ECMA-363) RFI response

+ Justification for proceeding with COLLADA
    - OFF.TWG members overwhelming voted for COLLADA in informal (straw) vote
    - Widespread authoring tool support
    - Already supported by one Immersive Education platform (Wonderland 0.5)
    - Ease of implementation and transformation
    - Various related projects underway for OGRE and realXtend

+ OFF.TWG MESH RENDERING PROJECT overview and status report
    - Requirement for 2 distinct implementations
    - COLLADA project overview
       + See figures in charter http://mediagrid.org/groups/technology/OFF.TWG/
       + Reference implementation via COLLADA transformation to OGRE & realXtend
       + COLLADA conformance content suite
    - Funding sources for COLLADA mesh rendering project
    - COLLADA mesh rendering project status

+ Timelines for Official Adoption and Standardization
    - COLLADA source code and related materials available to public (May/June)
    - Immersive Education OFF.TWG 3D/VR format vote and announcement (June)
    - Immersive Education file format profiles and levels [subsets] (June/July)
    - Wonderland, realXtend full support and pass conformance suite (July)
    - Croquet/Cobalt full support and pass conformance suite [TBA]

+ $10,000 COLLADA Immersive Education content creation contest
    - http://colladacontest.com
    - Contest input into OFF.TWG standardization process


+ Q/A and open discussion

+ Adjourn

Posted at 03:10PM May 13, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Learning Math via Video Games

Tell these kids or their parents that they aren't learning math or that video games just aren't as effective, if not more so, than a textbook. Kudos to DimensionM for helping show the way. Oh, The Times they are a Changin'.

Posted at 07:47AM May 13, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Get in the Game

If you'd like to win $5,000 cash then jump in to the Champion the the 3-D Web with Collada Contest. Sponsored by Intel, Khronos Group and the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, experience designers can compete to build the most realistic fantastic online experiences using this state-of-the art file format for interactive 3-D content. And,guess what!? Project Wonderland is the ONLY Collada-compatible technology approved for the Education Grid so fire up those Blender or Maya engines and get in the game because Sun is here to help you win that dough and more. Contact us if you'd like to work on an Immersion Grant at your schoool for a student lab to get kids ready for jobs in the new world of 3-D web!

Posted at 08:19AM Apr 24, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Calling all Students

Before jumping on the Oracle Town Hall webcast, I thought I'd just quickly blog the news that JavaOne is free this year for students. And faculty? You too can get in free if you bring 10 students with you. Sign up today.

Posted at 08:12AM Apr 22, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Irmos & Project Wonderland

Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Labs, will reveal the preliminary results of the Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service Oriented Infrastructures (IRMOS) Project at the 'Immersive Education Summit' - being held at the London School of Economics in London this week.

The IRMOS Project is a 36 month, 12.9m Euro project awarded by the European Commission to a Consortium of 13 leading European organisations. The project aims to develop 'real-time' interaction between people and applications over a service oriented infrastructure (SOI), where processing, storage and networking need to be combined and delivered with guaranteed levels of service.
Within the scope of the IRMOS Project, Giunti Labs is developing one of the user
scenarios for Interactive Real-time Location Based Learning, integrating its Harvestroad Hive Digital Repository and learn eXact Mobile Learning technologies with the Project Wonderland and Project Darkstar Virtual
Worlds and collaboration platforms, running on top of the IRMOS
SOI infrastructure.

Very cool stuff and the beginning of our latest new strategic business partnership in Immersion

Posted at 09:32AM Apr 21, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Metaverse U

Paul and I met up with Henrik for a nice chat and some darn good pizza at Cafe Zoetrope last week to work out the details of our participation in Metaverse U this year. We're all set to go now for the Project Wonderland presentation and demo of the new 0.5 platform and we're really looking forward to a great event at Stanford on May 29th.

Posted at 12:16PM Apr 16, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

World Builder

Posted at 02:54PM Apr 09, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Immersive Education - London Summit

The two-day Immersive Education Initiative London Summit featuring keynote presentations on Project Wonderland convenes at 9am on April 23rd 2009 in the Wolfson Theatre in the New Academic Building at the London School of Economics. Students are free so register today.

Posted at 03:58PM Apr 06, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

People2People

While the Immersive Education London Summit is only a few weeks away, we are already lining up the next project work and initiative and this time in the Middle East. Here are some early details of the important work which lies ahead.People2People: Using Virtual Worlds for developing Leadership and Conflict Resolution Skills Among Arab and Jewish Israeli Students - Selected and approved by the GRID Institute and Immersive Education, USA.

The main goals of the project are:

To build a 3D virtual space, the technological infrastructure and pedagogical concept for conducting the study using Sun Micro Systems's Wonderland.

To conduct a study which will examine and analyze the multidimensional interactions of Arab-Israeli high-school students and students, while they collaboratively build engaging learning objects and design games within 3D collaborative virtual space.

Granted with 9,000$ US from Grid Institute and Immersive Education, the  project lead by Dr. Hanan "VRider" Gazit, at the Instructional Systems technologies department at H.I.T-Holon Institute of Technology, will start this spring and run for three years. It will receive Sun's hardware, software and technical support from Immersive Education. The Sun's Wonderland platform will run on H.I.T's own server that will be connected to the Immersive Education Grid.

Project Chief Scientist and manager: Dr. Hanan Gazit
Dr. Hanan "VRider" Gazit is a faculty member of the Instructional Systems technologies department at H.I.T- Holon Institute of Technology, were he teach games and virtual worlds. Hanan is the CEO of MetaverSense Ltd., an Israeli based company leading the use of virtual worlds, digital Games and social networks for instruction and business. Hanan holds a Ph.D. degree in the Learning Sciences and a Magna Cum Laude M.A. degree in Science Education, both from Tel-Aviv University. A former post doctorate fellow researcher at LIRT Lab, Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild Foundation Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Computer Science, University of Haifa.  Hanan serves on the Association of Virtual Worlds' Advisory Board, on the Editorial Review Board of the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations. He founded the Digital Games Research Association [DiGRA] ISRAEL and serves as the Israeli Chair of the coming SLACTIONS 2009 Conference.

H.I.T - Holon Institute of Technology is a modern technology-oriented academic institution. It has four faculties, eight departments, several research centers and a wide variety of state-of-the-art research laboratories. The Department of Instructional Systems Technologies provides a unique and specialized B.A program enabling its graduates to address the challenge of effective use of modern technology for promoting innovative learning and training in all sectors.

Posted at 09:18AM Mar 28, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Live in Berlin

It's day two here at the Sun European Education and Research Conference here in Berlin. The weather has been cold and windy, but the meeting is moving along well with lots of interest in the various open source and community efforts underway around the company in support of academic computing. I'll do my breakout session on Wonderland in about 3 hours live from the SunLabs server in in case anyone wants to startle the audience a bit when an unknown avatar shows up to say hi or just mill about in the background. Joining me is Fabrizio from Giunti Labs, Warren from Saint Paul College, Michael from Essex, Andy from SWITCH in Switzerland and Carlo from University of Rome. The conference wraps up tomorrow and then a 1pm flight back through Munich to San Francisco. That reminds me to log in to Lufthansa.com and see if I can get an exit row. Ciao.

Posted at 11:30PM Mar 24, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Best use of Blackberry Storm, ever

Posted at 04:58PM Mar 19, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[2]

Virtual Sun Users Group Meeting - Project Wonderland

Please join us for an overview of Project Wonderland and its use in Immersive Education at the Saint Paul College Center-of-Excellence for Immersive Learning. Our interactive, online meeting will be facilitated via Elluminate and a conference call this Thursday.

Date: Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Start Time:
10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)
12:30 PM Central Daylight Time (CDT)
1:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Duration: 90 Minutes

LIVE WEB ACCESS:
Elluminate link:
https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=vclass&password=BMUKXLYXPRV9I8NE4QBW

* Please launch approximately 10 minutes prior to the scheduled meeting start time in order to allow sufficient time for the Java session to load.

LIVE AUDIO CONFERENCE:
Toll Free Dial In Number: 866-545-5227
Int'l Access/Caller Paid Dial In Number: 215-446-3648
ACCESS CODE: 5351467

Guest Speakers

* Warren Sheaffer, Saint Paul College

Warren Sheaffer is the Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Saint Paul College. Warren is the Project Lead for the Sun Center of Excellence at Saint Paul College focusing on Java Technology, Open Source Software and Virtual Worlds. Warren manages Project Virtual Northstar which develops, deploys and uses virtual worlds based on Sun's Wonderland platform for applications in distance education and learning in virtual environments. Saint Paul College is an active node on The Education Grid. He speaks frequently in person and virtually on the use of virtual reality as an education and communication platform.

Kevin Roebuck, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Kevin Roebuck is the Business Development Manager for e-Learning in Sun's Global Education and Research Group. Kevin is responsible for Sun's strategy and market alliances for e-Learning. Kevin also acts as Community Manager for the Sun Immersion Special Interest Group, an on-line community dedicated to Open Education using Project Wonderland with over 860 members from 150 organizations in more than 43 countries.

Posted at 09:51AM Mar 17, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[1]

Wonderland in the Kingdom

I'm meeting up with Raed in about 30 minutes on the SunLabs public server to prepare and rehearse for our upcoming demo for King Saud University next week. I did a quick search on "saudi arabia" in the flickr window in MPK20 and got back some cool photos. Here's my favorite.

Posted at 08:36AM Mar 13, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

SIMiLLE Project - JISC Grant Win

I just got the news from Michael the his new SIMiLLE project has been awarded a JISC Learning and Teaching Innovation Grant with the project running from 1st May 2009 until April 2010 at the Digital Lifestyles Centre at the University of Essex. Here is the project abstract:

System for an Immersive and Mixed reality Language Learning Environment (SIMiLLE) - The proposed project will investigate using virtual world technologies to create meaningful contexts for learning a foreign language. It addresses the problem for distance learning students unable to experience the cultural and social immersion when learning a language, and to enrich and control the cultural content for students already
located in the host environment. A virtual world will be built using Sun’s Darkstar Platform and Project Wonderland tools. It will be evaluated for both its technological and pedagogical utility.

We are going to build Wonderland worlds (hopefully with 0.5) for language learning in collaboration with the International Academy and the Language and Linguistics departments at Essex.

Comment on the project in the Immersion Forum Discussion on Using Wonderland for Online Lectures.

Posted at 09:41AM Mar 09, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Minority Report : It's really happening

Angie joined the Immersion SIG today and put up a new forum discussion on her amazing work with motion gloves, SunSPOTs and now Project Wonderland to create all new types of GUIs to interface with desktop applications and data resources similar to the ones in the movie Minority Report. Immersive Indeed.

Posted at 05:48PM Mar 03, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Immersion Grants

If you've got an interesting project idea or pilot to explore in Project Wonderland, Darkstar or SunSPOTS for Immersive Education but are running a bit short on resources (and who isn't these days), then Sun is here to help with our 2009 Matching Grant Program. So, toss in a proposal to establish a node on the Education Grid, set-up a student lab around Blender and Netbeans for creating Open Virtual Worlds or maybe to pilot a use case scenario that you think might be a real community showcase with transformational impact for Immersion, then click on the image below and let's get started.

Posted at 11:47AM Feb 25, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

The ShanghAI Lectures

I met up Beatrice last Friday at Stanford where she was participating in a workshop on intercultural collaboration and presenting the work they are doing at University of Zurich and Shanghai Jiaotong University using Project Wonderland called The ShanghAI Lectures - An experiment in mixed-reality global teaching, intercultural collaboration and community building. The first test run with Wonderland is currently taking place during the
"Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" class at UZH Based on "How the Body Shapes the Way We Think - A New View of
Intelligence" by Rolf Pfeifer and Josh C. Bongard, MIT Press, November
2006, ISBN 0-262-16239. They have also developed a couple of cool custom applications including
one for the exchange of Virtual Business Cards and one for lecture annotation. Contact the team to learn more and participate.

Posted at 11:01AM Feb 23, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Sun Creates Immersive Technology COE At Athabasca U

The press release from IT Canada went out yesterday describing our new Centre-of-Excellence for Immersive Technologies around Project Wonderland at the Athabasca University, Canada's Open University and the first of it's kind in the country. Read the Press Release

Posted at 08:38AM Feb 20, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

27

Here's a screenshot of the 27 avatars in the University of Zurich in their 0.4 Wonderland space from earlier today. Thierry reported that people were using very different HW/OS settings (e.g., Ubuntu 8.10, Windows XP, MacOS X on 32 and 64 bit machines) and they edited some open office docs, looked at the built-in video viewer. They had logged in from different locations in Switzerland.

Posted at 09:21AM Feb 19, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Immersive Education - European Summit

The Immersive Education European Summit will launch in London on April 23-24, 2009. Hosted by the London School of Economics (LSE), IE Europe is a special two-day conference dedicated to new and emerging virtual world and game-based learning platforms, technology, standards, learning content, and best practices for Immersive Education. As with the 2008 Boston Summit, the London Summit is an anchor event and will feature a number of speakers, presentations, panel discussions, round tables, and break-out sessions on Immersive Education including feature talks on Project Wonderland by SunLabs Bernard Horan and Essex University's creator of the MiRTLE Mixed-Reality Classroom project, Dr. Michael Gardner.

Details for the LONDON SUMMIT will be posted to the Immersive Education Initiative home page at: http://ImmersiveEducation.org or at http://mediagrid.org/. Registration for the event will open soon. The per-person cost for the 2-day conference is $275 US Dollars.

Project Wonderland is an accepted open technology platform for the Immersive Education Initiative and the Education Grid:

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-06/sunflash.20080625.1.xml

Don't miss out and mark your calendars now to attend!

Posted at 02:20PM Feb 18, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Live SHIFT Radio - Episode #30 on Project Wonderland

Shift Radio - Episode 30 starts in 15 minutes. Join host, Chris Melissinos, he talks with Nicole joinYankelovich who oins the show to discuss Project Wonderland, a Java and open source toolkit for creating 3D virtual worlds. In addition to Project Wonderland Team Lead, Nicole is also
Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Program at Sun Labs. Her impressive background includes work on the telepresence device Porta-Person, six patents in interaction design and numerous publications.

Shift Radio
Episode #30 - Project Wonderland

Posted at 08:44AM Feb 13, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Wonderland in Thailand

The Nation, Thailand's biggest business daily, has announced our latest momentum for Project Wonderland in education with Kasetsart University in Thailand.

Posted at 11:20AM Feb 12, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Letter from Silicon Valley

Shinichi-san who goes by the nickname "Steve" writes a regular article on latest trends in Silicon Valley for a Japanese periodical called Network Magazine. I met him at the Venture Capital Private Equity Roundtable where I gave a demo of Project Wonderland. He was kind enough to come visit Sun and learn more about the project and meet Paul and Jon too in the Labs. Here's the Article. Now, I'm off to find a friend who can translate to see how the article reads. Next up Steve wants to do an article on SunSPOTs.

Posted at 01:51PM Feb 11, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Building 3-D Worlds in Wonderland - Live Now

Angad is starting the Building Wonderland Worlds presentation in Elluminate now live if you'd like to participate.

Posted at 07:59AM Feb 10, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Wonderland for the Deaf

Here's a snapshot from today's trial run of hooking up a Dragon speach-to-text interpreter and piping it into the chat window in Wonderland with a goal of allowing hearing impaired students to fully participate in the immersive experience. The system worked great so it looks like we'll start a thread going on the Immersion SIG site to start responding to the crtically important issues of equal accessability. Nicole joined which was great and she shared some more detailed thoughts on the Wonderblog today.

Posted at 03:56PM Feb 06, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[0]

Work Hard, Be Nice

This week Bill Gates released a jar full of Mosquito's into the audience at the TED conference to make a point about Malaria. Not only is the talk well worth watching for a better understanding of the childhood death rate, but also for his second point on education and his recommendation of a new book called Work Hard, Be Nice about how two inspired teachers created the most promising schools in America. It's really hard not to appreciate and respect what Mr. Gates is all about these days as a role model and to remember that technology can be such a powerful tool for addressing the things that really matter in our world

Posted at 09:48AM Feb 06, 2009 by kevinr in Immersion  |  Comments[1]