New World Notes

Bored With Zoom, Professor Teaches Computer Programming in a Virtual World, And Streams It To Her Twitch -- Here's Her Advice for Other Educators

Starting at 12:30pm PT today, you can watch this Twitch channel to see yet another clever solution to teaching a large group of students in quarantine times: UC Irvine computer scientist Crista Lopes, being "sick and tired of teaching in Zoom", moved her class of 150 students to OpenSimulator, an open source virtual world. And not just to stream a video lecture to an assembly of avatars, but using OpenSim's scripting functionality so students could actually learn programming by using the virtual world's language, and building applications within it:

"The course is ICS10, a General Education course in the spirit of CS Principles," she recently reported. "There's 150 students enrolled. So far, the students have programmed in assembly on a simulated computer, used various tile walls with assorted encodings, and are now deploying and configuring a simulated Internet inside the simulated world.

"So far, everyone seems to be turning in their projects on time, and engaging. And a curious side effect has emerged of a student creating YouTube video tutorials showing how to do the projects." (See below.)

As regular readers know, Professor Lopes isn't just an OpenSim user, but one of its early pioneering lead developers. So I was curious how she customized OpenSim for her class, and how challenging it was for students to use. OpenSimulator is basically a reverse engineered version of Second Life, with a notoriously difficult UI and old graphics; Fortnite or ROBLOX it is not. (In fact, her class uses Firestorm, a viewer for accessing both Second Life and OpenSim.)

"I was expecting it to be problematic," she tells me, "and I was ready to spend many hours doing tech support, but it was surprisingly easy. There was no major hurdle, shockingly!" However, having no hurdles required a fair amount of preparation on her part, which you can read about below.

Challenges aside, she recommends OpenSim as a teaching platform to other teachers, if their course work is enhanced by a 3D immersive space and simulations --  my conversation with her below:

Virtual World Simulation of COVID Infection Significantly Improves Student Awareness of Social Distancing

Among the many problems the COVID pandemic has created is the challenge of opening up elementary schools while also teaching kids the importance of maintaining social distance.  But how do you teach social distancing to kids who are learning remotely? 

Enter the SORBET project (for Socially Responsible Behaviours through Embodied Thinking), created in OpenSim, the open source virtual world platform, launched while Singapore was under quarantine. Lead developed by Kenneth YT Lim, a researcher with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the SORBET simulation gives kids treasure hunts and other mini-games to play -- with the likelihood of infection, if students allow their avatars to stray too close to each other. (See above.)

Could Second Life Slowly Migrate to Unity? Maybe, Says Veteran Developer Adam Frisby, But Here's Why That'd Be a Massive Undertaking

 

Last week in our conversation about whether Second Life should upgrade to a modern 3D engine, I suggested that Linden Lab could slowly shift toward Unity, the world's most used 3D game engine. But there's what might work in theory, and what is actually feasible. Developer Adam Frisby has been working on a new virtual world platform based on Unity for years, and has a long history developing with Second Life -- he's also a co-founder of OpenSim --  so I asked him to explain if my idea was even worthwhile.

"SL is a very unique beast," Adam tells. "And frankly, they'd gain very little switching to Unity, and lose a lot. It's already a mature product, and SL relies on doing a ridiculous number of very simple things, very fast. Whereas most games rely on doing a lot of very complex things, but at a reasonable pace.

"I think SL has something like a total of 5? very simple GPU shaders. The average game probably has no less than 100-200 complex ones on screen at any one time. The moment you open the potential for any kind of complexity, and SL's performance would tank even harder. Because no one has ever optimized anything, and the only reason it could ever even think of running at all, is because the rendering complexity is somewhere between 'jack squat' and 'nothing'."

But my specific proposal is to add Unity inside the Second Life viewer -- and only switch from SL's legacy OpenGL-based graphics to Unity, whenever a user teleports to a new, Unity-compatible island or continent: 

Text-Based Viewer for Second Life & OpenSim? There's an App for That

Linden Lab may be finally ready to release an iOS "companion" app for Second Life, but reader "Saga" points out there's already a third party SL app in the App Store: "There is another app for SL chat/inventory for iOS. I use it now and then, it’s called MetaChat!" And so there is:

MetaChat is a text-only viewer for all Virtual Worlds based on the OpenSimulator software for 3D worlds.

iOS apps CANNOT RUN IN THE BACKGROUND !

There is no 3D view, this is a text-only viewer.

Add accounts from different worlds with different start locations.,
See your friendlist, read messages or write
Chat with groups, see group infos or write group notices
Chat in open world 
Move around a mini-map, teleport to landmarks
See your inventory/worn, preview textures or pictures, send items
Attach/Wear/Detach/TakeOff Clothes
Enter/leave groups
Add friends/invite/pay/remove

So about the same feature list as the late-lamented Pocket Metaverse, but updated more often (check the developer blog here). But caveat emptor, my dude: MetaChat's user reviewers are pretty middling. However, even most of the critical reviews still suggest it's worth considering as a purchase:

Open Source VR Viewer for OpenSim in Development -- Low Cost Alternative for Social VR Projects?

Interesting project now in development within the community of OpenSim, the open source/reverse engineered version of Second Life:

OpenSimulator core developer Melanie Thielker — also known as Melanie Milland in-world — announced that she is releasing her virtual reality OpenSim viewer to the open source community, available here via GitHub. The new viewer uses the Unreal Engine to display OpenSim regions, such as areas from the grid Thielker founded, Avination.

While OpenSim never took off as a consumer-facing project, it counts thousands of developers and dedicated members, many within the education community, and counts thousands of regions/3D experiences. So this could potentially be a good, low budget/low frills alternative for indie social VR projects. Though the technical effort to make this possible seem fairly daunting -- porting OpenSim content into the Unreal engine:

What OpenSim Can Teach Us About Building Successful Virtual Worlds

On HyperGrid Business, my colleague Adam Frisby shares some fascinating thoughts on co-founding OpenSim, the open source spinoff of Second Life, and what they can teach about building new virtual worlds that can scale to a broader audience. Couple big surprises to me: OpenSim "was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times" during its first few years, and had incredible buy-in from Silicon Valley:

For a while, there were some big names adopting the project in droves. Nearly every major tech company had some involvement — or at least one employee contributing — to OpenSim at some point. IBM had an entire team of OpenSim developers and was running internal conferences using the project.

OpenSim, sad to say, couldn't sustain that momentum, and Adam has many insights for why. Here's one worth discussing as a group -- "IP protection needs to be baked into the virtual world from day one":

OpenSim Educators Turn to Discord for Communicating in Virtual Events

OpenSim, the open source spinoff of Second Life, has a small but passionate userbase (probably between 10,000-15,000), many or most of whom are educators who use the technology as a low cost teaching tool. To enhance OpenSim's limited communication features for pedagogical events, educator Leighton Marjoram has turned to the popular gamer platform Discord:

As people who use Opensimulator will know voice and chat range whilst in world is limited and is not helpful when exploring regions together in groups. Discord and the overlay helps a great deal as all the grid crawlers have to do is signup for Discord and download the desktop client and join a dedicated channel (voice and chat)... Also while on the Opensim Life grid we decided to do a group build region and we used to Discord for a private discussion area and used voice in-world whilst we were building. 

More here, along with tips for setting Discord up. For users who need a more secure and private chat channel, such as therapists who use OpenSim for RL therapy -- the US miliary, for instance, uses OpenSim as part of its therapy for personnel with PTSD -- Leighton recommends  Matrix and Riot app. 

Hat tip: Rocky Constantine.

Weekend Open Forum: What's Most Interesting in the Metaverse Lately?

And by "metaverse" I mean Second Life, VRChat, OpenSim, High Fidelity, Sansar, Sinespace, and yes, also Dual Universe. And by "interesting" I mean events, experiences, updates, creations, news. And yes, self-promotion is encouraged, as long as you post helpful links too. To start things off, here's a web-based portal to a scale, 3D interactive replica of Fallingwater in Sinespace (an NWN partner) created by University of Edinburgh's Austin Tate.

Inworldz's Relaunch as Islandz Inevitably Beset by IP Rights Protest Drama

Since posting about community members of the now defunct Inworldz rallying to crowdfund a new OpenSim-based world called Islandz early last week,  the comment thread has been overwhelmed by angry complaints from Inworldz users, mainly protesting the ownership status of Inworldz's back-up OAR files, and their rights over them. Difficult for me to piece out which allegations are accurate, but Chic Aeon summarizes the ensuing complaints quite well, responding to a complaint from the apparent leader of the Elf Clan, which moved its roleplaying community from SL to InWorldz many years ago:

We always have risks. We lose our digital goods. It happens. It frequently happens in SL simply because of database failures. So we don't even need to be part of a defunct grid to watch our items disappear into the mist. I have copies of all my items uploaded into Inworldz. Hopefully your clan members do also. They of course have no rights to movable copies of items they purchased unless that was an agreement with the content creator (at least one texture store OKed movement to another grid but that is the only one I have heard about).

So we will see what happens but I am guessing that things are going to either die quickly or get VERY messy here soon. :D

If things weren't messy, it wouldn't be the metaverse now would it?

Many Former InWorldz Users Departing to Other OpenSim Worlds -- But Few, So Far, to Second Life

The owner of the now-defunct InWorldz, a commercial spinoff of OpenSim (which is, in turn, an open source spinoff of Second Life) , is working with many users to crowdfund a new OpenSim world. Meanwhile, other InWorldz members are reportedly moving on to other grids. According to Metaverse Traveller, other OpenSim-based worlds, including Discovery Grid, Kitely, and DigiWorldz are seeing an uptick in InWorldz exiles:

I sent an email to Terry (Butch Arnold) of DigiWorldz asking and he replied, "We have received many new InWorldz users over the past few days. We've added approx. 150 new users to our system since 7/24/2018 and we've also added approx. 42 new regions in that same period."

 

 ... I also asked Ilan Tochner at Kitely grid, which is well known for it's unique cloud-based worlds on demand, to see if they were experiencing a similar influx. Ilan Tochner replied, "We've seen a significant number of people migrate into Kitely as a result of Inworldz's pending shutdown."

More here. However, one world doesn't seem to be seeing much growth (so far) from any movement of exiles -- Second Life itself.

 

Since late July, when word of InWorldz's troubles emerged, Second Life has not seen any sharp growth in user concurrency:

 

"No, there was no significant change in Second Life concurrency trends around or after that date," Tyche Shepherd of Grid Survey tells me. We have seen recent growth in Second Life sims, but that's likely attributable to the recent discount from Linden Lab: