Nicht in Berlin

It's been painful not being in Berlin at the Educa conference this week. I was all geared up for the usual live video link, but was shocked to find that there was no stream. The only link I had was a healthy Twitter channel, but this just teased me and made me wish I was there even more. Judging from the tweets, Graham Hibbert was doing a sterling job, but I felt 'disempowered', as they used to say in the 80s. I was stuck in snowy Leeds wasting my efforts on local problems that haven't changed for 20 years and could be tackled by any number of people, when I should have been in Germany helping to shape the future of education. Well, in the absence of detailed information, that's what I imagined was happening. Even two intense blog posting sessions (Inventing the VSE concept and making sense of the entire Open Habitat project) didn't really make me feel any better.

However, this morning a tweet came through flagging up the live 'Sounds of the Bazaar' radio broadcast with Graham Attwell and Josie Fraser, and a link to a parallel chat room. Ah, this was just what I needed to cheer me up. I challenge anyone to feel negative when Graham A and Josie F are on the mic. The chatroom gave me an opportunity to talk some rubbish and tell a few bad jokes which, at the end of the day, was all I was really missing.

The parallel text chat room seemed to be some sort of instant freeby widget/gadget/mini-application type thing. Essentially, a load of random people clicked a link and signed in and suddenly we were all together in a spontaneously generated virtual text-space.

Now, there is no reason why that couldn't have been a multi-user virtual environment. Maybe Wonderland could be put to use to provide a simple on demand Java webstart 3D chat space, with open log-ins just like today. No sign-up hassles. Noobs welcome. An open 3D world just when you need it.

A world within a world

Just had a thought that I need to capture before it escapes:
Could you run OpenSim as a shared application inside Wonderland? This may seem like an insane idea, I realise. Why would you want a 3D environment inside a 3D environment?

Well, I'm thinking about the draft evaluation of the first pilot by Steve and Marga, and one of the important issues that has been identified is the need to know when to do 'distance', and when to do 'blended'. I think that OpenSim standalone is just right for teaching building skills in a real life blended learning situation (Ian & Graham tutors), and Second Life is best done at a distance (Cubist and Kisa mentors).

Wonderland is closer to a blended learning environment, in that you are your real life self, speaking with your real voice, and you can interact properly with an application (interface elements and all) like you do in an I.T. lab. That's why I think it might be interesting to have OpenSim standalone as a shared virtual application. I can teach some building skills at a distance without it getting muddied by the whole role play and social complexity thing.

Well, it's just an idea.

Wonderball

I've been messing about with full 360 x 180 degree panoramics. When you map one of these photographs onto a sphere and walk inside it, it gives a good sense of being in a real space. The image distorts a little as you move around in the sphere, but your brain seems to be able to make adjustments quite easily, so I can imagine that you could map other objects within this space and you would get a reasonable sense of their position in relation to the projected panoramic. If you had a bunch of avatars inside this space, and each avatar had a rectangular cone object which projected out in the direction they were facing (the cone would correspond to the field of view of their camera), then everyone would be able to see what they were looking at. This would be very useful in group discussion about the location of the panoramic image that everyone was inside. It would also indicate when someone was looking you in the face, providing another valuable visual cue in the 3D virtual space. Browsers and whiteboards could also be placed within the sphere to facilitate the discussion.
I reckon all of this is do-able with Wonderland.