IMVU: Be There

You’ve seen the ads all over the Internet for IMVU. They must be the biggest banner ad company on the gaming and social sites. Worlds in Motion has an interview with the CEO of IMVU, Cary Roosenzweig.

Q&A: IMVU’s Cary Rosenzweig On “Building From The Avatar Up”

I always thought that IMVU looked like another version of There.com when I saw the ads, now I know. IMVU was started by a group of There.com execs. The service claims some pretty impressive numbers with 20 million registered users, and they just crossed 2 million items available for avatars to purchase. In a lot of ways, the service sounds similar to Second Life.

The difference is in that there is no big world or continent, but instead stages or private avatar spaces. The spaces can be simple rooms, outdoor locations, or even flying carpets as the interview claims. Here’s a video promoting the platform:

IMVU – Youtube Video

Now, you might be quick to just write this off as just a 3D chat program. But take a look at this video about their content creation tool:

IMVU Content Creator Program

Kinda makes you want something like this in other platforms, like maybe Second Life? Let’s hope tools like this make it into Wonderland. The catalog for IMVU looks very similar to the one used in There.com, no surprise there.

IMVU has been around now for four years. They’ve quietly been building up a user base, and they clearly target a young crowd interested in chat taken to a new level. We’ll see how this does after it has been officially launched and promoted. It’s services like these that are quietly building the user base for future virtual worlds.

I decided to take a look at this after hearing some of the students in our summer school program with PacRimX talk about it. So it has definitely started to reach the high school crowd.

Employers Turning To Games For Training

Kotaku has an article up today about the use of video games and training employees:

Employers Turning To Games For Training

A study released by the Entertainment Software Association shows that 70% of major employers in the US utilize some form of gaming technology in their training programs.

“Businesses across the spectrum, from automobile manufacturers to financial service providers, are utilizing entertainment software to help educate their employees to better serve their customers and improve their bottom lines,” said Michael D. Gallagher, CEO of the ESA, the U.S. association representing computer and video game publishers. “Interactive technology is a valuable tool in workforce development and this study underscores the fact that video games have become a mass medium helping Americans live, work and of course play.”

Some of areas of training include: compliance training, training for specific job functions, IT training, management training and customer service training. Some of the advantages mentioned were:

• a reduction in costs;
• more efficient and faster training;
• the ability to apply consistent training across all parts of an organization;
• the ease of measuring employee participation; and,
• better information retention.

Jump to the full article to read some quotes from experts and examples of some companies and their use of games for training.

Other Blog Posts on the Education Grid Launch

Kevin Roebuck passed along a list of blog posts on the launch last Friday of the Wonderland Education Grid:

* Wonderland Works!

Katherine W. Prawl

New Media On the Go

June 21, 2008

http://newmediaonthego.com/blog/2008/06/21/wonderland-works/

 

* Immersive Education Initiative Launches Education Grid on Wonderland

Virtual Worlds News

June 20, 2008

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/06/immersive-educa.html

 

* Writer’s Blox

Project Virtual Northstar

June 21, 2008

http://virtualnorthstar.org/blog/gs9/2008/06/21/being-grid

 

* First Educational Gathering in Wonderland

Tim Wang’s eLearning Blog

June 20, 2008

http://blog.loaz.com/timwang/index.php

 

* Sun Microsystems’ Project Wonderland and The Immersive Education Grid

It is Time to Tweak eLearning

June 20, 2008

http://tweaklearning.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/sun-microsystems-project-wonderland-and-the-immersive-education-grid/

 

* Sun’s Wonderland & Education Grid Demo

Fleep’s Deep Thoughts

June 20, 2008

http://fleeep.net/blog/2008/06/20/suns-wonderland-education-grid-demo/

 

* The Princess visits Wonderland : The Education Grid

The Princess of Yaximixche

June 20, 2008

http://princess-manqo.blogspot.com/2008/06/princess-visits-wonderland-education.html

Wonderland: Education Grid Launched

The Immersive Education Initiative launched the Education Grid this past Friday with early Sun Wonderland services hosted by a handful of organizations. The event launched in Second Life at the Sun Island.

Kick off meeting in SL for Education Grid Wonderland Launch

Lined up out the door waiting for the launch

As with any new platform combined with a public launch, things did not go as smoothly as was hoped. In talking with Aaron Walsh (Director Grid Institute), there were over 150 people wanting access to the Education Grid during the event. The Second Life Sun location quickly filled up, and there was no overflow location for them to go. A URL was passed around via group IM in SL for requesting access to the grid. Aaron Walsh was quickly swamped with requests for access during the event.

The Sun Wonderland platform is currently only in v0.3 (v0.4 will be out soon). In its current version you can only get about 20 avatars in one space. There were four servers that were available at this event; Sun MPK-20, CommoNeed, Mirtle, and NMC’s. I bounced around to all of them during the launch event.

The CommoNeed server was based on the MPK-20 model. This is the one that has been in all of the Wonderland promo videos (and is also the current model we are hosting on the Virtued server). I won’t post any screenshots from there since most have seen it more than a few times. This server had full voice enabled. When I first logged in I was able to talk and hear everyone, but I could not move off the landing spot. I finally was able to walk only after logging out and back in.

The Mirtle (Mixed Reality Teaching and Learning Environment) server was my next stop. Mirtle is a project by University of Essex in the UK. Michael Gardner was giving the tour of this server. The building has several classroom locations and has already been being used for an English Language class with Chinese students. This server had full voice support enabled, and demonstrations were made opening X-Applications in the environment.

Essex University Mirtle Server

The last one I visited was the NMC’s server. This server did not have voice enabled yet, but it had the best models of all the servers, both with avatars and objects. One thing with new users on Wonderland is that you get a random avatar at first login. I ended up with a Larry Johnson “big head” avatar.

Larry talking to Larry on NMC Wonderland Server

Everyone on the NMC server was commenting on how nice the textures looked, and I really want to know how Larry got such a slick avatar head imported into the environment. The people who got in and were exploring these servers seemed truly excited. I had one of our Virtued members (and a fellow administrator, Scott Kuykendall) in the lab with me test driving these servers, and his comment was:

“Even as rough as this is, this is really cool!”

I think this might have been the comment most people were making as they explored these Wonderland servers. Aaron was very careful to warn people of what to expect during this event:

“Understand that this is VERY EARLY-STAGE TECHNOLOGY: Please be patient, and prepare for a bumpy ride. If you have problems or need help send an email message to the Wonderland User Community Group that you were automatically subscribed to (signed up for) when you requested access to the Education Grid.”

The one thing I kept reminding myself of is that this platform is still in development and not even at Alpha stage yet. I’ve been Beta testing MMO’s now for over 10 years, and online services for over 20. I’ve never gotten in earlier than a closed Beta before on any project. I applaud Sun Microsystems for swinging the doors open and letting all these educators into their project this early in the development. Not many would do that. I think this move is partly to build excitement and involvement in a platform that will eventually be open source and community supported. Sun has a Wonderland Roadmap posted on their Java.net Wonderland site for those curious about where this platform is going in the next year.

Kevin Roebuck from Sun Microsystems and Aaron Walsh from the Grid Institute are very active with the education community in promoting this platform and this project. I was worried recently when I read in the media of layoffs at Sun Microsystems, and I quickly picked up the phone to be assured by Kevin that they were still alive and kicking in the Wonderland group. These two deserve a lot of credit for the community building they are both doing on a daily basis, and the interest they are building for this platform in the education community. I also have to applaud all the virtual world educators that are exploring this platform with an open mind and future view on what this might be down the road.

There are a handful of open source virtual world projects out there in development. The three major ones are represented in the Immersive Education Initiative; Second Life (the veteran of the bunch), Cobalt/Croquet, and Wonderland. Keep an eye on the Events Page of the Immersive Education site for upcoming events for Second Life and Cobalt/Croquet.

Spore Creature Creator Available

I had the pleasure of seeing Will Wright do a live demo of Spore back in March when I was at the NASA Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose. I’ve been waiting for this one for years now. If you are not familiar with Spore, it’s sort of an MMO, it’s sort of a God game, it’s sort of a strategy game, and it’s also sort of a social network. What it really will be is a new obsession of people around the Internet that want to explore a wide open universe and share their experiences and creations with others online.

For good coverage of the game you can check the Official Spore Site or the Spore area of Gamespot. This program will blaze the way for social educational games in the future (hopefully, if it is successful and relatively bug free at release).

Getting to see the demo with Will Wright just upped my excitement all the more for Spore. Here’s a great behind the scenes video interview from Gamespot. This explains some of the motivation of the design team who worked on Spore.

If you want to play around with creating some creatures that you can load into Spore and share with others, the free trial of the Creature Creator was made available for download today. This free trial has 25% of the options that the boxed version of the Creature Creator will have (list $9.99 available in two days). This game should set new standards and models for future immersive environments.

$1,000 Prize for Sims Carnival Beta Game Development

Here’s a great summer project with a chance to bulk up your student cash flow:

Galactic Game Challenge

You can create a new game for the Sims Carnival site using their editing tools, or by uploading a flash game. First prize is $1,000, second and third places will receive a Nintendo DS. Pass this along to any students you have out on summer break with no summer job.

Multi-touch Gaming

Kotaku has an interesting post up today about a student created game (from the software down to the multi-touch table it runs on) from the Aalborg University Copenhagen as part of a bachelor thesis:

Students Explore Multi-Touch Gaming with Oculusia

This is an interesting story and is one of the first to demonstrate this technology in a collaborative multiplayer experience. This technology holds a lot of promise for educational environments once the economies of scale are realized and hardware costs come down. Look for more homebrew efforts like this before anything mainstream hits the classroom.

Education Grid Launches this Friday (June 20th)

I am just going to repost what is up at the Immersive Education Website:

WHAT: Education Grid launches with Project Wonderland [Education Grid LAUNCH]
WHEN: Friday June 20th, 2008 at 4pm EST
WHERE: Sun island http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sun%20Microsystems%201/127/165/71

TRANSCRIPT: >>AUDIO TRANSCRIPT WILL BE POSTED AFTER THIS EVENT<<

.:: join the Immersive Education Second Life GROUP for in-world event invitations ::.

On Friday June 20th at 4pm EST the Immersive Education Initiative will launch the Education Grid with an array of Sun Wonderland virtual world servers (“nodes”) hosted by Essex University (United Kingdom), University of Oregon, St. Paul College, New Media Consortium (NMC), and Sun Microsystems. Faculty and staff from each host organization will join faculty from the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College to guide visitors through the Wonderland virtual worlds that debut on the Education Grid this Friday.

The Education Grid is provided free of charge to the general public and Immersive Education Initiative members. Starting this Friday, Immersive Education Initiative members can conduct classes and meetings within Wonderland virtual worlds on the Education Grid. Initiative members can also use the Education Grid to build custom Wonderland virtual learning worlds, simulations, and learning games.

Immersive Education’s virtual world Platform Ecosystem and corresponding Education Grid provide educators with an open and comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of learning worlds, interactive learning games, and simulations. Sun Microsystems Laboratory’s Project Wonderland is an official Immersive Education virtual world platform. Wonderland is now being enhanced to utilize the Education Grid, which is being designed to deliver a rich library of learning objects, digital media assets, learning games and collaboration services from which a wide variety of Immersive Education experiences can be assembled. Friday’s event will give educators an early preview of the emerging Wonderland client-side platform and corresponding server-side Education Grid.

This event starts at 4pm EST (1pm pacific / Second Life time) in Second Life and
then moves into the Education Grid’s Wonderland virtual worlds

Study Says: Immersive Education Increases Test Scores

The Journal just published a story on immersive education and increased math scores:

UCF Study Finds Video Games Increase Student Achievement

The article starts out:

“Based on research conducted by the University of Central Florida (UCF), immersive educational video games can improve students’ math skills and comprehension and raise scores on district-wide benchmark exams.

According to the study, over an 18-week period, students playing the educational video games demonstrated higher gains on district benchmark exams than students not playing the games. On average, students in the experimental group made gains of 8.07 points (out of 25), while students in the control group made gains of 3.74 points.”

The story goes on to quote Ntiedo Etuk, CEO and co-founder of Tabula Digita, maker of the DimensionM educational video game series on his thoughts on this technology. I had the pleasure of presenting with Ntiedo at a CoSN sponsored webinar on educational gaming a few months back. eSchool News just published a story covering that event here. One of Ntiedo’s best quotes from that presentation was this:

“If you had a system that could compel a student or child to do so much to make it work, but instead it was teaching them about algebra or science or calculus, I think that educators would–and should–fall all over themselves to understand as much as possible about why that works and how that happens,”

Right now it is only a very small group of educators who are exploring these technologies. Maybe as more studies like this are released, and a consensus is formed around the benefit of these technologies, more teachers will embrace the technologies that students have already internalized in their private lives.

The Virtual World Chasm

I just got back last night from a weeklong vacation exploring the eastern Sierra. We visited Bodie (a ghost town), climbed a volcanic formation on Mono Lake and explored some fissures (picture above), explored a volcanic crater filled with obsidian, and visited the Tufa’s of south Mono Lake.

I am just started to read my overloaded inboxes at home and work, after being unplugged all week with no cell or Internet service.

There’s a great post up at Terra Nova from Bruce Damer:

A New Virtual World Winter?

This is the first in a series of posts. He calls this Part One: Does the Chasm Still Lie Ahead? He asks a series of questions about virtual worlds and the future of these technologies. There’s a healthy discussion starting in the comments of this post. This is well worth a read by anyone dabbling in virtual worlds.

I’ll get things back up to speed in the coming week on both the PacRimX and Virtued blogs. The worst part of taking time off is coming back to piles of work and overloaded inboxes.