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.
