NMC Campus Observer

Virtual Reality Room Now a (Free) Reality For Educator

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jan 15, 2008 10:41pm

Today witnessed an amazing turnout for Stephane Zugzwang’s demo and release of the Virtual Reality Room tool for educators, hosted today at Learning on NMC Campus.

We had a capacity crowd of 73 for the 10:00 AM demo, and we got so many messages and IMs from people knocked out to the next sim, that Stephane agreed to provide another demo at 12:00pm where we saw an additional 41 eager avatars show up.

As a recap, we have some audio recorded from the first session (sorry, the sound quality is not the best, but hopefully you can appreciate Stephane’s detailed explanation of the technology, its potential, and what he is offering to the educational community.

Virtual Reality Room Demo [38.5 Mb mp3, 42:01]

And see the full set of photos we took today.

The Virtual Reality Room brings an impressive realistic presence into Second Life, and it is almost ironic that we are viewing real world scenes inside a virtual world. The “magic” works via the file format of a cubic panorama photo- generally one takes a series of high resolution photos with a wide angle lens on a tripod that accurately rotates the camera in even increments in a 360 degree circle. Stephane recommended a web site that shows you how to create a QuickTme VR Scene in 10 Minutes.

Special software “stitches them together into a format that actually places them onto surface that represents a cube that has been completely folded open and flat, or a cubic panoramic photo. Stephane uses professional software from RealViz but also recommended some of the open source tools you can find on Google such as Panotools

This is the format used by QuickTimeVR to make a full navigable scene; the computer graphics hardware takes this image plastered inot a cube and renders it to a smooth sphere.

What Stephane has done is to apply this same concept in Second Life by creating a giant cube that we stand inside of, and he has created the logic to project the panoramic photo as textures which create giant immersive scenes to explore.

In this image you can actually see the shadow (bottom right) of Stephane and his tripod!

Stephane also demonstrated other thing you can such as applying static images to the scene, setting walls as “phantom” so people can enter a room easily (there is a great example of a room scene built inside a VRR at Strategies located on Brimsen (196, 59, 302).

But we did say you could get this tool for free. Stephane pioneered this concept over the last 2 years, but felt like ti was not used as widely as he thought it could be. So he decided to put it in the hands of the educational community who might use the scenes and likely build their own, or add applications on top of the technology.

Therefore, in partnership with the New Media Consortium, the Info Island Archipelago, the Commonwealth Islands for not-for-profits, Stephane is providing the tool free for educators.

You can find the vendor machine now at the site of the demo — href=”http://slurl.com/secondlife/Learning/128/128/101/”>Learning (128, 128, 101) and very soon, it will be accessible at multiple locations on NMC Campus.

Because this is a valuable concept and technology, the Virtual Reality Room is scripted to verify it is placed on a sim that is part of an educational organization. At this time, it includes all of the NMC Sims (50+ sims) plus the Info Island Archipelago- meaning an educator could rez one of them anywhere at these places and it will work. If your organization wants to have its own, you should contact Stephane directly. He is eager to share.

The VRR is not limited to cities and nature scenes; there are plenty of opportunities for computer generated scenes, nano-scale scenes, or models. Another interesting example was a world map, and Stephane described how it as augmented with prims that were interactive for offering geographic specific information.

There are other related resources you can purchase from Stephane’s VRR Shop at Solariam (208, 171, 431) including many pre-built scenes and a HUD that allows just a single person to control the scene selection.

This was an utterly amazing day, and we appreciate the more than 114 people show showed up. We close with one of our favorite scenes– if you were in Chicago last August for the SLCC 2007 Conference, you may have ventured over to the park northeast of the hotel to gaze at the shiny Cloud Gate sculpture- this too is rendered as a VRR scene. Here is our audience, looking tiny next to it. And in the reflection we see Stephane taking the photograph:

On behalf of interested educators and the NMC, we extend to Stephane a big thanks for sharing this with us.

Story filed under: Audio / Video, Campus Headlines, Do It Yourself, Teaching and Learning

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)