As many as 20 NMC Virtual Learning Prizes will be awarded in 2008. Each of the US$5,000 awards will provide a cash incentive paid to the awardee of $500 as well as $4,500 in expert development assistance from the NMC Virtual Worlds team to create the learning experience. The range of inworld services available to awardees to actualize the proposed ideas includes professional building, scripting, design, animation, avatar design, and/or related services.

The NMC is committed to pushing the boundaries of how we collectively view teaching and learning in virtual space. The NMC Virtual Learning Prize is envisioned as a way to surface and realize creative ideas for how to make optimal use of a virtual setting, using a process that provides recognition, financial incentives, professional development services, and a return for education as a whole.

"Projects funded under the NMC Virtual Learning Prize program will be those that make learning fresh or novel, or that illustrate concepts that are usually very difficult to teach," explains Dr. Larry Johnson, NMC's CEO and director of NMC Virtual Worlds. "We are seeking immersive learning experiences in particular, as well as tools that support the craft of teaching. We hope to see a number of proposals with broad applicability across disciplines as that will allow us to maximize the reach of the shared resources that are to be developed under this program."

As a requirement of funding, all materials and content produced as part of the program will be licensed for broad use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Proposal authors will retain full copyright to finished products, and all funded materials will be made available to educators and educational institutions at no cost via either the NMC's Educational Resource Center on Learning in Second Life or via the NMC's website, as applicable.

For the 2008-9 award year, funded ideas will be limited to those that can be implemented in the virtual worlds of Second Life or Project Wonderland. In future years, the program may be expanded to other virtual world platforms.

Review of proposals will begin on June 16, 2008, and proposals will continue to be accepted until all funds have been expended.

For further information, or to download a proposal submission form, please see the Virtual Learning Prize website. Questions related to the criteria or the submission of an application should be directed to virtual-learning@nmc.org.

As part of an event atClever Zebra’s vBusiness Expo, in this interview, Metanomics host Robert Bloomfield asked Larry about the NMC’s Virtual worlds programs and then discussed more on Larry’s recent experience testifying before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet of the US Congress.

You can find
audio recording

and

video recording

of this interview plus soon a transcript, at http://metanomics.net/larry-johnson

“U Pacific” is a based on the real campus area around Burns Tower. For those at the university, you can meet at Pacific Theater for a live demonstration and virtual ribbon cutting of the Pacific campus. Elizabeth Griego will officiate the ceremony. For all attendees, a virtual dance party with live DJ will follow.

Among the speakers, it was exciting to see and listen to Philip Rosedale and NMC’s own Larry Johnson

The video should appear on the archives eventually at the Committee on Energy and Commerce website - but we snagged an audio recording if you cannot wait.

April 1, 2008 testimony to the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet [40.7 Mb PM3, 2:15:00]

Update: Meeting materials (papers) and the video archive are now available:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte_mtgs/110-ti-hrg.040108.VirtualWorlds.shtml

On entering PARSEC (a giant seeming infiinite white dome), each of seven avatars dons a collection of gestures, each set is different. Apparently our use of voice chat generates musical tones and animates certain objects.

Certain balls begin to float in the air in response to our individual forces, and there is a mysterious combination of events that trigger a rather intense result:

Somehow, our group managed to trigger the sequence in a few minutes, but we could not figure exactly what actions made this happen.

And this is the “game”. We tried all kinds of approaches, scientific, process of elimination, total guessing, and in what passed as a fast hour, we felt we got close, but never nailed the sequence (even with googling parsec for clues).

We were told groups have spent hours in this space.

Its engaging because it is a mystery; the outcomes are not tied simply to action, and it depends on a group process. The use of voice chat as a stimulus to generating audio is a nice nod to the work of Robbie Dingo’s whisper box, but this is all together different.

There is a teleport to PARSEC but according to the signs, there has been a huge demand so they are hosting it now by arranged tours. Look for more images from the flickr photo group.

It is an amazing concept… and I still feel that gnawing frustration of not being able to figure out the solution!

In 2007, NMC Virtual Worlds served more than eighty colleges and universities, providing services from full virtual development to special custom tools and builds to leases. As NMC CEO Dr. Larry Johnson notes, “2007 was a year in which campuses made their entries into Second Life in great numbers, and as a result there is a considerable critical mass of educational institutions now existent in Second Life — more than 1200 educational islands were created in 2007, and the number of educational projects launched last year in Second Life is many times that.”

“2008 also promises to see strong educational use of Second Life, but with a new focus. Projects in 2008 are much more likely to be about creating learning experiences than virtual campuses. This is, in my view, a very positive trend, and reflects the increasing skill and understanding of virtual spaces among educators across the board.”

“NMC Virtual Worlds plans to continue the range of the efforts it launched in 2007 to support education in Second Life,” said Johnson, “and we are planning several new initiatives for 2008. At the center of these initiatives is a renewed focus on immersive learning, and continued support for educators.”

New initiatives for 2008 include:

• The NMC Virtual Learning Prize. The NMC Virtual Worlds team will be soliciting ideas for the development of immersive content from educators around the globe. Twenty ideas will be selected in 2008 for development. Each Virtual Learning prize recipient will receive $5,000 US in cash incentives and virtual services that can be devoted to realizing the idea in Second Life. Recipients will have their idea funded with $4,500 US in premium development services from NMC and receive an honorarium of $500 US in cash. The copyright for prize winning ideas will of course remain with the inventor, but the products created as part of this program will go into open source and be distributed royalty free to the educational community. This program will be launched in March, 2008.
• The Educational Resource Repository. The NMC is devoting an entire sim for an educational resources repository that will be located on Learning, an island within the NMC Campus. To seed the content of this repository, and to encourage other developers to support education in Second Life, the NMC will release virtually all the content it produced in 2007 into open source — buildings, meeting facilities, educational tools, avatars, clothing, equipment, scripts, and much more. The amount of material that the NMC has licensed to release in this way numbers in the thousands of objects, and the NMC is committed to adding to it throughout the year. The repository, in which everything from shoes to amphitheaters will be available for a single Linden dollar (simply to enable tracking via counts), will also include resources donated by other developers. The first of these is Stephane Zugzwang’s renowned Virtual Reality Room, which is already available. The NMC’s Educational Resources Repository will open February 1, 2008
• Development of New Forms of Architecture. Among the interests of the NMC Virtual Worlds team for 2008 is to explore new concepts of architecture that may be especially suited for virtual spaces. The first of these, created by real-life architect and NMC Virtual Worlds developer CJ Holden, is an extremely flexible modular structure that works with the SL building grid to allow the construction of simple or complex structures organically in literally minutes.
• Live mentoring for new entrants into Second Life. High on the list of planned enhancements for the NMC’s Orientation Island experience is the implementation of a mentoring program. There is strong support for this in the Second Life educational community, and a presence-aware mentor notification system has already been piloted. The mentor community is expected to launch sometime in the next 30 days.

“We hope these new initiatives will stimulate the same kind of development around learning in 2008 as we saw around establishing presences in 2007,’ said Johnson of these new directions. I am especially excited by the NMC Virtual Learning Prize, which will help content experts across a wide range of disciplines realize their visions for learning in virtual space.”

“The release of the NMC’s content from 2007 into open source is an expression of our deepest values,” continued Johnson, “and an outgrowth of the way the NMC conducts its work in the real world. Every product the NMC has ever produced has been ultimately released under Creative Commons or open-source software licenses.”

The mission of NMC Virtual Worlds is to help learning-focused organizations to explore the potential of virtual spaces in a manner that builds on community knowledge, is cost-effective, and ensures high quality. To those ends, the NMC and NMC Virtual Worlds provide a comprehensive set of premium development services for education and training, and conducts an ongoing series of events, conferences, and programs. These include:

• Supporting the educational community in Second Life. The NMC hosts more than twenty islands designated as educational communities, providing parcels in these communities for as little as $100/year. Each of these communities has space designated for fellowships, and nearly two dozen educators are currently the beneficiaries of these year-long fellowships. Via the extensive NMC Campus (now numbering nearly 50 sims), NMC also provides educators free access to a wide variery of venues for conferences, meetings and other events. Full sims have been provided at no cost for several educational proof-of-concept projects over the past year, including the renowned Dante’s Inferno project. The NMC’s biweekly Teacher’s Buzz sessions allow educators to dialog around ideas and to discuss interesting developments and projects in Second Life. At the present time, more than 7,800 individuals have joined the NMC’s community in Second Life.
• Helping educators become comfortable and productive in Second Life. Foremost among these efforts is the NMC’s Orientation Island, open to anyone who wishes to use it, and the NMC’s custom registration process, which allows people to quickly open a Second Life account. Currently hundreds of people a month enter Second Life via this process, which is open to all educators and their students. The NMC Orientation Island, modeled on the city of San Francisco, provides basic and advanced level orientations, orientations to educational uses of Second Life, and an orientation to the culture of Second Life. In addition, the NMC has offered a number of “studio” sessions on topics ranging from Second Life photography to sculpture, machinima to fashion design, and pedagogical strategies for virtual worlds.
• Providing affordable high-level development services. The NMC created a wide range of fully-realized sims in 2007, including dozens of campuses, a fully realized hospital, business centers, immersive learning experiences, art installations, meeting venues, and more. For campuses needing high level support, the NMC’s services are priced at cost, and include every aspect of creation in Second Life, from design and building, terraforming, landscaping, scripting, avatars, clothing, equipment, realistic recreations, and immersive learning experiences.
• Hosting the NMC’s Series of Virtual Symposia. In 2007, the NMC hosted three virtual symposia — one in collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation on the Impact of Digital Media; one on Creativity; and the most recent, this past December, on the Evolution of Communication. These events attract audiences both inside and outside Second Life. The NMC Campus includes the “NMC Conference Center,” a sim specially designed to support conferences in Second Life, and the home of the NMC’s Series of Virtual Symposia. The NMC Conference Center is made available to educational organizations at no cost for large-scale events in Second Life.
• Supporting the Arts. In real life, the arts have always been important to the NMC and its members, and in Second Life, the NMC is one of the most active supporters of the arts, from traditional forms to highly unique art only possible in Second Life, to performance, dance, and theater. The Aho Museum of Art, on the original NMC Campus sim, is one of the premier museums in Second Life, and home to a phenomenal permanent collection of Second Life art that spans several sims. The island of Ars Simulacra devotes its land space to an ongoing series of exhibitions and installations throughout the year, and is also home to the ZeroG Skydancers, as part of one of the NMC’s several art fellowships. NMC Arts Lab is a sim devoted to experimental large scale installations, and currently features “Full Immersion,” a 256×256x720 installation from DanCoyote Antonelli that uses every cubic meter of the sim. Full and partial sims are often loaned at no cost to promising artists to realize a large scale vision. An ongoing series of art-related events and dialogs is also part of the NMC’s commitment to the arts in Second Life.
• Providing fellowships for promising ideas. The NMC is committed to ensuring that the expression of ideas need not be limited by budgets, and as such provides educators and artists a wide range of fellowships to support their work in Second Life. In 2007, more than 60 talented individuals directly benefited from one or more of these fellowships.
• Documenting efforts. The NMC Campus Observer blog chronicles not only events on the NMC Campus, but educational projects and activities across Second Life. The blog attracted more than 14,000 unique readers a month throughout 2007, from more than 25 countries all around the world. In addition, the NMC continues to produce a steady stream of machinima of Second Life events, podcasts with prominent Second Life residents, papers and surveys, and much more.

The NMC has an extensive presence in Second Life currently, and the NMC Campus community has grown to nearly 100 co-located sims, of which nearly 70 are contiguous. More than twenty of these islands have been designated as educational lands for the use of faculty and others. The home of NMC Virtual Worlds is the NMC Campus, considered one of the premiere educational destinations in Second Life. The sims comprising the NMC Campus estate are the home for a wide range of educational tools, services, and meeting spaces, as well as a functioning museum and library, a planetarium, and much more — all provided to educators at no cost.

To learn more about NMC Virtual Worlds, see the unit’s website at:
http://virtualworlds.nmc.org

To learn more about the NMC’s work on behalf of higher education and its member institutions in Second Life,
see the NMC Campus Observer blog at:
http://www.nmc.org/sl

For additional information, contact:
Dr. Larry Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, NMC

Download Press Release (72k PDF)

In this research project, we demonstrate that MMOs also provide a powerful platform for Augmented Reality (AR) applications. We introduce the notion of AR Stages, persistent, evolving spaces which encapsulate AR experiences in online three dimensional virtual worlds.

Based on the 3D virtual world Second Life, our custom client software blends together locations in physical space with corresponding places in the Second Life virtual space and leverages the power of the MMO to create an powerful AR authoring environment targeted at a wide audience and fields of application.

The “stages” concept is compelling, and infers something more akin to an art installation that is set up on a virtual stage in SL, but plays on a different stage in real life. They apparently have done some incredible modifications to the open source client to add the necessary camera controls.

But don’t just take our word, check out this demo video:

Thanks to our own Ravanelle Zugzwang for discovering this cool project!

It’s time to make some noise!

modified form Creative Commons licensed flickr photo by Daniel K. Gebhart

This will defintely b put to use in the upcoming Symposium on Creativity in Second Life…

The new voice capability is built into the SL client, so you can just talk using your computer’s microphone, and you can hear other avatars through your speakers. We’ve had more than one opportunity to demo this and it makes a huge impact on the experience.

Over the last few weeks, Second Life has been enabling this across many sims, apparently in order of dates they came on line. By the end of this week, just about every one of NMC Campus sims, the rental islands, and many of our academic neighbors will have the voice light turned on.

Now here is the catch– the interface is not yet built into the primary SL client. To experience the voice features, you need to download the special First Look client, something that is in between the beta grid and the main grid, in that the First Look contains new features, but it interacts with everything on the main grid. So the first step is to download the current First Look application. It’s pretty much the same software, with some different looking buttons, and everything you have inventory wise is there.

The next step on logging in, is to select Preferences under the Edit menu, and there is a new tab for “voice chat”. By default, this options is not set, so you should check the top box to enable voice:

The other options allow you to set the voice to be either on all the time, or only when you press a button. I like just talking when I feel like talking, so I don’t use Push to Talk mode. but that might be handy when you dont want all noices around you being transmitted to Second Life (like the yelling in the background, “Are you still playing that GAME????”)

You can tell if you are on land where voice is enabled (sim owners can turn this on or off according to their whims), by looking for the small blue icon on the top menubar:

Or you can see which Second Life regions are enabled via the Voice Map.

When you talk, or when others talk, an audio presence is indicated by green “squiggles” — audio waveforms over an avatar’s head. If your audio is too loud, they will be big and red, and if it is to faint, there will only by perhaps a single small squiggle:

So above, I am talking, though no one is around tonight to talk back. There is some moral in this situation.

As you experience audio, like real sound, the volume is proportional to the distance form the source. So if your avatar is far away, your voice will be low in volume, and will increase in volume as we come closer. Interestingly, the alt/option zoom tool used to move your camera view also works to amplify voice from far away (so I could listen in on conversations from a distance??). Sound is also stereo, so voices to your right will be louder in the right speaker.

The new features are wrapped into the IM and Friends tools as well, not as a “Communicate” button in the bottom. You can do an audio IM, like a person to person phone call. A new “Talk” button in the interface will also show you who is nearby who has voice capability.

It likely will not be long until voice capability is part of the main SL client, and a whole new raft of possibilities (and issues) crop up for a new mode of communication. We are eager here at NMC to see how the education community probes the use of voice– for language learning? virtual theater? communication activities? maybe stand up comics?