Sun’s Wonderland platform accepted for Media Grid by Scarlett Qi
March 28, 2008
Kevin Roebuck (Gossamer Maine in SL), Community Manager for Immersive Technologies at Sun
CMP 4: A gathering of 71 residents yesterday listened to Kevin Roebuck (Gossamer Maine in SL) give an overview of Sun’s global educational initiatives. Roebuck is the Community Manager for Immersive Technologies at Sun.
Wonderland, Darkstar and Sunspot are advanced development projects at Sun Laboratories. “We are at the very early days of this technology but it holds great promise,” Roebuck said. These projects are happening outside of SL.
The Immersive Education Initiative at Media Grid (http://www.immersiveeducation.org/ ) has approved Project Wonderland and Project Darkstar as accepted technology platforms. (Wonderland, Croquet and Second Life are approved platforms and will have DNS mapping service to sites on the Education Grid). This group is working together to define open standards, best practices and platforms for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems.
Immersive education uses real-time three-dimensional audio and video and recently developed open-source software to enable teachers to interact with individuals or groups of students online. This may include virtual worlds as well as analog film, videotape, online maps, audio tracks, wiki pages and still images. It is hoped that immersive education will “capture the engaging spirit of learning” for students.
Last month Sun announced the collaboration with New Media Consortium (NMC) on the Open Virtual Worlds Project (http://media.nmc.org/nmc-virtual-worlds/open-virtual-worlds.mov for presentation by Dr. Larry Johnson, CEO of NMC). This would be a Wonderland hosted service that would be provided, enabling anyone to begin building and developing their own projects. Moodle would be integrated into the community.
Project Wonderland is a toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds.
Anyone? I do wonder about that. I bet if you are not part of the "community" and not accepted as an accredited, credentialed, RL educator or registered non-profit of some kind, you might find it difficult to come into this "open source open platform". In that sense, it is not as open as Second Life itself.
See, if you go here to join, this "open" thing, here's what you will see: http://www.sun-isig.org/join.php
You must show an organization -- a university or a non-profit affiliation -- and a title in it, and an industry.
You must therefore already be in a recognized and credentialed and registered real-life institution. That has its plusses and minuses.
Oh, I could put in something easily, as I'm involved in all kinds of non-profits and that part isn't a problem. But it's the principle of the thing. It is not really "open" as it proclaims.
And that's how these things filter, screen, control.
;)
