Three Levels of Virtual Worlds
Summer is finally here, the students are gone, and it’s a good time to step back, take a deep breath, and reflect on the past academic year. The Institute has a new director now, and amid a flurry of Second Life discussions, he asked me what I thought about the Croquet Consortium. I put together an email and fired it off to Brian, and after re-reading it, thought it might be worth posting here (with minor edits):
I see three different types of virtual worlds out there right now that are all worth exploring:
- Commercial Virtual Worlds (mostly MMOs) that could be used for education and research. These include things like WoW, EQ, Whyville, Club Penguin, City of Heroes/Villains, Toon Town, etc. All these virtual worlds have some unique characteristics, and are worth keeping an eye on as educational and/or research opportunities present themselves.
Barrier to entry? Little to none
- Virtual worlds that can be used as platforms. This would include Second Life and There (www.there.com). The thing with There is that it isn’t as robust as Second Life in terms of user-created content. Users can only really design clothes and maybe vehicles. But…There has a MUCH better UI and technology running their world. The U.S. military is using There technology for training purposes (http://www.forterrainc.com/)
Barrier to entry? Not very difficult for someone with a bit of tech knowledge
- Virtual world packages/tools. This includes things like:
ActiveWorlds
MetaVerse:
Multiverse:
And by the looks of it, Croquet.
All of these are worth exploring and keeping on the radar, but these are more like virtual world tools and/or authoring environments where you need to create the whole thing from the bottom up.
Barrier to entry? Steep, and would probably require a small skunkworks team with a variety of skillsets (3D modeling and asset creation, network configuration, server admin, design, etc)
One very interesting opportunity:
Smart Fox Server
This is the technology stack that powers Whyville and Club Penguin, very popular flash-based VWs accessed via the web. From what I understand, this technology is FREE to download and experiment with, then it gets into pricing based on how many concurrent users you want (but is still very reasonable).
hi, just to make a correction, Whyville is based on its own proprietary engine called NICE (Numedeon’s Interactive Community Engine), which is also now used to power other virtual worlds run by Numedeon. NICE is also still the only engine specifically designed to support learning and education — with lots of hooks, bells and whistles for community management, metering use, simulation based gaming and learning, etc. So, Whyville is actually a ‘Learning-based virtual world”. Anyone interested can look at the independent (that is, not related to Numedeon), blogsite organized by Prof. Yasmin Kafai, at UCLA who has been studying the educational use of whyville for some time, and has recently published a series of papers on the subject.
http://kafai-whyville.blogspot.com/index.html
Jim Bower
CEO Numedeon Inc
Founders of Whyville.net
Ah, thanks for the heads-up Jim. I recall a presentation by Tim Holt at the SGS @ GDC going over MMP technologies, talking about Smart Fox Server and that (he thought) it powered Whyville and Club Penguin. I’ll have to take a look at the NICE tech and see how that might impact our college.
What kind of barrier to entry exists in Using the Smart Fox Server. Does it have modules or do we have to program everything from the ground up? What kind of price range exist for Virtual World packages?
We’re still in the process of sorting out Smart Fox Server. We’re on Multiverse now hacking around and learning the system, and hope to move to Smart Fox next. The price is the best part: it’s free for up to 20 concurrent users. So you can download and install the fully functional server at no cost (assuming you have a server to run it). Modules exist for Smart Fox, but I believe it will cost you a small fee to obtain the library of pre-existing modules.