Virtual Worlds – Page 129

July 24, 2014July 24, 2014

UWE Teaching MA In Virtual Worlds Within Second Life

The Education Innovation Centre at The University Of The West Of England are teaching a MA Education in Virtual Worlds with the course taking place in Second Life. Learners will have the opportunity to :

Explore the application of teaching, learning and research theories in a virtual environment,

Develop potential learning activities of their own and test them out
Explore the use of non-player characters and bots powered by forms of “artificial intelligence”
Design and develop curricula specifically for delivery in virtual worlds
Research education in virtual worlds

…and more

The MAEVW is a flexible programme of study, which is taught entirely in the virtual world Second Life. It is supported by online technologies that include virtual learning environments, collaborative tools and video conferencing. This flexibility enables the course to be studied anywhere in the world (with some requirements regarding time zones).

The whole course is a two year programme, although you can choose to take the modules individually if you want. The full programme structure can be read here. There are a number of modules, some are compulsory and some are optional. The compulsory modules are :

Orientation in Virtual Worlds
Designing Curricula in Virtual Worlds
Simulations and Role Play
Scripting and Building Learning Environments
Research Methods in Virtual Worlds
Sociology of the Metaverse
Artificial Intelligence, Bots and Non-Player Characters
The Philosophy of Education in Virtual Worlds

The programme structure page goes into a lot more detail about the course and all the details.

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July 23, 2014

RezMela Contest In Kitely Offers Prizes Of Up To $250

RezMela are running a competition in Kitely with prizes on offer of up to USD$250.00. Now you may be wondering what the bloody hell RezMela is, we’ll get to that later, for now here are the details of the competition :

Category A – Photography Contest

You need to submit:

An in-world photograph taken using a RezMela scene
Text (maximum 100 words) to describe the scenario depicted by the photograph

Prizes:

Gold: $50
Silver: $30
Bronze: $20

Category B – Machinima Contest

You need to submit:

A link to an video (maximum 5 minutes) using a RezMela scene, uploaded to YouTube
Text (maximum 100 words) to describe the scenario that the machinima presents

Prizes:

Gold: $250
Silver: $110
Bronze: $40

Note that YouTube videos must be set to Public or Unlisted, and must allow embedding.

To enter the competition you will need to visit RezMela Competition or RezMela Competition 2 in Kitely. Please note that the contest deadline is Thursday July 31st 2014, 11 pm EDT. All submissions need to be made on or before that time.

For further details please go to : http://rezmelacomp.wordpress.com/

Ok so what on earth is RezMela? At a very basic level it’s a way of building and saving scenes for your sim in OpenSim. This way you can quickly load scenes for different scenarios, it’s an excellent idea for many use cases but it seems to be particularly useful for educational usage and education is the sector that the product blurb is aimed at with talk of virtual learning environments and such like.

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July 22, 2014

The Cost Of Windows Updates For Developers And Users

Oz Linden’s recent blog post on Tips for Reducing Viewer Crashes urged people to upgrade their operating systems :

Upgrade your Operating System

There is a very clear pattern in our statistics – the more up to date your operating system is, the less likely your Viewer is to crash. This applies on both Windows and Macintosh (Linux is a little harder to judge, since “up to date” has a more fluid meaning there, and the sample sizes are small). Some examples:

Windows 8.1 reports crashes only half as often as Windows 8.0

Those of you who stuck with Windows 7 (roughly 40% of users of our Viewer right now) rather than upgrade to 8.0 made a good choice at the time; version 7 still has a much better crash rate than 8.0, but not quite as good as 8.1 (now about 15% of users), so waiting is no longer the best approach.

Mac OSX 10.9.3 reports crashes a third less than 10.7.5

OSX rates do not have as much variation as Windows versions do, but newer is still better, and there are other non-crash reasons to be on the up to date version, including rendering improvements.

Upgrading will probably also better protect you from security problems, so it’s a good idea even aside from allowing you to spend more time in Second Life.

However there’s a massive elephant in the room here and it’s the cost of upgrading Windows. OSX is a different kettle of fish and the recent Mavericks OS was even free. Microsoft Windows is different and this highlights an issue for developers as well as end users.

Here in the UK, Windows 8 upgrade for Vista and XP users is £99.99. The upgrade to Windows 8.1 after that is free.

Windows 8.1 itself, which is the path Windows 7 users will likely want to tread, is also £99.99. These are hefty fees in all reality and a lot of people would rather wait until their computer reaches the end of its life before upgrading.

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July 21, 2014

Authors In Second Life And Beyond Are Forming Good Virtual Communities

Book Island isn’t new to Second Life, it has been around since 2007 and claims to be the oldest dedicated literary sim in Second Life. They’ve recently welcomed back a renter by the name of V.L. Dreyer who is the author of The Survivors series of books.

The sim exemplifies what virtual worlds do well, community, it’s clear that there’s community work here with events advertised for a 500 word writing challenge, Open Mic where you or one of the regulars can read in voice, live literature where one of Second Life’s regular live performers reads.

Then there are events aimed at writers, such as an Improv writers challenge and writers chat. There’s also something called Promptly Erotic, which you will have to ask Freda Frostbite about!

I’ve seen communities such as this inside and outside of Second Life. Earlier in the year I took a trip to Opensim to look at the Hypergrid Stories Project. Indeed this community were so nice that even though Second Life isn’t part of the Hypergrid, it was included in the Hypergrid stories project!

One of the reasons for that is of course related to Second Life having an audience that it worth engaging with. This point arose recently in my blog post about Seanchai’s discussion of Second Life and Kitely. The discussion in the comments is quite interesting as we see that authors in particular are not happy with Linden Lab’s TOS but they still want to engage with Second Life.

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July 19, 2014

The Mysterious Case Of Inworldz Cash Outs

There’s an odd forum announcement over on the Inworldz forums :

Over the course of the last couple of months or so, it has become apparent that Linden Labs has been tightening the cash outs, or taking longer, etc., thus forcing people to make accounts over here to attempt to cash their L’s out.

For clarification: InWorldz economy stands on it’s own, we are not tied to Linden Lab, nor any other grid for that matter. When you attempt to cash out against our merchants and residents who are growing this economy, while not being a part of it, we will remove the cashout.

From a business standpoint, we are not about to start absorbing a loss for Linden Lab and their cash outs. This would be very foolhardy on our part to even try to absorb those. If you wish to cash out in our world, then you need to be a part of it, otherwise expect us to put a hold on those monies and not cash them out (as this also sets off my fraud flags when I look over the accounts).

If you are encouraging people to bring their cash outs over here, please stop. This is not helpful to our merchants or residents who do normal business daily in our grid. If you know someone who is encouraging others to do this, please let them know to stop or send them to this thread 🙂

Thanks everyone!

The odd part about this is that I’m not sure how anyone is exchanging money from Second Life to Inworldz or vice versa, as far I was aware this sort of exchange ended long ago. In their TOS update thread, an October 2012 announcement stated :

Unfortunately, at this time, our losses due to Fraud have become too high to sustain and we are effectively shutting down any ATM business. Owners that we are aware of have been notified, and we will no longer allow intergrid currency exchanging.

Furthermore the InworldZ TOS states :

InWorldz, LLC further establishes that any service designed to transfer I’z into or out of it’s service may result in account termination. This includes, but not limited to: ATM machines designed to transfer I’z out of InWorldz into other currency, people or accounts created to transfer I’z out of InWorldz into other currency, or any other system deemed by InWorldz staff to be accommodating such transfers.

So I am somewhat bemused as to how anyone is using Inworldz for cashing out, rather than cashing out via Second Life.

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