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:

1. An in-world photograph taken using a RezMela scene
2. 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:

1. A link to an video (maximum 5 minutes) using a RezMela scene, uploaded to YouTube
2. 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.

In Kitely due to the summer competition you can play around with the system. The place to start really is the Command Board.

From here you can add buildings, NPC’s, infrastructure, vehicles, plants, events etc. to your scene. You can save a scene, clear a scene, load a scene and it’s the latter that impresses because when you load a scene it is a rather slick and smooth process.

Now sometimes a video explains matters better, so here’s a YouTube Video showing some of the basics of the command board.

I ended up getting myself in a bit of a mess I must admit, I had way too many police cars at the scene but the beauty of this system is that you can clear the scene and then load the original again, phew! This left me with NPC’s doing their best to control the chemical spill.

The nature of this product lends itself to a virtual world such as Kitely, because of the way Kitely utilises cloud storage it means on demand worlds can be quickly created. The RezMela team explain matters further :

RezMela™ regions are currently cloud hosted on Kitely™. We are able to duplicate as many RezMela™ regions as needed in order to match class size. The way RezMela™ is set up allows instructors to create breakout sessions trivially. Different groups of students can participate in scenarios on dedicated regions. This approach will ensure a good user experience even if the number of exercise participants is large. This is because the pressure on resources gets distributed among regions running as different instances on the Amazon EC2 cloud.

The ideas and concepts at play here could most definitely appeal to people outside the education sector, there are plenty of potential use cases for a system like this and it definitely demonstrates some of the positives of Kitely and OpenSim in its approach.

At the very least, if you’re interested in OpenSim, Kitely, education or just want to look at some different concepts, this is certainly worth a visit. Interesting stuff indeed.

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