Growing the use of Virtual Worlds in education : an OpenSim perspective

The growth in the range of disciplines that Virtual Worlds support for educational purposes is evidenced by recent applications in the fields of cultural heritage, humanitarian aid, space exploration, virtual laboratories in the physical sciences, archaeology, computer science and coastal geography. This growth is due in part to the flexibility of OpenSim, the open source virtual world platform which by adopting Second Life protocols and norms has created a de facto standard for open virtual worlds that is supported by a growing number of third party open source viewers. Yet while this diversity of use-cases is impressive and Virtual Worlds for open learning are highly popular with lecturers and learners alike immersive education remains an essentially niche activity. This paper identifies functional challenges in terms of Management, Network Infrastructure, the Immersive 3D Web and Programmability that must be addressed to enable the wider adoption of Open Virtual Worlds as a routine learning technology platform. We refer to specific use-cases based on OpenSim and abstract generic requirements which should be met to enable the growth in use of Open Virtual Worlds as a mainstream educational facility. A case study of a deployment to support a formal education curriculum and associated informal learning is used to illustrate key points.Postprin

A Classification of Scripting Systems for Entertainment and Serious Computer Games

The technology base for modern computer games is usually provided by a game engine. Many game engines have built-in dedicated scripting languages that allow the development of complete games that are built using those engines, as well as extensive modification of existing games through scripting alone. While some of these game engines implement proprietary languages, others use existing scripting systems that have been modified according to the game engine's requirements. Scripting languages generally provide a very high level of abstraction method for syntactically controlling the behaviour of their host applications and different types of scripting system allow different types of modification of their underlying host application. In this paper we propose a simple classification for scripting systems used in computer games for entertainment and serious purposes

Scene integration for online VR advertising clouds

This paper presents a scene composition approach that allows the combinational use of standard three dimensional objects, called models, in order to create X3D scenes. The module is an integral part of a broader design aiming to construct large scale online advertising infrastructures that rely on virtual reality technologies. The architecture addresses a number of problems regarding remote rendering for low end devices and last but not least, the provision of scene composition and integration. Since viewers do not keep information regarding individual input models or scenes, composition requires the consideration of mechanisms that add state to viewing technologies. In terms of this work we extended a well-known, open source X3D authoring tool

Software Defined Media: Virtualization of Audio-Visual Services

Internet-native audio-visual services are witnessing rapid development. Among these services, object-based audio-visual services are gaining importance. In 2014, we established the Software Defined Media (SDM) consortium to target new research areas and markets involving object-based digital media and Internet-by-design audio-visual environments. In this paper, we introduce the SDM architecture that virtualizes networked audio-visual services along with the development of smart buildings and smart cities using Internet of Things (IoT) devices and smart building facilities. Moreover, we design the SDM architecture as a layered architecture to promote the development of innovative applications on the basis of rapid advancements in software-defined networking (SDN). Then, we implement a prototype system based on the architecture, present the system at an exhibition, and provide it as an SDM API to application developers at hackathons. Various types of applications are developed using the API at these events. An evaluation of SDM API access shows that the prototype SDM platform effectively provides 3D audio reproducibility and interactiveness for SDM applications.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC2017), Paris, France, 21-25 May 201

Requirements for Topology in 3D GIS

Topology and its various benefits are well understood within the context of 2D Geographical Information Systems. However, requirements in three-dimensional (3D) applications have yet to be defined, with factors such as lack of users' familiarity with the potential of such systems impeding this process. In this paper, we identify and review a number of requirements for topology in 3D applications. The review utilises existing topological frameworks and data models as a starting point. Three key areas were studied for the purposes of requirements identification, namely existing 2D topological systems, requirements for visualisation in 3D and requirements for 3D analysis supported by topology. This was followed by analysis of application areas such as earth sciences and urban modelling which are traditionally associated with GIS, as well as others including medical, biological and chemical science. Requirements for topological functionality in 3D were then grouped and categorised. The paper concludes by suggesting that these requirements can be used as a basis for the implementation of topology in 3D. It is the aim of this review to serve as a focus for further discussion and identification of additional applications that would benefit from 3D topology. © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Wonderland Task Viewer

Our objective for this project was to implement a productivity tool for a virtual team project room using the Sun Microsystems Project Wonderland software. More specifically, we created an application that would allow for teams using the Project Wonderland software to discuss, manage and view task data from within Project Wonderland itself. In order to do this we had to create a Graphical User Interface (GUI) within Project Wonderland that a user could interact with, as well as implement a system that could communicate with an external task management application such as SourceForge(R)

Management and Visualisation of Non-linear History of Polygonal 3D Models

The research presented in this thesis concerns the problems of maintenance and revision control of large-scale three dimensional (3D) models over the Internet. As the models grow in size and the authoring tools grow in complexity, standard approaches to collaborative asset development become impractical. The prevalent paradigm of sharing files on a file system poses serious risks with regards, but not limited to, ensuring consistency and concurrency of multi-user 3D editing. Although modifications might be tracked manually using naming conventions or automatically in a version control system (VCS), understanding the provenance of a large 3D dataset is hard due to revision metadata not being associated with the underlying scene structures. Some tools and protocols enable seamless synchronisation of file and directory changes in remote locations. However, the existing web-based technologies are not yet fully exploiting the modern design patters for access to and management of alternative shared resources online. Therefore, four distinct but highly interconnected conceptual tools are explored. The first is the organisation of 3D assets within recent document-oriented No Structured Query Language (NoSQL) databases. These "schemaless" databases, unlike their relational counterparts, do not represent data in rigid table structures. Instead, they rely on polymorphic documents composed of key-value pairs that are much better suited to the diverse nature of 3D assets. Hence, a domain-specific non-linear revision control system 3D Repo is built around a NoSQL database to enable asynchronous editing similar to traditional VCSs. The second concept is that of visual 3D differencing and merging. The accompanying 3D Diff tool supports interactive conflict resolution at the level of scene graph nodes that are de facto the delta changes stored in the repository. The third is the utilisation of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the purposes of 3D data management. The XML3DRepo daemon application exposes the contents of the repository and the version control logic in a Representational State Transfer (REST) style of architecture. At the same time, it manifests the effects of various 3D encoding strategies on the file sizes and download times in modern web browsers. The fourth and final concept is the reverse-engineering of an editing history. Even if the models are being version controlled, the extracted provenance is limited to additions, deletions and modifications. The 3D Timeline tool, therefore, implies a plausible history of common modelling operations such as duplications, transformations, etc. Given a collection of 3D models, it estimates a part-based correspondence and visualises it in a temporal flow. The prototype tools developed as part of the research were evaluated in pilot user studies that suggest they are usable by the end users and well suited to their respective tasks. Together, the results constitute a novel framework that demonstrates the feasibility of a domain-specific 3D version control