Transcript Document

Second Life in Education: An overview
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
I. THE VIRTUAL WORLDS: STATE OF THE ART
A virtual world is a computer simulated environment designed for its
inhabitants to reside and use it. This is performed through the use of graphic
representations -3D, 2D or text based representations called avatars.
Since a Virtual World is a very vague and inclusive concept, it might be divide
into two big subgroups:
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games or MMORPGs where the
user that interprets an specific character is a main feature of the game.
Massively multiplayer online real-life/rogue-like games or MMORLGs,
where the user may edit and alter its avatar appearance at will, allowing them
to play a more dynamic role or different roles.
Following, there is a set of virtual worlds of the second kind.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Activeworlds
Awomo
Forterra Systems
Gaia
Moove
MTV
Barbie Girls
Club Penguin
MyCoke
Habbo Hotel
Hipihi
Hello Kitty
Multiverse
Open Croquet
Open Sim
Cybertown
Disney’s Toontown
Kaneva
Meez
Pixel City
Playdo
Dizziwood
Entropia Universe
Minyanland
Mokitown
Planet Cazmo
Second Life
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
The Palace
The Sims Online
There
Vside
VZones
Whyrobbierocks
TowerChat
Traveler
Virtual Magic
Kingdom
Whyville
Whirled
Worlds.com
Voodoo Chat
Yohoho! Puzzle
Voy Plaza
Zed City
VpChat
Zwinky
AUTOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
We are going to examine some of them in some deep to see which is the state
of the art with respect to the virtual worlds. Our first virtual world examined will
be There.com, from which the following picture has been extracted:
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
There.com is a 3D virtual world created by Will Harvey and Jeffrey Ventrella.
Its release was in October 2003. In June 2004, it went through big changes. It
contains 12 main islands and a number of other smaller islands, there are
500000 members and many community places, including business. The
majority of the items such as surniture are designed to be used inside the
homes. The economy uses Therebucks, virtual money with real value in the
real world. Therebucks can be bought directly from There, from other members
or from third parts –”banks” online, that usually offer competitive change rates.
This world supports –only partially-Windows Vista. The fact that it is a PG
World is viewed by some as a sign of the childish the project is, though others
think that is precisely that which makes thing to be less bothered by “mature
content”.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
The next virtual world that we will see, will be Whyville, from which a picture us
included:
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Whyville is an educational place in Internet directed towards prescholars and
teenagers. It was created originally as a support for the weekly article on
science on the LA Tiems, its goal is to engage its users in the learning of a wide
range of sbjects, from science and business to art and geography. It has about
2,8 millions players base. It has been notably successful in atracting young
women. As a virtual world based on simulation, the environment users engage
in games sponsored by a wide spectrum of governmental, non-lucrative and
corporative entities. It was launched in 1999, by Numedeon, Inc.and it was one
of the first virtual worlds for children and it is the only virtual world which
purpose is primarily educative. Numedeon was founded by Dr. James M.
Bower, his students and assistants in Caltech, interested in the way how
Internet and serious games based on simulation could change the education.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Now, we will review ActiveWorlds, from which the next picture is extracted:
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
ActiveWorlds. Its browser “ActiveWorlds” runs on Windows although it can
also run over Linux. The users assign themselves a name, they enter the
universe and they explore virtual 3D worlds and environment that other users
have built. The users may chat with one another or build structures and areas
from a selection of items. This virtual world allows its users be owners of worlds
and universes and develop 3D content. The browser has a web browser, voice
chat and basic instant messenger. This integrated software can allow users to
connect, explore and earn a deeper understanding of 3D. The corporate and
educative customers of ActiveWorlds may use the interaction, comunication
and means to provide functional environments designed towards their aim. The
original goal of the program was to be the 3D equivalent of a web browser in
2D (Such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla) The user could build an office, a
building or an area in which to display its products or information. Currently,
there are many new features that allow a greater interaction with the
environment than in previous versions.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
The next example will be the Entropia Universe. This world is important
because of the economy. The virtual objects that are acquired inside the Project
Entropia have real value and any participant may, in any moment, withdraw his
funds to make them real money accordingly to a change rate, discounting the
commissions of the transaction. _Universe Entropia had an economic
movement of about 360 millions of dollars
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Picture of Project Entropía. It may be seen that the screen resolution is very
good, which also makes this the most resource-consuming system seen until
now.
AUTOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
And which are the minimum requirements for Second Life?
Internet Connection: Cable or DSL
Operating System: Windows XP /Service Pack 2)
Or Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4)
Processor: Pentium III o Athlon a 800 Mhz o más
Graphic Card:
Nvidia Geforce 2, Geforce 4 MX or greater
Or ATI Radeon 8500, 9250 or greater
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Picture of Second Life
AUTOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
And after this brief review, which are the advantages that the virtual world s
could bring us? As an example of an attractive place, I include two pictures of
the Second Life region of the Oregon University
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
As an example of collective presence with real time interaction, we have this
picture, taken during the meeting celebrated in march in the second life place of
the SFEU (Now Scotland Colleges)
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Avatar in an emplyment event celebrated from 15 to 19 October, 2007
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Picture of the free whiteboard in Novatierra, in which it has been included the
results of my research in Information Retrieval, that were presented in the
IADIS Conference in Amsterdam.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
A picture about how to download, install and configure Sloodle, which is
Second Life + Moodle.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
As they explain it “ Who is Wilde Cunningham? We are a group of 9 adults
severely injured, exploring all Second Life, which truly frees us to make things
that we could not do in real life. We participate as a group.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
In the following link:
http://uiaccess.com/transcripts/wheeling_in_second_life.html we
can see the next question and answer:
Do you think that Second Life is useful for people with mobility
issues in real life? Yes, because you can make friends without
having to go out and physically meeting with them.
For Simon Stevens, that also suffers from brain symptoms, it is
equally important hte fact htat it makes the disabled people visible
All of this is supported by Peter Abrahams in his paper:
“Second Life is now too important not to be accessible”
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Of course, virtual worlds have disadvantages, too, that we could summarize in
three large groups:
-Stability problems: Entering the world 20 times, there have been seven
crashes of the two machines used to do this dissertation, which means, it has
not worked properly 35% of the times we have wanted to enter the virtual
world.
-Constant Beta: Three different versions of the client side of Second Life have
been downloaded in a month and a half.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
The search Problem: The discovery of resources is the problem of knowing
which things (avatars, items, sounds, etc) are in a world and how are they
related to each other. As an example, when a web page is loaded that contains
a link to other webpage, we have “discovered” that new page. Furthermore, it
is implied that the page is relevant for the page we are currently seeing.
Without that links, the WWW would be useless. Similarly, the elements of a VR
space should be able to link each others in such a way that the total is more
than the summation of the parts.
A mean to supply for this are the SLURLS, which are esentially the URLS for
Second Life, and a mean to blend the web 2.0 with the Web 3D.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Legal and Ethical issues. Logically in this environment you have all the
problems derived from web 2D, existing the possibility in some worlds of a
reservation that allows teenagers-for example Teen Life. It is noteworthy,
though, that there are places where the whole world is PG-13, restraining the
contents that could be present. There.com is an example of this kind of world.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
SECOND LIFE IN EDUCATION
¿What could Second Life be useful for?
To make simulations, as an example we have the following picture of a regionmuseum that shows the space career history through the rockets and vehicles.
This would be impossible in the real world without a massive injection of
money, and perhaps more important, without a very considerable
environmental impact.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Now we will see a selection of educative places in Second Life, First is the
Cervantes Institute, which is an institutiondedicated to the teaching of Spanish
as a second tongue
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Genome Island, with many practices and exercises about genetics.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
In the virtual hospital,
the avatar has to react
before catastrophe, for
example a pandemia.
Through some
scenarios with
different missions and
directed towards a
determined audience,
the participants test
their reaction skills,
acquire new abilities
and take decisions.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Places dedicated to astronomy and physycs
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
The Public Library of
Cleveland is the third
research library in the
United States and the first
in chess related objects
collection. Besides, chess
matches can be played in
the boards provided for it.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Science Island, this place shows us in an interactive way how science works.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
It can be read: The sun gives
light with a temperature of
9940 ºF (5504,44 ºC). The
side of the moon that faces
the sun absorbs its light,
heating about 240 ºF (115,55
ºC). The warmed moon
irradiates its heat back to
space allowing its dark side to
freeze to -280 ºF(-173.33 ºC).
Nevertheless, a point in the
surface of Earth does not
change its temperature in 520
ºF (271,11 ºC) in a day. WHY?
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Picture of the meteora region, that simulates meteorological phenomenons.
AUTOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Pictures of the sun in different wavelengths
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
The University of Nottingham is evaluating bullying throug a survey of an
occupational psychologist to 50 avatars. The universities of Plymouth and
Jefferson in the United States have developed a sexual education zone with
movies about HIV and an stand with news about sexual health, as the picture
shows:
AUTOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
La Universidad de Cornell está midiendo el impacto del estrés postraumático
en veteranos de la guerra de Irak y del Golfo mientras participan en un tour
virtual por el escenario del conflicto.
El Imperial College de Londres tiene una versión de Second Life de su edificio
del mundo real Sir Alexander Fleming, completo, ofrece teleportar a la librería y
al teatro. Además, está realizando un experimento para comunicar mensajes
complicados en cuanto a cuidados sanitarios, como se puede ver en la
siguiente imagen:
AUTOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
It is also used by some Spanish universities such as the university of Sevilla,
which owns a place in the Osiris region where they meet and ise concepts such
as Webquests.
AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Usability is
an issue: A
link list
would be
more
useful
than these
“booklinks”
In the year 2007, a piece of news that explained that the University of Navarra
(Spain) had a building in Second Life appeared. It was decided to go there to
watch it and take inspiration in their achievements. Instead of that, inspiration
came from the fact that “Going there” was a particularly complex thing to do.
It was then when it was learnt that all the things that are taken for granted in the
“Web 2D” were not so simple in the “Web 3D”. There was not an address bar
where entering the destination. Finally, after looking for it thoroughly, an SLURL
was found, which is an URL for Second Life, and that corresponds always to the
string: “http://slurl.com/secondlife/region/x/y/z “.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Normally, the Page Rank and other algorithms have relied in the number of links going
from and to a place to calculate the importance of the page. But in Second Life we
have a graph with just nodes and no edges, which means the ways to calculate the
importance of a given region are no longer good. Except if we found a way to fuse this
“web 3D” with the Web 2.0 through the use of the aforementioned protocols.
For doing this, a tool has been developed and his performance has been tested
against the internal search engine of Second Life.
Our tool allows to search by a tag and region and it could be easily implemented
in any programming language. It has been developed both in PHP and Visual
basic and has the following format: The data entries will be those of the region,
the coordinates x, y, and z and a tag and a commentary. The data will then be
stored in a MySQL database, and then a search can be performed by the criteria
of the region or the tag or even the associated avatar
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Once the
SLURLS are
stored, they can
be searched.
The tool will
provide us three
different criteria
for it: Either we
can look for
region, for tag
or for avatar as
can be seen in
the following
figure:
We can search by region, by tag or by avatar and the results
retrieved provide us with the link identifier, a link to the google
powered map from where we can transport by pressing the
“Teletransport button”, a link that opens the location in Second Life,
the region, the tag, the comment and the avatar associated (In this
case, we searched Brace Coral)
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Now, after having generated both the intermediate link and the direct link,
we have the following result:
Besides, the links have been stored in a database with the tags and the
comments.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
If we click the highlighted link in the previous slide, we
finally teleport to our desired location
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Of course, after having this tool
ready, the following step is his
use for the evaluation of the
quality of the internal search
engine of Second Life. For that,
60 SLURLS from the
bibliography were crawled and
stored. After that, the procedure
consisted of seeing if with these
SLURLS we could reach our
destinations. The technique that
was followed was giving a value
of 1 point if we reached our
destination without any troubles
and 0 if we did not reach it.
As the maximum
efficiency could be
the 60 points we have
an efficiency of about
90%.
With the Search
Engine of Second
Life, the efficiency
dropped drastically as
it was about 65%.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
Since the date this experiment was done, though, Second Life
has improved his search engine, in March 2008, and now the
efficiency is the same with both systems (90%) (Using the
beta version of the search engine)
Nevertheless, there are also problems with this new engine.
Some of them are described now:
• There are places like the University of Navarra that are not
found either in the old engine or the new one.
• The accessibility continues being an issue.
• It does not sort the results by tags, but by the belonging to a
given place
• There remains the problem of calculating the authoritative
pages, this is, the importance of a given region, as we could
do with the PageRank.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
CONCLUSIONS
For all these reasons, we still feel confident that our approach to the fusion of the
Web 2.0 and the web 3D is the best possible way to improve the search in the 3D
Virtual Worlds. The reasons why we believe this approach could be better are
exposed in [1]: The keywords that the region’s owner chooses are not normally
those that the users would choose. The reason why a web 2.0 application works is
that a large number of people are able to perform a common task. Our research has
leaded us to believe that Linden Labs should include a feature to allow the
navigation entering an address in the address bar. Besides this, the Search was one
of the defining features of the Internet revolution. It is not by chance that the biggest
of Microsoft rivals nowadays is Google and that the company has been actively
seeking to buy Yahoo. If something similar happens in the Web 3D, a need for new
algorithms that are not Graph-Based must be developed. We have not developed
yet a system for calculating the relevance of a given region but it is clearly a
possible path to follow.
RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN
Second Life in Education: An overview
EN UN ENTORNO 3D: SECOND LIFE
REFERENCES
Arthur, L. Taylor, 2007, Collective Tagging of places in the multi-user virtual environment of Second Life. School of
Information and Library Science
Rymaszewki et al, 2007.
La guía oficial de Second Life (Second Life's Official guide), Anaya Multimedia (Authorized translation from
English Language by Sams Publishing)
Alberto García Serrano and Ruth Martínez, 2007. Exprime Second Life (Squeeze Second Life), Anaya Multimedia
Ben Schneiderman and Catherine Plaisant 2004, Designing the user interface, chapters 6 and 10. AddisonWesley.
Adrienne J Gauthier, 2007, Astronomy in Second Life: A user’s perspective,
Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal, Volume 1, p.32
Cynthia Calogne and Jeff Hiles, 2007 Blended Realities: A virtual tour of education in Second Life. Technology,
college and community worldwide online conference proceedings.
Tim, O’Reilly, 2007 What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software,
Communications & Strategies, No. 1, p. 17.
Alexander, Bryan, 2006, Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?, Educause Review v41,
n2 p33-34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44
Gottfried Vossen and Stephan Hagemann, 2007, Unleashing web 2.0: from concepts to creativity. ACM
Paul Anderson, 2007, What is Web 2.0? Ideas, Technologies and Implications for Education, JISC Technology
and Standard Watch