Carl Jokl is hosting an upcoming community meeting.
Open Wonderland Community Meeting Mobile Strategy Wednesday, August 27th, 2014 1pm US Eastern time (see event in your time zone: http://tinyurl.com/OWL-Mobile-Strategy) Community server – http://owf1.virtualnorthstar.org:8080/
Session Overview
The session is intended to cover the strategy for creating new high performance mobile clients for the Open Wonderland platform. This includes dealing with getting the best performance for Wonderland and best user experience while allowing for cross platform customizability. Finally we will discuss how the new mobile applications could be ported to be the basis of new higher performance desktop client applications and the potential for porting to games consoles.
Johanna Pirker from Graz University has volunteered to organize and run an Open Wonderland community meeting this coming Wednesday. We will meet on the community server.
The first student, Lisa, is about to finish her Master’s Thesis. She is developing tools to support exploratory collaborative learning settings in the form of scavenger hunts in OWL. This includes (a) an itemize functionality, which provides objects with info text, (b) an info inventory, (c) a student manager, where the teacher can assign 1-4 roles to students, (d) an item board, which provides students with the gathered information, and (e) a quiz. As a first application scenario, Lisa displays the approach and her tools in a setup to learn about the Egyptian culture.
Patrick is also about to finish his Master’s Thesis. He is developing a graphical OWL editor, which can be used to move, rotate, and duplicate objects in the world in a 2D window. He will focus on the architecture and implementation of the tool.
Before we add these links to the Documentation Wiki and Open Wonderland web site, we would appreciate your help in reviewing these documents. Please send us feedback in terms of errors or suggestions for improvements, preferably by replying to the related discussion on the Open Wonderland forum:
You can also leave comments here or on the Open Wonderland Facebook page.
We would appreciate feedback by Monday, February 24th. We will incorporate any feedback we get between now and then, update the documents, and then add links to the new guides on the Documentation Wiki.
In my work with clients, one common concern is how long it will take users to learn to use Open Wonderland. Moving the avatar around a space is typically one of the clients’ biggest concerns. To address this issue, my company, WonderBuilders, has been thinking about different mechanisms for avatar navigation. One strategy we have implemented for customer projects is an enhanced Best View feature that allows users to focus in on objects by clicking on them.
In this way, users navigate by moving only their avatar camera, and not the avatar. In some scenarios, this approach works well. There is, however, at least one serious drawback. If the avatar does not actually move and the object they are focusing in on is far away, they will not be able to hear audio in the vicinity of the object they are looking at.
To address this issue, we recently added a new capability called “Navigate To.” Now, when the user clicks on an object, their avatar will move to a location near that object that the world builder has specified.
Navigate To can be used in conjunction with Best View or on its own.
As we have added these capabilities, we also had to address the issue of which capabilities take precedence when more than one is applied to an object. For now we have hard-coded an ordering. Navigate To always comes first, followed by Best View, which is followed by Audio, and so forth. Eventually it will probably be necessary to create an interactive ordering tool so that the world builder can specify the order they desire.
As described in previous blog articles (“ESL Instruction Using Open Wonderland” and “NSF Funds Wonderland ESL Project at STCC“), WonderBuilders has been working with the English as a Second Language faculty at Springfield Technical Community College in Springfield, Massachusetts to deploy a Wonderland environment for English-language learning. This video, created as an update for the NSF project sponsors, provides an overview of the project.
By Dominik Alessandri & Christian Wietlisbach Hochschule Luzern Technik & Architektur
As part of our bachelor thesis, along with our Kinect module described last month, we developed a printscreen plugin for Open Wonderland. When the plugin is installed on a server, all connected users can choose if screenshots should be saved locally or on the server. If saved on the server, the pictures can be displayed in an automatically updated photo gallery. The update of the picture gallery is made with a shell script which is running as task in the background on the server. We had to implement it this way, as we did not find a way to save directly in the ‘docRoot’ folder in the ‘run’ directory. The shell script uses rsync to keep these two folders in sync.
When a user is connected to a server with the printscreen plugin installed, he can display the controls of the plugin by selecting ‘Window -> Printscreen Folder’:
The Printscreen Folder dialog allows the user to choose where to save the images:
When pressing the ‘o’ key, a new screenshot will be taken and either saved locally or on the server. The reason why the key binding was done with ‘o’ is very simple: The printscreen key is not forwarded from the client to the module. The capture of the key event is done on a level before the module gets the event. On this higher level, the “Print Screen” key is filtered and the module doesn’t get any event. Instead the message “Key is not allowed” appears. Version 3 of jMonkey will support taking screenshots by default, making it easier to capture the screen.
On the server-side, the screenshots are saved in /.wonderland-server/0.5/run/content/images/screenshot/. This folder should be created by an administrator when installing the plugin.
To run the photogallery, the content of the file ‘lightbox.zip’ needs to be extracted to /.wonderland-server/0.5/run/docRoot/lightbox/. This photo gallery shows all images stored in /.wonderland-server/0.5/run/docRoot/screenshot/. To update the photo gallery, we need a background task which copies the files from /.wonderland-server/0.5/run/content/images/screenshot/ to /.wonderland-server/0.5/run/docRoot/screenshot/. For example, the shell-script ‘copyScreenshot.sh’ can do the job.
Anne Massey, a professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business wrote to me to tell me about a recent article she co-authored with Akshay Bhagwatwar and Alan Dennis. In the paper, they describe their fascinating research on using Open Wonderland to enhance brainstorming. Here’s a pointer to their paper (PDF version) along with one of the images from the paper and the abstract.
Bhagwatwar, A., Massey, A., & Dennis, A. R. (2013, January). In System Sciences (HICSS), 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 215-224). IEEE.
Three Dimensional Virtual Environments (VEs) have potential as platforms for collaboration. VEs enable members of teams, represented as avatars, to interact in a simulated world that can be designed in a variety of different ways. Research from cognitive psychology has shown that it is possible to manipulate non-conscious cognition and behavior through “priming”, a well-known phenomenon in which words and images are used to activate desired concepts in participants’ minds. In the context of team brainstorming, we posit that VEs can improve performance when specifically designed with visual objects intended to prime team members and enhance their creativity. Using Open Wonderland, an open source toolkit for creating 3D collaborative environments, we designed two VEs to support virtual team brainstorming: one looked like a generic conference hall while the other was visually designed to prime team members. Results show that when teams generated ideas in the creative VE, they generated significantly more and better quality ideas than when they worked in the generic one. In terms of key contributions, our study (1) demonstrates the efficacy of 3D VEs as collaboration spaces for facilitating team creativity, and (2) shows that the design of the VE itself can influence team performance.
Open Wonderland is easy to install and run on your local machine. But when you want your virtual world be accessible by many people from the Internet, things become more complicated. Anyone who needs to have their virtual world on the Internet needs to do the following:
Configure a virtual server in the cloud or configure their router to point to a local machine.
Manage a domain name or deal with fixed IPs or dynamic DNS.
Correctly dimension the server in order to accommodate the necessary number of participants
Install the necessary Open Wonderland modules and plugins and configure them.
Deal with the fact that not everyone has Java correctly installed or Java Web Start working properly.
More than a half of the posts on the Open Wonderland forum are regarding server configuration issues. People who only want a virtual world running must deal with many technical barriers that are not part of their business.
By providing Open Wonderland as a product, this is the gap that the Cyramix team is aiming to fill. We are offering Open Wonderland virtual world hosting combined with technical support so that virtual world owners only have to focus on building, using, and sharing their worlds while we take care of the rest.
We provide a client installer for Windows that comes with Java embedded as well as a launcher. For other platforms, we offer the standard web-based launch button. With the client installer, the user only has to download and install this one package and then type a world code. That’s all. The Open Wonderland client will launch faster than it does from a web-based launch page since a lot of code will already be downloaded and will not need to be verified each time the client is launched.
With our service, the customer will get a pre-configured island on a shared server in the cloud, ready to be prepared for users. The customer can choose if the world is completely private or if guests will be allowed. We are offering three different plans targeted at different types of users:
Basic (complete experience without video playback, webcams and applications)
For painters or photographers who want a virtual gallery as an extension of their website.
For 3D artists who want visitors to experience their work in 3D.
For presenters and educators who only need slideshows and limited document sharing.
Plus (basic experience plus video playback and public webcams)
Multimedia presentations with slides and videos.
Rich virtual galleries with biography.
Education environment with full multimedia.
Premium (plus experience with fully collaborative application support)
Supports developer team meetings with real-time browser and code editing.
Real-time document and spreadsheet collaboration using Google Docs or Libre Office.
VNC client for desktop sharing
With time, we hope to be the top Open Wonderland contributor, making the platform more and more user friendly and bug free.
We invite everyone to check out our web page http://www.cyramix.com and test the trial world. We are just beginning and your comments would be much appreciated.
Posted by Nicole Yankelovich 
Wonderblog 