Presentation Second Life

Second Life in Education: An overview

AUTHOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.


RECUPERACIÓN DE INFORMACIÓN 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.




Activeworlds Forterra Systems Moove

Awomo Gaia MTV

Barbie Girls Habbo Hotel Multiverse

Club Penguin Hipihi Open Croquet

MyCoke Hello Kitty Open Sim

Cybertown Kaneva Pixel City

Disney’s Toontown Meez Playdo

Dizziwood Minyanland Planet Cazmo

Entropia Universe Mokitown Second Life


http://www.activeworlds.com/

http://www.forterrainc.com/



http://www.moove.com/

http://www.awomo.com/

http://www.gaiaonline.com/

http://www.vmtv.com/

http://www.barbiegirls.com/home.html



http://www.habbo.es/

http://www.habbo.es/

http://www.multiverse.net/index.html

http://www.clubpenguin.com/

http://www.clubpenguin.com/

http://www.hipihi.com/index_english.html

http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page



http://www.mycoke.com/index.html?tunnel=cokestudios

http://www.hellokittyonline.com/us/



http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page



http://www.cybertown.com/main_nsframes.html

http://www.kaneva.com/

http://www.citypixel.com/



http://play.toontown.com/screenshots.php



http://www.meez.com/

http://beta.playdo.com/

http://dizzywood.com/

http://www.minyanland.com/

http://planetcazmo.com/



http://www.entropiauniverse.com/index.var



http://www.mobile-kids.net/mokitown_prehome/home_en.jsp

http://secondlife.com/



AUTOR: ALFREDO DE LA PRESA CRUZ.


The Palace Vside

The Sims Online VZones

There Whyrobbierocks

TowerChat Whyville

Traveler Whirled

Virtual Magic Kingdom

Worlds.com

Voodoo Chat Yohoho! Puzzle

Voy Plaza Zed City

VpChat Zwinky


http://www.whirled.com/

http://vmk.disney.go.com/vmk/en_US/index?name=VMKHomePage




http://www.worlds.net/

http://www.voodoochat.com/

http://www.voodoochat.com/

http://www.puzzlepirates.com/

http://www.puzzlepirates.com/

http://www.voyplaza.com/vpv.html

http://city.zed.com/



http://www.vpchat.com/

http://zwinky.smileycentral.com/download/index.jhtml?partner=ZJxdm128&utm_id=3&ref=http%3A//www.zwinky.com/



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:




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”.




The next virtual world that we will see, will be Whyville, from which a picture us included:




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.




Now, we will review ActiveWorlds, from which the next picture is extracted:




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.




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




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.




And which are the minimum requirements for Second Life?

Internet Connection: Cable or DSLOperating System: Windows XP /Service Pack 2)

Or Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4)Processor: Pentium III o Athlon a 800 Mhz o másGraphic Card:

Nvidia Geforce 2, Geforce 4 MX or greaterOr ATI Radeon 8500, 9250 or greater




Picture of 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




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)




Avatar in an emplyment event celebrated from 15 to 19 October, 2007




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.




A picture about how to download, install and configure Sloodle, which is Second Life + Moodle.




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.




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”




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.




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.




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.




SECOND LIFE IN EDUCATION

¿What could Second Life be useful for?

To make simulations, as an example we have the following picture of a region-museum 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.







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




Genome Island, with many practices and exercises about genetics.




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.




Places dedicated to astronomy and physycs




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.




Science Island, this place shows us in an interactive way how science works.




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?




Picture of the meteora region, that simulates meteorological phenomenons.




Pictures of the sun in different wavelengths




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:




Cornell University is measuring the postraumatic stress impact in Irak war veterans while they take part in a virtual tour in the conflicts’ scenario.The London Imperial College has a complete version of their building of the real world Sir Alexander Fleming. It offers teleportation to the library and the theatre. Besides, it is performing an experiment to communicate complicated messages with regards health care as can be seen in the next picture:




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.


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 “.

Usability is an issue: A link list would be more useful than these “booklinks”



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



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)



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.



If we click the highlighted link in the previous slide, we finally teleport to our desired location



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%.



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.



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.



REFERENCESArthur, L. Taylor, 2007, Collective Tagging of places in the multi-user virtual environment of Second Life. School

of Information and Library ScienceRymaszewki 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. Addison-Wesley.

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

