Web3D Exchange Project
In June 2007, CDDU partnered with a team at USQ to receive a Carrick Institute grant for a project titled "The seamless integration of Web3D technologies with university curricula to engage the changing student cohort".
What that means is that we're trying to figure out how CQU teaching staff can make use of immersive 3D environments (like Second Life and many others) to effectively improve the learning experience of CQU students. This is going to be done by actively helping a small group of volunteers do this.
The Web3Dx project site contains more information about the project. The technology being used in the project is described in more detail in de Byl and Taylor (2007).
On November 2 CDDU staff gave a presentation (slides including audio) about the project and how it might run.
The aim of the presentation is to identify those CQU academics who are keen to integrate some aspect of immersive 3D environments into their learning and teaching in 2008.
Current Status
April 1, 2008. The CQU Learning island in Second Life is now open to public access. It has been for a few days. There's nothing all that exciting there but am hoping that things may grow.
Late Jan, 2008. Work has begun on the machinima project for the course ACCT19064 - Auditing & Professional Practice. As an overview, CDDU in conjunction with Jenny Kofoed are using the CQU Second Life Island to act out a case study on professional ethics. The students instead of reading the case from the text and answering the questions, will follow the animation while completing exercises as they go. It is hoped that this approach will be much more engaging for students and immersive - having students think as an auditor by observing one struggling with an ethical dilemma. What should the auditor do? Visit the ACCT19064 Machinima Project page which documents the goings on in this project.
Late Jan, 2008. This web page gives an overview of the early status of the CQU Learning island in Second Life. If you are a CQU staff member and would like to visit the island follow these instructions.
January, 2008. The CQU Learning island has been created by the folk at Second Life. We're still in the process of getting it ready, it's currently a bare island. This means that most folk won't be able to access the island. We're hoping this will change by the close of January, and hopefully a lot earlier. We are also starting to discuss Ideas for the CQU Learning island.
December, 2007. A group of about 20 CQU academic staff have joined a mailing list. This mailing list is being used for some general discussions about possibilities and aims. Visit the mailing list web page for information on how to join the list.
We have purchased an Island in Second Life for use in Learning and Teaching. Darren de Warren from Noosa is going to be using the island for his CQU L&T grant project titled: "Second Life and Social Work: Student evaluations and comparisons of collaborative learning using multiple-user virtual environments and Blackboard.". Jenny Kofoed from Mackay (with some assistance from DTLS) will be using the island to create some machinima that will be used to add some "colour" to case studies.
Resources
We have a small, but hopefully growing, collection of resources. Most are hosted on this website, which is a Wiki which means you can add your input to any of these pages.
The current resources include:
Other Discussion
Participants in the Carrick project are using blogs and forums to discuss various aspects of the project. The following provides a representation of the various RSS feeds from those forums.
Discussion forum
Ideas for Web3D Exemplars
Posted by on 24 August 2007
From what you have seen on Web3D thus far and the work being done in the ALIVE project [1] what ideas do you have for integrating 3D into your e-Learning?
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Main project blog
Where have I been all this time?
Posted by on 27 September 2007
I had good intentions of posting sooner, much sooner, but wanted to have something to say. That meant doing at least some preliminary exploration of the Web3D space, especially the AliveX3D site.
Unfortunately, exploring the AliveX3D site is easier said than done for a Mac user. Viewing AliveX3D material requires the Flux Player and there is no Mac version available. Never mind, I thought, my Intel iMac (Core 2 Duo and Radeon X1600) has Parallels 3 and Vista installed. that should handle it, no worries.
Nup. I was able to load and install the Flux Player but it choked when I tried to run it. Back to the drawing board. download and install BootCamp. Install Vista in that. Try to integrate that installation with Parallels. Hit the MS windows activation wall. Finally get Vista running in BootCamp but not in Parallels. Yes. Flux Player runs and I can access AliveX3D materials. That proves it works but who would want to run Windows, even Vista which is a bit easier to look at than XP, as the only OS when the alternative is MacOS. That solution would work if I got desperate but I'm not fussed on rebooting into Windows if I can avoid it.
<img src="http://web3dx.usq.edu.au/wiki/tiki-view_blog_post_image.php?imgId=1" border="0" alt="screenshot of Mac running AliveX3D content using Parallels" align="right" width="420" height="263" vspace="2" />Sometime after that there was an update to Parallels. I installed that and, behold, Flux Player worked in the updated Parallels - in either Vista or XP (on my MacBook Pro). Remove the BootCamp partition (why waste drive space on something so ugly?) and now I'm able to run IE, complete with Flux Player content, in a window on my OS X desktop without losing any of the essential amenities such as iTunes.
Yep. It works on my Macs. It's not ideal because I still have to run it in Windows but at least I don't have to live in Windows to tinker with AliveX3D. Now that I've solved that one it's time to explore the workings of the editors and see how creative I can be.
Web3D Technical Dilemma's
Posted by on 12 September 2007
If only real life in 3D graphics programming were simple. Some graphics code is software processed which depends on the operating system and some on the graphics card. I've had OpenGL programs that have worked fine on one laptop and not another (both with windows). And having the source (which is highly complex) does not mean that it can be compiled on one platform and then transfered and compiled on another. These games engines have literally millions of lines of code and its not a matter of just getting the code and recompiling.
And then there is the matter of creating a web browser plugin to support the Web3D standards. Currently we have not been able to find any open source and/or free ones that are cross platform. We started working on our own OpenGL one last year, but browser plugin code is very complex and there is very little support in the wider community for creating your own plugin. We had limited success but with such a small team it is not practical.
The software we are currently working with, DXStudio, is built ontop DirectX and uses DirectX graphics protocols. Its turned out to be a great little piece of software and produces some really nice 3D outputs which can be embedded into most things Microsoft. It also has come with networking code which has allowed us to easily create multiuser environments. While there has been limited success running it in Parallels or VMWare on the Intel Mac, these systems are not mature enough nor have the correct graphics drivers to support this. I hope that one day this will change.
DXStudio is not open source, but its 3D file formats are. Even if it was open source I would estimate about 2-3 years effort from our team to convert the DirectX graphics to OpenGL and get it onto the Mac platform. I've spoken with the DXStudio guys and we've discovered ways that it might be ported to the Mac, but the ALIVE team can't do this as we would have to pay $50,000K for the source.
The UNITY software we just got for the Mac looks great (from the short amount of time we've spent on it). The problem then with using this is that although it produces output for both Mac and Windows, the development editor is exclusively Mac based and it doesn't seem to include networking modules as DXStudio does.
So while 3D standards and applications are "kind-of" heading towards being truly cross platform, its a while off yet, and should not currently be our focus.
The ALIVE team have spent the best part of a year switching between differing game engines to find the right balance between features and if we've learned anything. No one product meets all our needs and unfortunately mixing such products is not practical. Another thing we've found is that 3D applications on the Mac platform are really POORLY supported. There are few games engines and other 3D tools that can help us do our job. I find this quite ironic as my first memories of how great Macs were, were the cool graphics tools for producing images, animations and videos.
So its a dilemma from my position as project manager as to where the emphasis of the development team should lie. As this project is about producing exemplars, we should move forward with this with the tools that are working for us and the majority of our clients. All the while keeping an eye on the cross platform scene and hoping that some of the companies we have been working with get the message.
Otherwise we will just continue chasing our tails in the never ending platform support issue.
The real location for blog posts on the Web3D project
Posted by on 30 August 2007
G'day,
I'll be using my personal blog to post reflections and ideas around the Web3D project.
The blog posts associated with the project are
<a href="http://cq-pan.cqu.edu.au/david-jones/blog/?cat=23">tagged with web3dx </a>
David.
Carrick Project Management Workshop
Posted by on 22 August 2007
On the 20th-21st of August I attended a Carrick Institute Project Management event in Adelaide. It was great to meet people from around the country who are also involved in Carrick Grant projects and some who have had their project underway for over a year and some who have just started.
The workshop was more about sharing challenges, learnings and successes in each of the projects rather than about the theory of project management.
A number of challenges were common across the differing projects. These included:
- project outcomes changing due to:
</li></ul>- research revealing different issues and directions as to those first identified in the project.</tt>
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- partnering institutions having differing conceptualisations of what the initial project proposal goals were</tt>
- communication difficulties between project team members (finding an appropriate time, bridging geographical distances etc, shared knowledge)
- adoption of project outcomes (technologies/methodologies) institution wide and getting buy-in from university executives
- future proofing technological outcomes
- lack of technical understanding in project team
- developing evaluation plans
- management of time poor academics with conflicting and teaching heavy workloads
- getting ethics approvals across institutions and within acceptable timeframes
- ownership/authorship of research outcomes/papers etc.
These certainly sound like issues we are/will be encountering. To counteract some of these and other ideas I heard and liked I would suggest for our project:
- Use the Eluminate facilities hosted by the Carrick Exchange to communicate regularly between USQ, CQU and Reference Group Members.
- Create a "Rules of Engagement" for the project team outlining meeting times, authorship protocols and responsibilities.
- As above but for the teachers involved in creating the exemplars.
- Create an identity for the project group and participants via the Web3d Exchange and having a community website and logo (which we have at <a href="http://www.web3dexchange.org">http://www.web3dexchange.org</a>
- Build in the independant evaluation right from the start (not sure how to do this)
- Get buy-in from the Executives at the universities (e.g. Jim Taylor has already included the ALIVE team in the Learning Futures Institute)
- Create a "Memo of Shared Knowledge" which describes the project and the goals (might include FAQs) for the project team, volunteers, students and wider community.
Watch this space for more concrete actions on these.
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