one month?

I cannot believe it's been a whole month since my last post! But I have a good excuse, my M.Sc. dissertation is due in one week so I have been working like a mad thing on it. I will start posting again after that, hopefully from mid next week on. I will write a post about my dissertation so till then, if you feel very curious about it, you can have a peek here.

The Virtual Worlds research Group

A talk about a piece of research dealing with virtual worlds or maybe a hands-on workshop is organised every Monday at 2pm(SLT) by the VWRG. Check the meeting schedule page for more info on every week 's meeting, or if you want to be punctually reminded you could join this facebook group.

There are a few other research meetings in SL but to be honest I have never attended one. Being in Europe makes it a bit difficult to attend if we are talking about American or Australian times. I have also joined recently the SL Education rountable group. Their meetings are on at 2.30pm(SLT). It looks interesting and if I'm not working on my project this Tuesday I might go. Let's see if I can make it, I would love to!

--- update:
The schedule is also replicated in the social presence wiki managed by Willow Shenlin.

The Sloodle Project

One of my favourite things about virtual worlds is the ability to integrate other applications and communicate with the external web.

One of the nicest applications that I have used so far is sloodle also known as the simulation linked object oriented dynamic learning environment. This is an open source system that allows you to communicate with an external moodle application, a course management system also open source.

The sloodle team have been working in the SL grid for a long time but in the last month they've been porting it to work with opensim. They have been busy with the port and packaging but I cannot wait to test it!

They also have other nice projects as the sloodle browser.

If you need an intro to sloodle, there is an introductory class every tuesday at 1.30pm U.S. Pacific time in the sloodle clasroom.

Virtual Worlds : Best Practices in Education -- Conference

Just a quick note to remind you that the conference starts today and it will be running till Saturday in different virtual locations. Schedule here. If anyone wants to attend but needs orientation, just give me a shout. I'll be glad to help!

The OpenSim Project

OpenSim is an open source server implementation of a virtual world quite similar to Second Life but with many differences. It is a lot more extensible and can be run standalone or connected to a grid, being a grid a bunch of servers all connected together so that the land they host can be accessible from each other.

There are a number of grids running OpenSim code, some of them are commercial and some are not. In OSGrid, for instance, you can connect your server to their grid and it will be available straight away. You will need to set up your server properly and it is not an easy task if you don't have the needed skils. For this reason a number of grids are offering this service for you. Depending on how much you want to spend, you can have as much virtual land as you want in grids like Openlife, Avatar Hangout or ReactionGrid, the latter one being a fairly new proposal(at least for me) that seems to be focused on Education and Business.

I discovered ReactionGrid the other night through the Sloode development team as they are working on a port of their fantastic project to OpenSim. I personally cannot wait to test it! Hope to have time to do it very soon. Another cool bit about this grid is that they have some kind of integration with Skype. I haven't had time to test it yet but this is quite interesting for me as we have been working in the same functionality for a while in our current project.

I am currently hosting a region in OSGrid called Galicia. Feel free to call by and say hello!

SLACTIONS 09

The second call for papers for SLACTIONS is about to close, 31st of March is the deadline so this is your last opportunity to get your papers in. Go! now!! get it ready!!!

First Post and counting...

Hi there!

Josmas Flores here, starting this simple virtual life blog where I will try to relate my experiences in Virtual Worlds.

I have loads of ideas and been thinking about starting this trip for a long while but I think now it's just the perfect time. You will find here stories about my research work and also links to other posts and videos of all kinds of interesting stuff I find on the net.

My main subject of research is Gaming and Virtual Worlds in Education but I will talk about that in another post.

Feel free to leave any comments!