Virtual Worlds III has Craig Reynolds and Ken Perlin lined up for keynotes (two incredibly influential academics, Reynolds work on ‘boids has had a huge influence on agent based AI in games, and Perlin’s impact in graphics has been immense).

No keynotes announced yet for VS Games, but is supported by the EU FP7 GALA network of excellence, so will be guaranteed to bring along many of Europe’s top games and learning researchers.

Sarah identifies many of the reasons why VW have slid in popularity and hype. I think learning technologies (and the people interested in them) are still prone to hype and despondence -  augmented reality and gamification to name two of the more recent hype cycles. As the dust settles, there will still be people using VW in education – though unlikely as widely as the hype was leading us to believe.

Sarah’s article does a very good job of explaining some of the key reasons why the recent Second Life centric wave of hype burst – as virtual worlds re-emerge it will presumably be with less wild enthusiasm and a more pragmatic and realistic basis.

Get your SuperNews here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2080114/ARVEL%20SuperNews%20Fall%202011.pdf

http://www.virtual-worlds.net/vw2012/

Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to announce and call for papers for the Third International Conference on Virtual Worlds (VW’2012) which will be held from July 3 to 5, 2012 in Paris (La Défense).

Background

A Virtual World can be defined as a computer-simulated environment with its own physical and biological laws, populated by dynamic interacting entities such as artificial creatures and human avatars. Whereas Virtual Reality largely focuses on the design of 3D immersive spaces, and Artificial Life on the modeling and study of life-like systems, Virtual Worlds embrace both dimensions by synthesizing an entire digital universe. Their design and realization requires competency in various fields from Virtual Reality and Physics to Artificial Life and Ecology, Computer Graphics, High Performance Computing, and more.

Virtual Worlds have many applications in 3D simulation, computer games and online business. However, the approach is still broader and more fundamental. It also addresses the crucial problem of elucidating the constitutive principles by which large numbers of interacting elements can self-organize and produce emergent phenomena as they are observed in the natural world. Therefore the study of Virtual Worlds is particularly concerned with the formal basis of synthetic universes and offers a promising new way to contribute to the understanding of Nature and of complex systems in general.

Subjects

Topics of interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:

Virtual World applications

-           Video games and entertainment

-           Educational, medical and business solutions

-           Virtual economies

-           Social and philosophical implications

-           Virtual Worlds and Ecology

Virtual World technologies

-           High performance and low latency solutions

Virtual and Augmented Reality

-           “Avatarization”

-           Human-machine interfaces

Virtual World fundamentals

-           Artificial physics and chemistries

-           Complex systems, emergence, self-organization

Artificial Life

-           Artificial life and ecosystems

-           Evolution, co-evolution and adaptation

-           Collective intelligence, cooperation, communication

Artificial creatures

-           Avatars

-           Virtual creatures

-           Intelligent agents

-           Conversational agents

Submissions

The Program Committee of VW’2012 is looking forward to high quality papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research.

Full papers may be submitted electronically from 16 October 2011 to 16 January 2012 via the conference website.

All submitted work will be assigned for double blind peer review. Authors of accepted papers will be asked to register to the conference and present their work.

Papers must be submitted in LNCS format and be up to 10 pages in length including abstract, figures and references. Formatting instructions are available at :  http://www.springer.com/lncs

Short papers (4 pages including abstract, figures and references) can also be submitted and selected ones will be presented as posters during demos session.

Artistic and technical demos are also welcome and can be submitted by contacting alainlioret@gmail.com before 12 December 2011.

Final demos has to be set up before 05 May 2012.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline:               16 January 2012

Notification of acceptance :                05 March 2012

Early registration before :                   15 March 2012

Final paper deadline:                          05 April 2012

Conference days :                              03 July to 05 July 2012

Demos and Posters

Short Paper submission deadline:     16 January 2012

Notification of acceptance :                05 March 2012

Early registration before :                   15 March 2012

Final poster and demo deadline:        05 April 2012

We look forward to welcoming you at the conference!

Steering Committee

- Alain Lioret,  Université Paris 8 (Chairman)

Contact : alainlioret@gmail.com

- Jean-Claude Heudin , Institut International du Multimédia (Co-chairman)

Contact : jean-claude.heudin@devinci.fr

- Stefan Bornhofen, EISTI (Co-chairman)

Contact : sb@eisti.fr

- Jean-Claude Torrel, Institut International du Multimédia (Co-chairman)

Contact : jean-claude.torrel@devinci.fr

Provisional Program Committee

Bruce Damer, DigitalSpace, USA

Jeffrey Ventrella, CDM, Vancouver, Canada

Sébastien Barot, Bioemco,  France

Evelyne Lutton, INRIA, France

Emmanuel Cayla, ESTP, France

Kevin Korb, Monash, Australia

Marc Métivier, Univ. Paris Descartes, France

Tom Barbalet, BIOTA, USA

Frederic Fol Leymarie , University of London, GB

Pierre Berger, Paris ACM Siggraph, France

Penousal Machado, University of Coimbra, Portugal

Jon Mc Cormack, Monash, Australia

Maciej Komosinski, Poznan University, Poland

Mathew Lewis, Ohio State University, USA

Robyn Taylor, Alberta, Canada

Simon Richir, Ensam Angers, France

Marc Ebner, Univ. Tübingen, Germany

Gerald de Jong, Darwin @Home, USA

Joseph Nechvatal,  BIOTA, France

Alan Dorin, Monash, Australia

Daniel Thalmann, EPFL, Suisse

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Miralab, Suisse

Tatsuo Unemi, Tokyo, Japan

Leonel Moura, Portugal

Joseph Nechvatal, School of Visual Arts, USA

**Please Twit, share, post, or 1+ the following to help me promote virtual world language learning. Thank you so much! On with the show!**

I will be presenting at a fairly major international online conference next week and thought I would pass on this information to you. Many of you are aware I have been researching ways to use virtual worlds like Second Life for language learning. In the past few years I have grown my community, Cypris Chat (http://cyprischat.org), to over 500 active members from more than 40 countries. The conference I will be presenting at is focused on global awareness and education. I think it will be very exciting to show how a community like Cypris Chat has brought the world together with one main goal in mind, to learn or teach English. I hope this presentation will help promote this fantastic medium for educating students.

WHEN: Tuesday, November 15^th from 10:00pm to 11:00pm JST – 1:00pm – 2:00pm GMT

WHERE: Blackboard Collaborate link will be provided here on the 15^th: http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/globaledcon11-schedule-gmt-9-1 Please find my presentation in your time zone (Cypris Chat) I will be on Facebook during the presentation. Cypris Chat members can help you on our Facebook group page and chat channel here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/58820483559/

CONFERENCE INFORMATION

The 2011 Global Education Conference will be held November 14 – 18, online and free. Sessions will take place in multiple time zones and multiple languages over the five days. The 2010 Global Education Conference had 15,028 unique logins and presentations from 62 countries.

To be kept informed of the latest conference news and updates, please join this network. The sessions schedule is now live and available in multiple time zones HERE.

http://globaleducation.ning.com (Notice the featured discussions. Mine is featured…wow)

Over 5,000 registered attendees. Hundreds of presenters over five days. 19 keynote speakers.

The conference sessions are being held in Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate), and can be accessed live from any personal computer. (All sessions will also be recorded and posted quickly after the conference.) All sessions are free to attend, and the links to the sessions will go live in the schedule when the conference starts.

To check that your computer is ready for Blackboard Collaborate, please click here. “Step 1″ will indicate if you have a version of Java that is compatible, and then “Step 2″ lets you actually go into a test session. We encourage you to do this in advance of the conference. If you have any difficulties, you can ask for help in the WeCollaborate.com user community.

MY (rough) PRESENTATION PROPOSAL

Session Title: Cypris Chat – Virtual World English Learning Community in Second Life

Session Strand (use the “tag”): 2011Teachers

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Your Name and Title: Mike McKay / Professor Merryman – Adjunct English Professor

Your Library, School, or Organization Name: Mukogawa Women’s University

Name(s) of Co-Presenter(s):

Session Description: Cypris Chat is a not-for-profit English learning community based in the virtual world of Second Life (http://secondlife.com). Visit my YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/SLmerryman) to see videos which describe the community in detail. We have over 500 active members from more than 40 countries. The purpose of our community is to show how virtual worlds can make language learning immersive and real. We provide an environment which is friendly, safe, anonymous and interactive making it the perfect environment for experimenting with the language. Friendships and relationships have developed that will last a lifetime which shows that such a concept changes lives. This community certainly proves that global communication can be helped through the use of technology. Come learn more about what we do and why we do it.

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Japan

Your Bio: Mike McKay (aka Professor Merryman) is an adjunct professor of English at Mukogawa Women’s university in Nishinomiya, Japan. He is an American expat and holds a Master of Education with an emphasis in Technology. His research is focused on providing his students with more realistic opportunities for learning and practicing English. Technology has proven to be the best medium for him based on the fact that living in another English speaking country is simply not feasible. He hopes to bring the world to Japan and provide learners of all ages, young and old, with a place to learn, explore, live and enjoy in English. The results of his research could be applied to all languages. His presentation is meant to share his experiences and what one could do to begin learning about this wonderful teaching medium.

Link to GlobalEdCon11 Session Proposal (full URL with http://): http://globaleducation.ning.com/forum/topics/cypris-chat-virtual-world-english-learning-community-in-second

Target Audience: Educators, Educational Technologists, Teachers, Parents, Secondary+ Students, Language Learners

This time round the snapshot will cover Ireland as well as the UK. The main body of the snapshot will be based on self-reported activity, so get working on your submissions and send them to John before the November 14th deadline.

More info here. Prize for the wittiest contribution, apparently.

The important dates are:

• Paper submission: 30th September 2011
• Notification of acceptance: 14th October 2011
• Final paper submission: 28th October 2011
• Summit: 28th-29th November 2011

Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Blended/Hybrid learning
• Personalised learning
• Intelligent agents in learning
• Edutainment & Game-Based Learning
• Location-based and contextual learning
• Immersive Educational technology markets & challenges
• Virtual and mixed-reality for education
• Educational software/hardware
• Intelligent classroom
• Virtual laboratories and tools
• Pedagogy for the Internet Age
• Innovations in the teaching laboratory
• Student assessment in high-tech teaching environments
• Cultural dimensions of educational technology
• Educational technology innovations
• Social/Collaborative learning
• Smart educational environment
• Teaching strategies to maximise benefits of emerging technology
• Future research issues for Immersive Education

More details on the call for papers page.

Researching Learning in Immersive Virtual Environments 2011 (ReLIVE11)

Creative Solutions for New Futures, 21^st – 22^nd September 2011, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Reduced Fee! New Deadline!

In response to feedback from the enthusiastic but underfunded community, we have worked to reduce the conference fee, enabling more opportunities for attendance in a period when budgets for conferences are constrained. Although we are no longer providing a formal conference dinner and entertainment, we anticipate that this will provide more focus for academic collaboration and networking. This has enabled us to reduce the fee to £285 for early birds and £340 for later registrations. Consequently we are offering a new deadline for abstract submissions, and will be accepting these up to and including the 3rd of July.

We are pleased to remind you that there will be Best Paper awards at the conference, to the value of £300 in Springer books, sponsored by Springer. Publication opportunities include an ISBN registered conference proceedings (note that the ReLIVE08 Conference Proceedings are still regularly downloaded from the archive conference site), and an edited book of chapters developed from the top paper submissions, published in the new Springer Immersive Environments series (to be launched at the conference).

As a delegate to ReLIVE11 you will meet with other leading edge researchers from around the world to exchange ideas and scholarship. With an opening keynote from Robin Wight, founder of The Ideas Foundation and a creative legend in advertising, we challenge the community to think creatively and to look for opportunities to collaborate and innovate. The invited panel speakers from within and without academia bring a range of interesting perspectives and expertise to our discussions and we anticipate a showcase of papers and workshops that reflect the best of current academic research, making ReLIVE11 your one stop conference this year for disseminating, sharing and stimulating your practice in virtual worlds.

We are now seeking proposals for papers, workshops, symposia, posters and inworld events that demonstrate innovation within the themes of Concepts, Methods, and Implementations (In collaboration with JISC CETIS).

ReLIVE Virtual Festival, 20^th September 2011 We are also pleased to offer a ReLIVE Virtual Festival. This will take place within Second Life and/or other immersive environments, and we invite innovative proposals for activities (see ‘Call for Papers’ section on the ReLIVE11 website for more details), particularly from and for those who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference. Registration for this one-day event will be free, but places are limited.

The Virtual World Conference, 14^th September 2011 ReLIVE11 is linked to The Virtual World Conference, a 24 hour conference of invited speakers taking place within Second Life on the 14th of September. Please see www.thevirtualworldconference.org for more details.

Please visit our website for full details www.open.ac.uk/relive11

Best wishes

ReLIVE11 Conference Team

MOSES is the US military OpenSim virtual world. Apparently this was started after Linden Lab removed support for the Second Life Enterprise software for behind the firewall solutions. There seems to be a sizeable grid there already.

Aurora Sim is a recent fork of OpenSim, from the people behind the Imprudence line of Second Life/Open Sim viewers. Aurora claims better LSL support and better physics than regular OpenSim, amongst a wide range of other modifications large and small. More details here. Add-ons such as the Web-UI front-end are also available.

Going back a fair while (showing just how much my inbox was in need of a good clear out!), I found a link to a paper on Experiential Learning in Multi-User Virtual Environments by Baba Weusijana and colleagues, published in the now-defunct Innovate Online:

Multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs) like Second Life present unparalleled opportunities to help students connect knowledge by description to knowledge by experience; in a MUVE, students can experience phenomena rather than only reading about them. Baba Kofi Weusijana, Vanessa Svihla, Drue Gawel, and John Bransford describe their use of a maze constructed in Second Life to help students experience firsthand the phenomena described in their educational psychology course. Their use of Second Life is particularly notable in its use of MUVE-based movies and other strategies to leverage Second
Life’s interactive powers for exploration despite restricted access to technology. The examples they present can hopefully lead to new designs and uses of virtual environments that allow students to experience relevant phenomena and enable researchers to conduct additional experiments of virtual, experience-rich additions to traditional ways to teach and learn.

Stephanie Cobb and colleagues report on “The Learning Gains and Student Perceptions of a Second Life Virtual Lab” in Bioscience Education, published by the Higher Education Academy (UK):

The SL practical was well received by students, with 92% of participants reporting that they would like to use the system again and many requesting other experiments to be made available in this manner in the future.

More miscellany to follow, as I continue the great email clear-out (down from 800+ un-read emails in my inbox, plus hundreds of read mail, to under 100 emails in my inbox, total. Of course, this is just one of my email accounts I’m dealing with…)

At the recent Game2Learn event in Dundee, I spoke about ways of reducing the costs of developing new learning games and/or virtual worlds. One of the key ways to reduce costs is to use free stuff – of which there is a lot out there. Many of these resources are also useful for students learning game development.

Before using any resource be sure to check the license and conditions for use – some resources allow reuse for any purpose, others are only for non-commercial use.

3D Models

If you are developing your own game or using Unity, then chances are that you can import models that are available in the popular Collada format (and with mesh import this should also come to Second Life/OpenSim before too long).

Google’s 3D Warehouse is home to thousands of static 3D models – particularly strong on models of notable buildings, due to the links between Google Sketchup, the 3D warehouse and Google Earth, but interiors, objects and vehicles can all be found.

An interesting new resource (especially if you want military type models, or models of things you might find in or around army bases) is the ADL 3D Repository. You’ll also find a lot of regular household items (chandeliers and bidets!) alongside the weaponry and vehicles, plus models of US soldiers and Afghan civilians.

More commercially oriented sites like TurboSquid are marketplaces for the buying and selling of 3D models – prices vary dramatically but there is a lot of low cost and free content to be found, and the quality is sometimes of a very professional standard.

2D Textures and Images

You can search Flickr for Creative Commons licensed photos, but the photos are not normally very good for use as textures. Wikimedia Commons is another good source of photos, but few are ideal for use as textures.

In comparison, CGTextures specialises in textures that can be used in game development – and has thousands on offer. Free for commercial or non-commercial use. The only use that is explicitly not allowed is in creating your own texture packs (e.g. you can use some of these textures to build something in Second Life that you will sell commercially, but you are not allowed to create an in-world texture pack to sell or give away)

HasGraphics links to a small but quite high-quality range of sprites, tilesets and other 2D graphics resources, while Moosader has posted a range of her own creations under public-domain license at OpenArt.

Keith Ditchburn has collected more links for 2D textures and 3D models over at Toymaker. You can also always do a search for images licensed for reuse at Flick or on Google.

Music and Sound Effects

Freesound is home to a huge number of Creative Commons licensed sound effects, while ccMixter homes similarly licensed music samples, loops and mixes. Also check the Free Music Archive and the Creative Commons audio blog.

Back at OpenArt, Moosader has collected (and produced some of) a small range of retro-styled music files suitable for games.

OpenSim and Second Life Specific

There are two OpenSim specific archive formats – OAR and IAR. OAR files archive complete regions – including terrain and all objects including textures, scripts, sounds and more. IAR files archive users’ inventory – again including all data required to fully restore the items (scripts, sounds, etc.).

A third archive option (for which I’ve been unable to find a specific name) is the xml format used when backing up objects from Second Life or OpenSim using the export option in Imprudence and other 3rd party client software. (See discussion e.g. here). While most online discussion of this format is based on how to transfer your own objects, it also provides another way to share OpenSim/Second Life objects.

OAR files

Four sources for OpenSim Archives (OAR files, Hypergrid Business)

OpenSim Creations (OAR files, IAR files, XML objects, terrains files, textures. Includes many NSFW)

OpenSim Terrains – Flickr Set

OSAvatars – Avatar textures, parts and clothing