VastPark Stress Test

It’s been a virtual morning. Just participated in the VastPark stress test. VastPark is a nascent virtual worlds platform - according to their material,

VastPark is an end-to-end solution for creating, deploying and distributing virtual experiences on the web. It’s composed of a new breed of applications, designed to make creating these experiences simpler and faster, with a more immersive result. We call this the era of the virtual web.

Powered by open specifications

VastPark is powered by some exciting new specifications that have been developed to fulfill two of the layers in this virtual web; MetaWSS for content distribution and IMML for content presentation

Read more about how VastPark is working to standardise the virtual web.

So I downloaded the alpha browser, and logged in.

The point of view was first person, mouse controls and keyboard controls for moving around. There’s a chat window in the right… felt a bit like one of those VRML type sites. I couldn’t connect using my poor old Toshiba laptop, but my desktop graphics card was up to the task, and connection was achieved in 5 seconds, throwing me in-world. The first world worked fine enough, second one I tried caused it to freeze up (but that may have been because the test ended right about the same time). Now, I realise that this is the alpha build, and that this was a stress test, so one shouldn’t expect too much, yet (I was annoyed the way the browser grabbed my mouse, and wouldn’t let me leave the world pane of the browser. Turns out you have to hit the secret key to get it to release). They’ve already made all of their tools available, even at this early stage, so that’s something to be commended! Check ‘em out, see what you think. Full features list here.

AutoCad into Unreal2

Just had an interesting conversation with Joe Rigby, of MellaniuM Design

He was showing me a plugin that they’ve developed for exporting AutoCad models into the Unreal2 engine, and then scaling the textures back onto the model (usually, one would use something like 3d Studio Max or Maya to import models into Unreal2). From an archaeological point of view, archaeologists have been using AutoCad for years to create reconstructions of sites. To get those models into a world engine usually’d involve all sorts of translations, but if you could import directly from your existing archaeological AutoCad model…. you’d suddenly be able to experience the space that you’ve recreated. A 3d picture is still just a picture. Experiencing the space makes - as it were - a world of difference. Read Diane Favro or Kevin Lynch for a start on the importance of experiencing space.

In the demo Joe showed me, he walked his avatar around several architectural reconstructions (houses, etc), into a large art gallery / museum (pictures on the wall never pixellated, which was nice), and by their reconstruction of the Titanic. All the textures were very photorealistic, at least as good if not better than anything I’ve seen in SL. This being Unreal2, he had to turn off the weapons, etc, but he did show a novel use of the sniper-scope feature, zooming in on the detail of his model. Unreal2 brings people into the world via a peer-to-peer system, so allowing at least 30 odd if not more people to experience the same space at once: certainly enough for that class trip!

Joe’s interested to hear from any archaeologists who’re interested in exploring this technology, perhaps for some joint projects. I’d send him what I had, just to see what would happen, except I don’t have any AutoCad models lying about!

Online learning in SL & RWU

Here’s a short video clip I made mostly to figure out how to do it. It shows a one-on-one tutorial going on inside Second Life, at RWU’s virtual campus. The last section of the film features a field trip to Catal Hoyuk, as reconstructed by the ‘Remixing Catalhoyuk‘ team at Okapi Island. Where else but in Second Life can you begin with a language tutorial, move on to intro to archaeology, and finish up by exploring an ancient settlement, while sitting in your slippers drinking coffee?

Magic (cyber)Carpet Ride

Having spent some time working in and around Pompeii, I can tell you that walking there can be hazardous: uneven stones, dog dirt, stepping stones, tourists stampeding towards the brothel.

Yep. It’s dangerous. But apparently, an ‘omni-directional treadmill’ makes walking in a virtually reconstructed Pompeii feel just like the real thing…

From the BBC:

A stroll around the ancient city of Pompeii will be made possible this week thanks to an omni-directional treadmill developed by European researchers.

The treadmill is a “motion platform” which gives the impression of “natural walking” in any direction.

The platform, called CyberCarpet, is made up of several belts which form an endless plane along two axes.

Scientists have combined the platform with a tracking system and virtual reality software recreating Pompeii.

The key to the CyberCarpet is a platform with a large chain drive.

The chain drive is made up of 25 conventional treadmills which move in one direction, at right angles to the direction the chain is pulling.

The platform gives “walkers” a walking area of 4.5m by 4.5m and moves fast enough to allow jogging at about two metres per second.

Omni-directional treadmills are not new and have been in development for many years, including work done by the US military.

“This is the first omni-directional platform that allows near natural walking,” said Dr Marc Ernst, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Tubingen, Germany.

We are using virtual reality to study human behaviour. Dr Marc Ernst

The belts and the chain work independently so the “walker” can be recentred on the platform if he were to accelerate from a point towards the edge of the platform.

The platform weighs 11 tonnes and a series of 40 kilowatt motors can move a mass of seven tonnes.

“The size of the platform matters,” said Dr Ernst. “If you make it too small you have to counteract each step a person takes. It feels like walking on ice.

“You need some size and from a perceptual point of view the larger the better.”

Dr Ernst said the platform would have to be 100m by 100m if a walker were to have no sensation of being recentred.

“To make it feel natural for walking you cannot go any smaller than six metres by six metres; it’s a question of physics.”

Dr Ernst said walking on the treadmill “feels great”.

“It feels relatively natural. You do feel the acceleration of the belts.

“But you don’t need any harness - we wear them for safety in case someone was to fall. But no-one ever has.”

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute have combined the platform with virtual reality headsets to give the impression of walking or even running around 3D worlds.

The treadmill moves along two axes

The researchers have been working on a tracking system which lets “walkers” dispense with the type of suits used in Hollywood films for motion capture.

The system, which is part of a wider project called CyberWalk, uses cameras which track the position and posture of the individual.

That motion detection in turn controls the velocity of the treadmill and interactions with the virtual world.

The team is working with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ), which has developed a software package for quickly creating large-scale virtual environments in particular cities, in various degrees of detail, called CityEngine.

At a conference in Tubingen this week the teams will show off CyberWalk and the CityEngine being used to let people stroll around ancient Pompeii and Rome.

“Pompeii is a great showcase because it lets you discover a city that no longer exists,” said Dr Ernst.

He added: “We are using virtual reality to study human behaviour. We want to learn how different sensory signals are used by the human brain to generate representation or layout of a location.

“How do you create a mental layout of a town for the first time? We want to learn what information is used but also how you combine it.

“How do different sensory modalities interact?”

The teams believe the technology could be used in gaming, education, architecture and planning, disaster planning and training, as well as medical rehabilitation.

The platform is a result of a collaboration between the Swiss and German institutes, as well as the University of Rome, the Institute of Applied Mechanics and the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, in Munich.

Interactive Fiction, Passively

PMOG:The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

An interesting feature of Pmog ‘missions’ is the way that so many of them are really guided tours of specialty websites (e.g. this one). This is a handy approach if, say, you teach via distance and you want to show your students what constitutes ‘good’ research sites.

Yet, that’s really nothing a powerpoint couldn’t already do. An interesting variant on these missions is the ‘puzzle’ mission, where creators exploit a glitch in the game to create breaks in the flow of the mission. The only way to progress is to solve the riddle to learn what website to go to next - whereupon the mission resumes.  Some of these, like ‘The Mystery Machine‘, require you to read the page to fill in the blanks: each word represents a letter in an ultimate URL. If you’ve got the right letters and you complete the last URL, the resulting webpage represents the ‘Victory!’ screen.  Others are more complex, more devious. My own mission, ‘The Case of the Missing … Something” depends on anagrams of URLs (which is mean, I know). I can’t solve ‘The Lost Gold of Dr. Nes‘, since it depends on a gamer’s knowledge of nintendo, but the principle is good.  ‘Meet Felix Klein‘ takes the player on a tour through various flickr photographs to create a kind of visual story. No puzzle, but it certainly *feels* like an old-style text adventure.

All of these represent a new twist on “interactive fiction”, with the fiction layered on top of the day-to-day internet (perhaps a riff on augment reality, too?).  In a way, they are like the ‘Prisoner Escape from the Tower of London‘ game created by mscape: the fiction intersects with daily life to create the game, with events being triggered by your physical or virtual location in the game space. Unlike regular interactive fiction, the game creator does not control that game space - other people intrude (in Pmog, other players might lay, for reasons unrelated to the mission you happen to be on, mines or portals on pages within a mission, which could -perhaps- prevent you from completing it).

The archaeological angle: simple show and tell of vetted sites is good, for starters. Using Pmog (or other AR) to create layers of information/meaning on top of the information is even better. You could imagine a student creating a pmog mission on curse-tablets. This might begin as simple show and tell. Other students could then play the mission, leaving mines on pages they think are ‘bad’ (poor information, bad research, whatever) or portals to ‘good’ sites… the game records the play, and the meta-analysis afterwards with the prof would spark a deeper discussion. Inserting puzzles into the mission would force a deeper engagement still, and completing a puzzle mission would constitute a formative assessment exercise.  Creating missions could also be exercises in public archaeology for the students,  if built around a decent resource (say the British Museum, or Chaco Canyon).

What I’m arguing for is that we, as educators, need to be using things like Pmog to get our students to engage with online materials in a deeper fashion. They are too often uncritical users of what they find. They need to interact passively.

Omeka plugins: Contribute, Geolocation

So I’ve added the two plugins ‘Contribute’ and ‘Geolocation’ to my Omeka installation. The data that I’m using in this test is from a heritage survey of my local Municipality. One of the things we tried to do during that survey was solicit memories and information from the public. I published notes in the local papers, went to people’s homes, tape-recorded and scribbled notes madly.

Had we had Omeka in 2003, I think the ‘Contribute’ plugin would’ve been exceedingly handy. This municipality’s greatest export over the last 100 years has been its people, so I imagine I would’ve reached far more people with access to a greater range of materials than I ultimately did.

Here’s what it looks like on my test site (and if you happen to have a personal connection to Bristol, Quebec, or some materials about the place, why not submit them now? I’m continually astounded by the heritage of this little place!) The information submitted gets slotted into the proper categories in the archive, and a tab on the admin screen keeps track of all of your contributors and what they’ve coughed up. On the contribution screen itself, a catchpa or similar might be useful - I wonder if it will accumulate spam… Other thing that was somewhat problematic, is that in its original formulation, it asks contributors for their ‘race’. I removed that from the form - in Canada, people’d likely get very touchy over that…

Now, as for the geolocation plugin: This adds a field to the entry of items in the Omeka archive, producing a Google map. If you know the street address of the place you’re interested in, it will grab that from Google Maps, and put a wee map in your entry. You can even search your archive by panning around the map. Handy enough for the back-end, but I have yet to figure out how to get the map into my front-end. I’d like users to be able to click on an item, and have it mapped. I’m sure it’s probably just a matter of embedding something in the theme/stylesheet… thoughts, suggestions? Once I figure that out, I think all of the pieces would be in place to have a British-style ’sites & monuments record’ publicly available. (I did a heritage inventory recently of Gatineau Park: imagine having all of that information available to the public! Currently the NCC has no plans to do so.)

Finally, I’d like to get messing with the themes & stylesheets a bit more. I’d love to convert the wordpress theme “Brandford Magazine” to Omeka (I swear I’ve read somewhere where someone’s done something similar)… but that’s probably a wee bit beyond my abilities. Dare to dream!

Omeka Plugins

Ah! One of the plugins available for Omeka is a geolocation plugin… excellent. I haven’t made much headway on my exploratory omeka installation, other than getting a wee bit of info into it (tempus fugit and all of that). I was initially perplexed how I was going to get all my old GIS/cultural heritage data point-data into it, but this plugin should make life easier. FYI, other plugins are:

The following plugins may be downloaded separately and installed, following information on the codex.

Bilingual Enabler
Makes several of Omeka’s core metadata fields bilingual.

COinS
Adds COinS metadata to item show pages, making them Zotero compatible. Learn more.

Contribution
Allows collecting items from visitors. Learn more.

Dropbox
Allows Omeka users to ‘batch upload’ a large quantity of files at one time, creating unique items in the archive for each file. Learn more.

Geolocation
Adds location info and maps to Omeka. Learn more.

Sitenotes
Administrative users can write notes about the site in an an editable space. Learn more.

TagSuggest
When creating new items, the Tag Suggest plugin offers suggestions of tags based upon their frequency in the item textareas. Learn more.

iPaper
Embed iPaper document viewers into your Omeka item pages. Learn more.

PdfMeNot
Embed PdfMeNot document viewers into your Omeka item pages. Learn more.

Omeka Live… again!

I’ve just successfully installed Omeka on a subdomain of my new site, GRAEworks.net. My intention is to use it to showcase the heritage inventory of the township I live in, Bristol. I carried out the inventory back in 2003, as part of a wider public archaeology programme in conjunction with the local high school. The results have been sitting on my computer ever since, with occasional copies being burned onto cd.

It was without a doubt one of the easiest installations I’ve ever done.

So I’m very excited to see what can be done with Omeka. First impressions: wow. The interface is very sharp. It is reminiscent of WordPress. Using good menus, it’s a cinch to upload materials into an ‘archive’. Then, once they are all documented, you click on the ‘exhibits’ tab to publish it. I don’t know what’s involved with that yet - currently, I’m uploading a recording of one of Bristol’s residents reminiscing about the village back in the 1930s… watch this space.

Well done Omeka team!

Omeka Live!

The Omeka platform has now gone live! And what is Omeka, you may ask? It is a platform for the publication of collections and exhibitions online. Eventually, the makers of Omeka, the Centre for History and New Media, intend to make it available online a la WordPress, but if you’ve got the right system requirements on your server:

• Linux operating system
• Apache server (with mod_rewrite enabled)
• Mysql 5.0 or greater
• PHP 5.2.x or greater
• ImageMagick

… you can download and install it right away. I’m in the process of setting it up on a server that I have access to - it might not work, since I’m not entirely sure what I can do on that server (although it hosted both a Joomla and a WordPress installation well enough, so I’m hopeful). The data that I intend to put up concerns the built heritage of the township that I live in. The archaeological implications are obvious, especially in terms of public archaeology. Imagine that you are working on a project in a city neighbourhood- you could use Omeka to solicit community memories much the way this project is doing. Or you could showcase items in your collection, like the Object of History site. More showcase sites are listed here.

All of these sites have very sharp visuals and aesthetically pleasing themes, and more themes will become available as this project progresses - more info on themes right here.

postscript - woops. Turns out my host doesn’t run Linux, which nuked my ambitions right there. Ah well…

Virtual Excavation Update 5

Turns out that ‘digging’ virtually with the land tools in Second Life is emphatically not a good idea. Things get out of control waaaay too easily. I suddenly had an abyss and a Matterhorn side-by-side in the middle of our plot of land, the bits and pieces of the demolished cabin flying violently about the place… yikes. Throw in a bit of lag and some rendering issues, and I had my own personal Bosch going on.

I tried show-hide scripts, which worked well enough, except I could not then excavate what was underneath, though I could see it. That was because of course the original prim was still in position. D’oh.
What I’m trying to do instead - and it seems to be working well - is to put a ‘fly-away’ script into each prim (representing a single context). When the student touches the context, it repositions itself 10m up in the air, revealing the next context underneath. I place internet-linked objects within the contexts as desired. When the context is ‘excavated’ - touched - the object goes into the student’s inventory. The student needs to rename the objects appropriately - cataloging them - so as not to lose them in the inventory. They can then rez the objects to examine them, which opens up a browser window to the Open Context archive. Next thing to think about is the interface with Nabonidus, whether to try to bring it in-world or let the students lose in their own browsers.

Note also my prototype contexts are just wee boxes as of yet. They’ll get better, promise. I suppose I could combine the show/hide with the fly-away, but then I’d have a devil of a time finding them again to reset for the next student.

Picture below shows the current state of affairs. For reasons I cannot fathom, the regular Second Life client is not loading info from the website, but the OnRez viewer works great. Go figure.