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!

RWU: first in the world!

Robert Welch University got an excellent mention in a recent article in The Classical Journal.

From  Andrew Reinhard, “From Slate to Tablet PC: Using New Technologies to Teach and Learn Latin and Greek”, CJ Forum Online 2008.03.03:

[...snip...!]Robert Welch University is the first school in the world to offer
an on-line major in Classics featuring courses that include regular
journeys into Second Life to an eLearning island called EduNation.
The school has rented space for teaching Latin here, giving students
from around the world a place to play and interact within the
constructs of the language. Other schools such as the University of
Central Missouri have been using Second Life for language
education for over a year, but Robert Welch University is the first to
offer anything Classics-related.[...]

I had thought that maybe we were the first, so it’s nice to have independent verification! Andrew then goes on to survey current trends in Classical teaching online, and comes to the conclusion:

I challenge Classics teachers to find their way to new technology
and play with it. 100% book-learning is dead.

You said it, brother.

The Year of the Four Emperors mod for Civ IV

This little video records some of the game play in ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’ mod for Civ IV that I’ve used from time to time in my teaching. Things to watch for - the opening shows how to load the mod and get it running; ‘research’ can’t be turned off in the game, but you can make it impossible to carry out (’gunpowder’ for some reason is on the list- but it’ll take ca 2600 turns to do it, by which time the game has ended); the senate takes a vote on declaring one of the contenders Emperor; towns and military units are more or less in their correct historic positions.

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.

PMOGing Internet Research Skills…

PMOG: the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. This is a game you play while browsing the internet, going about your daily internet related tasks… think webquest with mines, treasure chests, and quests.

You play the game by adding an extension to your Firefox browser. This browser lets you ’sense’ the game world, the activities overlaid on the plain old mundane net. Then, in the words of the game’s creators:

“This unconventional massively multiplayer online game merges your web life with an alternate, hidden reality. The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement. Player behavior generates characters and alliances, triggers interactions in the environment and earns the player points to spend online beefing up their inventory. Suddenly the Internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but rather a hackable, rewarding environment!”

What does this entail? Again, from the PMOG site:

Prank Your Friends Across the Web< Using Mines that steal Datapoints	Leave Gifts on Web Sites Using Crates to hold Tools or currency
Make or Follow Paths Online Missions!	Develop a Rich User Profile Passively, just by surfing the web.

So what does this have to do with internet research skills? Well, it occurred to me that I can tell my students over and over again what constitutes a ‘good’ site versus a ‘bad’ site, but if I’m not there watching them, it never sinks in. Given that a lot of my teaching is done via distance, this is a problem.

But what if, as a class, we were all PMOGing? I could imagining setting a question the students would need to research in order to write an answer - maybe leaving their responses on a wiki somewhere - and then sending them out into the net with PMOGed enabled browsers. The game’s stats would instantly record how much work online the students were putting in, and if I set mines on all of the lousy sites I can find - the ones they typically go to, like the wikipedia page on Julius Caesar - and treasure chests on the good ones (like say a page from the British School at Rome, or from an online journal) they’d soon learn the difference. I could also set up quests that would take them to a number of good sites, or sites with opposing points of view, and require them to go to pages supporting or contesting the views… and of course, students could leave their own mines and treasures, and so hindering/helping their peers…

It would be quite neat, actually. Almost like laser tag in the library, capturing-the-flag…

Forum Novum Scenario available

I’ve worked out the kinks, and the Forum Novum Scenario for Caesar IV is available here.

SLED Events - Places to go to see education in action in Second Life

A calendar of educational events (everything from courses to conferences) taking place in Second Life is available at http://sledevents.blogspot.com

I note with interest a six week course on using SL for education begins tomorrow Feb 28…

Forum Novum: a market in the Sabine Hills - scenario for Caesar IV

This is my first attempt at a scenario for Caesar IV. It is based, loosely, on the site of Forum Novum in the Sabine Hills north of Rome. What I have always found fascinating about this site is the way it didn’t develop into what we would recognise as a ‘town’, per se.

A student playing this scenario as part of a class on Roman urbanism would try to reach the ‘winning conditions’, but would be encouraged to look at the underlying assumptions the game makes about social, civil, economic, and religious life. Specifically, by using the game as a kind of Roman socio-economics simulation engine, the student is forced through game play to confront the Roman economy…

It’s late right now, so I’ll write more about how the game would be used in a class, and what playing it might teach. In the meanwhile, you can download the scenario here into your ‘data’ -> ’scenarios’ folder for Caesar IV. No doubt there are bugs and other problems that need to be worked out, so let me know how you get on…

(by the way - the game puts an ‘apron’ around the scenario for aesthetics… but the one I chose doesn’t really fit, as you can see when you follow the Aia river by the town towards the edges… the painting tool in the scenario editor is absolutely abysmal!)

• postscript: I discovered that my scenario had a bug in it that caused catastrophic crashing of the game. So I’m rejigging it, and I’ve posted over at Titled Mill Forums asking for help… which I duly received. The ‘production version’ is available here, as will be any future updates.