Simulating History Research Lab

The Simulating History project folks at Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, with whom I do my games-based research,  have released a nice little video about the Lab:

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!

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.

Digital Digging, a new version of Google Earth, and Mycosm

A new version of Google Earth is out, featuring:

Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world

Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature

Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level

Henry points me to Digital Digging, where they’ve got some fantastic sketch-up models of archaeological sites imported into Google earth. They’ve got a great site going on, with lots of material on one of the most famous of counties (at least archaeologically-wise!) in England - Wiltshire. The movie below is a reconstruction of the sanctuary at Avebury:

A site (both web & archaeological) well worth exploring!

On a related note, a new virtual world called ‘Mycosm‘ promises to allow users to import Sketchup models to make the world their own. If that works well, it’ll be a jump on Second Life… I’ve never had a more frustrating time than trying to make things in SL!

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.

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.

SL_Archaeology (or, the virtual excavation update 4)

I recently posted a query on the Second Life Educator’s list explaining what I was up to, and, in the interests of not reinventing the wheel, whether anything similar has been done. I received a number of notes from people with suggestions of approaches to try, and examples of other archaeologically-themed sims, chief amongst them Okapi Island (read about opportunities for apprenticeships here!) and Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Crimson Island. Thank you so much!

(By the way, there is a session titled ‘Current Experiments in Interpretation‘ at this year’s World Archaeological Conference that should be of interest to readers of this blog.)

An interesting approach was suggested to me by Paula Christopher at Georgia State. Using simple box-prims layered on on top of the other displaying the ‘texture’ (picture) I want to show for each layer, she suggests putting a show/hide script in each prim. That way, the student can touch each layer, and have it ‘excavated’ away to reveal the layer below. This I think might be a ’safer’ way of doing it than what I’ve been trying this past week:

I had noticed, inadvertently, that I could lose prims ‘underground’. I could only recover them by using the land tool to lower the ground, exposing the prim. This gave me an ‘ah ha!’ moment. I rezzed the simple cabin that comes with every avatar’s inventory on a piece of ground that I had lowered to just above the level of the ur-ocean that underlays every piece of land in SL. I then unlinked all of its component prims, and made them all ‘physical’. They collapsed according to SL’s physics engine, making a pile of beams, etc. I then made them all ‘normal’ again ie they don’t move unless you use the repositioning tool. At this point, I raised the land around the prims as unevenly as I could, making sure to make the land a bit bumpy over the long walls and so on - site formation processes in SL! Then, a few bits of grass and other bits of greenery, placed to mimic growth over an archaeological site, salt with web-linked prims to archaeological databases, and voila.

The flaw in this plan, is that in order to excavate, I would have to turn over permissions to alter the landscape to my students. Maybe that’s not an issue, but on reflection I can think of one or two ways that that could go horribly wrong. That’s why I think I’ll redo this show/hide prims rather than the actual landscape of SL.

Establishing Virtual Learning Worlds (for Archaeology too!)

A blog worth examining, if you are interested in the educational aspect of immersive learning in online worlds, is the aptly named ‘Virtual Learning Worlds‘ Blog. There’s a white paper there by Barton Pursel and Keith Bailey that I’m about to read, abstract below:

Abstract

Video games in today’s society have moved from a cult phenomenon to a mainstream leisure activity. One reason for this is the emergence of online gaming, where people interact, socialize, and learn in online environments. While online game populations rapidly increase, the attrition in online courses remains to be an issue. Based on the needs of today’s students, along with the level of interactivity and other traits of online game worlds, educators need to look into incorporating elements of online gaming into online learning environments, creating Virtual Learning Worlds (VLW).

And since it seems an appropriate moment to introduce, below follows the draft of an essay that I’m writing (sorry that there are no click-throughs in the text):

Why should archaeologists care about online worlds?

Something to think about:

• Archaeology is “the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, features, biofacts, and landscapes”[i]

• Students learn to become archaeologists through a combination of lectures and hands-on training;

• To excavate something is to destroy it.

This last consideration guides how we teach archaeology to undergraduates (and I confine my comments for the most part to the undergraduate experience). We are loath to allow students to really get their hands on real archaeology because it is a limited resource and there isn’t the time, money, or resource to allow our students to make mistakes. There is of course more to archaeology than simply field work, but even in those cases, there is a reluctance to allow students to actually work with the materials, to make mistakes. We compensate for that by adding ever more lecture hours to a student’s course load. In some institutions, it is entirely possible to graduate with a degree in archaeology without ever having spent more than two weeks doing field work. Yet, by some estimations, the typical student only ever takes in about 10% of a lecture – a 5000 word lecture distills in the student’s notes to a mere 500 words (Oblinger and Maruyama 1996; Johnstone and Su 1994). This kind of teaching/learning has been disparaged as “One tape recorder talking to another” (Foreman et al. 2004: 53)

So: we have a subject, about the human past, especially its material culture, that we teach not by letting our students work with that material, but by giving lectures, of which only a tiny fraction may actually sink in. This despite the broader changes in educational practice that have been taking place over the last decade or so, from what might be called ‘teacher-centric’ to ‘learner-centric’ approaches. Broadly, a learner-centred approach recognises that students learn in different styles. Some may learn perfectly well by listening to a lecture; others might find that the discipline of writing a paper makes for a better learning experience, while others again find that they need to actually be working with the material culture in question, to achieve a successful learning outcome. A learner-centred approach does not aim to transfer knowledge from the teacher to the student, but to give the student the appropriate tools to create knowledge themselves (Barr and Tagg 1995). In a Roman history class, this might translate to, instead of lecturing about the political scheming of the late Republic, to showing students how to actively criticise the source materials and construct their own interpretations of that period’s political turmoil.

There is another significant problem that now faces us, as educators of the next generation of archaeologists. Essentially, our students think in fundamentally different pathways than previous generations. Any student under 25 years of age today can be considered a ‘digital native’, one who has grown up surrounded by, and bombarded by, computers, video games, and digital media. We their teachers on the other hand are ‘digital immigrants’, who grew up in a different land, surrounded by books (Prensky 2001a). A book requires sustained patience and attention; an argument can be built slowly on the assumption that the reader has the ability to maintain the thread. If we want to create good archaeologists, we need to recognise that how we have taught in the past might not be good enough any more simply because our students learn differently than we did (Prensky 2001b).

In recognising that our students are ‘digital natives’ there is an enormous opportunity for us as educators to deal with one of the perennial difficulties of teaching archaeology: to excavate, and/or to handle inexpertly, is to destroy our subject matter. Our digital natives that we hope to turn into archaeologists are at home in online, multi-user simulations, virtual worlds like Second Life, The Croquet Project, Multiverse Project, There, Ancient Spaces. Therein lays our opportunity. Online worlds for us ‘digital immigrants’ are for immersing our students in the material. I mean that literally. These worlds can be used to simulate ancient architecture, material culture, and/or the methodologies of field archaeology. We can use these worlds to provide immersive and engaging learning experiences that will prepare the students to be professional when they do encounter the real-world materials. The user or visitor to these worlds is embodied in an avatar, which can be fully customised to reflect the user’s persona. More importantly, being embodied in the world makes for a richer learning experience. Players of these games never say, ‘My character made it all the way to level 33!’ They say, ‘I made it to level 33’. These are rich 3D worlds, and they provide an extremely strong sensation of ‘being there’ in a way that ‘flat’ modes of educational delivery cannot match (cf Castronova 2005).

Educators using these worlds for teaching are using them to create simulations of places (replicating real-world geography, literary places, interior places like the structure of DNA, and extra-terrestrial geography as on Mars), for prototyping (urban designers and architects are early adopters here), for understanding disease (one simulation drops the user –medical students- into the world of a schizophrenic, Yellowlees and Burrage 2005) . Artists are using the media to explore new forms of expression. Users tend to identify with their avatar to a high degree; one humanities professor has used this phenomenon to explore human-animal relationships by having her students adopt animal avatars and then see what happens to them as they wander through the world (Jeremy Kemp, Second Life Educators List April 2006).

Part of the educational value of online worlds is that they are very game-like, and games are excellent vehicles for creating rich learning experiences.

“Games are… the most ancient and time-honored vehicle for education. They are the original educational technology, the natural one, having received the seal of approval of natural selection. We don’t see mother lions lecturing cubs at the chalkboard; we don’t see senior lions writing their memoirs for posterity. In light of this, the question, ‘Can games have educational value?’ becomes absurd… Game-playing is a vital educational function for any creature capable of learning” (Crawford 1982).

In the field, an archaeologist continuously has to be re-thinking her approach to the problem at hand. New laws, new stakeholders, a changing environment or changing finances continually re-make the ‘rules of the game’. An approach that was working one day may suddenly be inappropriate because the time-line for the road scheme has been accelerated. Archaeologists have to be adaptable, they have to reformulate their knowledge to adapt to circumstance: they have to be able to problematize their knowledge. This is something that games are very good at teaching. Students are often afraid to fail because a new exercise, a new problem, carries penalties for failure. Games encourage failure and learning from failure as part of a cyclical process of hypothesis (“what happens if…?”) testing (“…I’ll try this…”) and revision (“…well, that didn’t work, so…”). This cognitive disequilibrium is the process where the learners readjust their expectations in light of new information (resolution). Feedback in a game world is often immediate, allowing the cycle to begin again. “Games thrive as teaching tools when they create a continuous cycle of cognitive disequilibrium and resolution…while also allowing the player to be successful” (Van Eck 2006:20).

Online worlds and the way games are played in them are also good models for project management, a skill that archaeologists need but are seldom formally trained in. In online games, ad-hoc teams come together for very specific purposes, with different players assuming the mantle of leadership depending on their skill sets, for the duration of the episode. Management schools in the US are beginning to see in this a model for distributed decision making and for allowing leadership to emerge to suit the task, a very different model than traditional hierarchical models (Reeves and Malone 2007:31)

Online multi-user archaeological simulations do exist. The University of North Dakota has created a simulation of the village of Like-a-fishhook; this simulation is currently entirely text-based. In perhaps the most popular online world for educational simulations, Second Life, there are currently no explicitly archaeological simulations; but that is not to say that there are no simulations with archaeological content (Graham 2007). Of all the online worlds currently in existence, Second Life is probably the easiest one to visit and to build in, for every user has the ability to create using simple building tools, based on ‘primitives’ or simple geometric shapes. Perhaps the best example of a use that could have archaeological implications is Vassar College’s recreation of the Sistine Chapel (Taylor 2007). As it happens, users can fly in Second Life, and so a visitor to the Chapel can float up to the ceiling to study the paintings nose-to-Adam’s-nose, a point of view not really possible since Michelangelo tore down his scaffolding. There is a ‘mining’ game in Second Life that sends players into a simulated 1849 California after gold (Nugget Gulch 2007); the mechanics of this game could be adopted to develop a simulated excavation. The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (Caraher, Moore, and Pettegrew 2007) uses Second Life as a place to organise the logistics of their excavations, while the ‘Remixing Çatalhöyük’ project (Wei 2007) uses it to understand the architectural layout of that city. And finally, I have argued elsewhere that online virtual worlds exist as the latest in a long line of virtual worlds that have been created by humans, from the Hanging Gardens to Disneyland, and so ought to be considered subjects of archaeological study in their own right (Graham 2007b, 2007c).

The point, then, of online worlds is that they provide us with the opportunity to transform our teaching and learning to better serve our students and ultimately our profession.

Ancient Spaces www.ancientspaces.com

BARR, R. B. and J. Tagg, “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education,” Change, vol. 27, no. 6 (November/December 1995): 12–25. online at http://ilte.ius.edu/pdf/BarrTagg.pdf

CARAHER, W., R.S. Moore, and D. Pettegrew. 2007. “The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Internet Edition – Multimedia” http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/multimedia.htm

CASTRONOVA, E. 2005. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CRAWFORD, C. 1982. The Art of Computer Game Design. Electronic Version 1997, Washington State University Vancouver. http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Coverpage.html [February 26, 2007]

FOREMAN, J., James Paul Gee, J.C. Herz, Randy Hinrichs, Mark Prensky, Ben Sawyer. 2004. ‘Game-Based Learning: How to Delight and Instruct in the 21st Century’ EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October 2004): 50–66.

GRAHAM, S. 2007. ‘Electric Archaeology: Digital Media for Learning and Research’ http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/category/archaeology

GRAHAM, S. 2007b. ‘Of Second Lives and Past Lives: Archaeological Thoughts on the Metaverse’ http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/immersive-worlds-conference-at-brock/

GRAHAM, S. 2007c. ‘Archaeological Clutter and Dumpster Diving’ http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/archaeological-clutter-dumpster-diving/

JOHNSTONE, A. H. and W. Y. Su. 1994. ‘Lectures: A Learning Experience?’ Education in Chemistry, vol. 31, no. 3: 75–79.

KEMP, J. transcript of Wednesday April 12 ‘Teacher’s Lounge, Jen Doolittle’s The Human Animal’ https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/educators/2006-April/000672.html

Nugget Gulch http://www.nugget-gulch.com/

OBLINGER, D., and Mark K. Maruyama.1996. ‘Distributed Learning’, CAUSE Professional Paper Series, #14

PRENSKY, M. 2001a ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon. 9.5 October 2001. online at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky - Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - Part1.pdf

PRENSKY, M. 2001b ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently?’ On the Horizon 9.6 December 2001. online at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky - Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - Part2.pdf

REEVES, B. and T. Malone. 2007. Leadership in Games and at Work: Implications for the Enterprise of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games. http://www.seriosity.com/leadership.html

Second Life. 2003-7 Linden Research. http://secondlife.com

TAYLOR, S. ‘Sistine Chapel’ http://www.vassar.edu/headlines/2007/sistine-chapel.html SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vassar/200/85/27

The Croquet Project. 2001-7 http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page

The Multiverse Project. 2004-7 http://multiverse.net/

There. 1998-2007 Makena Technologies http://www.there.com/

VAN ECK, R. ‘Digital Game-Based Learning: It’s Not Just the Digital Natives Who Are Restless’. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 16–30.

WEI, Daniel 2007. ‘Constructing Knowledge & Virtual Places’. http://okapi.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/constructing-knowledge-virtual-places/

YELLOWLEES, P. and K. Burrage. 2005 ‘Virtual Hallucinations’. http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/ais/virtualhallucinations/ SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sedig/26/45/

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[i] Wikipedia definition, as it stood on November 14^th 2007. Since online worlds depend so much on user-created content, it seemed only fitting to begin with a definition posted on one of the most famous sites of user-created content.