Connect with ReactionGrid at these Upcoming Conferences on Virtual Worlds and Experiential Learning

If you'd like to connect with someone from ReactionGrid, here's some information about two upcoming conferences:

4th Global Conference - Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds

March 22-24, 2014

Prague, Czech Republic

The main aims of this conference are to increase our understanding of experiential learning in virtual worlds, both formal and informal, to share experiences and best practices, and to debate future possibilities for learning in virtual worlds.  For full details, please see the conference website.

My panel presentation will be "Finding the Balance between Pedagogy and Technology."  Here's my abstract:

Next Generation virtual worlds will be tightly coupled to many other emerging technologies, leveraging modern knowledge management processes and providing platforms for broad use among teachers and learners.  As the technological landscape grows, it is becoming increasingly difficult for educators to identify the right platform (or mix of platforms) for their specific immersive learning needs.  

In my current position at ReactionGrid and my previous work at Linden Lab and Harvard Medical School, I have explored the use of a wide range of gaming and virtual world platforms to augment education.  Today there are a number of very interesting virtual world technological trends involving specific gaming technologies like Unity as well as the growth of Open Source platforms such as OpenSimulator.  My ongoing work involves finding the right match between educational goals and technological affordances as well as identifying key synergies when virtual world technologies are interwoven with existing social media and web-based educational content.  

Above all else, there must be a thoughtful match between pedagogy and technology.  Different virtual world platforms are suited for different uses, ranging from collaborative work environments to immersive goal-oriented simulations.  One of the most important and challenging goals for any educator exploring virtual worlds is simply finding the right tool for the right job.  Likewise, it is critical for virtual world platform developers to keep a firm focus on well established knowledge management principles when designing new technologies intended to advance the field of immersive learning.

I'm particularly thrilled about this panel because I'll be participating with Dr. Bryan Carter from the University of Arizona.  Bryan is a true pioneer in using virtual worlds for experiential learning, and he's been working with virtual environments since his dissertation project in 1997 when he created a virtual simulation of Harlem, NY as it existed during the 1920s Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance.  Virtual Harlem was one of the earliest full virtual reality environments created for use in the humanities and certainly one of the first for use in an African American literature course.  The project continues to grow and evolve as Bryan explores new virtual world platforms.

1st International Conference on e-Learning e-Education and Online Training (e-LEOT)

September 18–20, 2014

Bethesda, Maryland, United States

This new conference will assess a wide range of progressive ideas for the future of e-Learning, focusing on the idea of technology as a means to education rather than an end in itself.  The conference organizers are lining up a wonderful range of interdisciplinary speakers and are planning to attract a wide group of heterogeneous scholars and practitioners.  For full details, please see the conference website.

I'll be giving a keynote at this conference.  And if you're looking to interact with the organizers and other attendees and speakers, be sure to check out the e-LEOT LinkedIn Conference Group.

If you're planning to attend either of these conferences or if you just happen to be in town when they occur, please contact me via my about.me page if you'd like to meet up and chat about virtual worlds.  

Be seeing you!

-John Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid

How to create Avatar Sit locations on any object in a Jibe world in Unity3d

Here's a short tutorial video that will show you how to create avatar sit locations on any object in your Jibe world.  It's a very powerful and flexible system where you simply drag and drop sit locations onto anything in your multiuser Jibe world, allowing you to easily create collaborative meeting environments that encourage avatars to gather together in groups.

In this video, I also review how to avoid the accidental misuse of a script that could potentially cause your Avatar to fall through the floor.  Safety First!

Creating Sit Locations in Jibe and Unity3d from John Lester on Vimeo.

You can also find this tutorial video in our Knowledge Base.

Take care,
-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer, ReactionGrid

ReactionGrid Inc: Growth and Change in 2013

Growth and Change always happen together. For something to evolve and flourish, it must grow.

And you cannot have growth without change.

ReactionGrid Inc. is growing and changing. Over the past year you've seen us shift away from Opensim to focus on developing our own proprietary web and mobile-based Jibe platform. You've also seen us evolve into a production studio that provides custom development services for educational 3d simulations using Jibe and Unity3d.

In 2013, you will see us continue to grow. We're working to expand our in-house videogame and instructional design expertise so our team can create the highest quality custom learning simulations. We're enhancing many of Jibe's core features to make it the most compelling multiuser 3d simulation environment out there, with the ability to coordinate complex data flow between virtual and physical world devices. And we are starting some major new projects with clients who are exploring amazing opportunities in the areas of immersive education and deeply engaging learning.

Along with all this change comes changes in leadership. Chris Hart has left her position as CTO to pursue her own ventures in data visualization, and she has handed over her lead developer role to Matthew Bertrand. Matt's been working with ReactionGrid for several months now, and we're very excited for him to take on this new challenge. Chris will remain an active contributor on the Jibe Unity Google Group in case anyone wants to pick her brains about all things Jibe.

At the helm of ReactionGrid, we're very excited to have Robin Donnelly now leading the company as President and COO. Robin's years of management and business development experience will be a great asset during this new phase of ReactionGrid's evolution. And lastly, Kyle Gomboy has left ReactionGrid to pursue his own projects. We wish him the best of luck.

We've got a great core team moving forward (see our updated About Us page), and we'll be continuing to expand our expertise while exploring how to integrate virtual worlds with some fascinating emerging technologies.

Keep an eye on this blog. We plan to surprise you in many wonderful new ways.

-The ReactionGrid Team

How to create Wandering Animals in your Jibe world using Unity 3D Pro

A great way to breathe life into your Jibe world is to add animated animal models that wander around the 3d landscape.  Here's how you can do it using the Pro version of the Unity3D editor.

The Unity Asset Store has many great models available for low cost that can make your Jibe space come to life. Just run a search for Horse or Cow and you may find just the model you're looking for. To make roaming animals, look for animals that come complete with animations. Mixamo produce many models that work well in Unity, though there are plenty of other publishers you can choose from. For this simple ambient animal example, you need just two animations - one for a stationary animal (so an idle / grazing animation) and a walk or run.

Step 1 - place animals and place empty cubes that the animals will walk to.  If you want the cubes to be specific per animal than you can place them in the animal object in the Hierarchy for organization but it doesn't matter where they are in the Hierarchy for performance. Making the cubes specific to an animal (by dragging those items into the hierarchy of the animal) then you can move the animal and the relative waypoints together in edit mode more easily.

Step 2 - Set up the Nav Mesh. to do this go to the Windows menu and open the Navigation window located towards the bottom of the list

Next select from the Hierarchy any objects that you want the animals to avoid such as buildings, fountains etc. In the Navigation window under the Object Tab those objects will appear with two check boxes and a drop down. Check off the Navigation Static check box to make it true, this will prevent the Nav Mesh from going under or through these objects. Next select the Terrain from the Hierarchy and check both Navigation Static and OffMeshLink Generation

Now in the Navigation Window click on the Bake Tab located next to the Object tab (do not press the Bake button at the bottom of the Window yet).  These settings will determine the accuracy of the Nav Mesh:

• Radius - how close to walls the Nav Mesh will generate.
• Height - how much clearance is required for the Nav Mesh to go under a floating object.
• Max Slope - the steepness of a slope that Agents can traverse.
• Step Height - the step-up height Agents can traverse between levels.
• Min Region Area - the smallest amount of space that the Nav Mesh can exist in.
• Width Inaccuracy % - how inaccurate the horizontal distance from wall and ledges the Nav Mesh is.
• Height Inaccuracy % - how inaccurate the vertical distance between the terrain the Nav Mesh is.

The Generate Off Mesh Links are for special actions of Agents being able to jump across gaps and drop down from ledges.

When everything is set up the way you want it click the Bake button located at the bottom right of the Navigation Window.

Step 3 - setting up the Animal AI. Download RGScripts.rar (includes AutoAnimateNPC.cs and NavigateToTarget.cs).  The below picture are the four scripts that will need to be on the animal to allow them to walk around.

• Animation - Set up the animations that the Animal will be able to do.
• Nav Mesh Agent - The most important of the scripts, this is what attaches the animal to the created Nav Mesh. Most of the settings in here are straight forward, the Radius is a collision sphere that tracks where the animal is on the nave mesh, speed is how fast the animal will move, height is how tall the Nav Mesh collision sphere is (so if there is a bridge that can be walked under and the height is set too high the animal won't be able to get under the bridge.
• Auto Animate NPC - plays the correct animations when walking or idle.
• Navigate To Target - sets the targets that the Animal can walk to.  This script will talk to the Nav Mesh Agent selecting a random destination from the list and passing that position to the Agent.

When you are happy that all works as it should, make all the targets invisible by turning off their Mesh Renderer component and removing their box collider components so you won't end up bumping into invisible boxes as you walk through the scene.

Step 4 - Run the game and enjoy.

-Matt Bertrand

Jibe Developer, ReactionGrid

Jibe 1.5 and Unity 4

Over the past months we've been busy working on several development projects for clients, and in each project we have had the chance to expand on our Jibe platform. The upcoming release of Jibe 1.5 will incorporate many of the features we have developed, and we will be ensuring that the release will be 100% compatible with the newly released Unity 4 editor.

Planned features for Jibe 1.5 include:

• Room variable support
• Photon 3 & Photon Cloud support
• Improved avatar pipeline to enable wider range of custom avatars
• Reduced requirement for naming conventions for avatar outfits when customizing appearance options
• Animations can have any name, and are mapped to known animation states via a simple script set up in the Inspector (makes it much easier to grab animations from places like the Mixamo store to add simple gestures to your avatars)
• Appearance maps can support model, hair and outfit choices out of the box, the goal is to move towards a more extensible system
• Storage and retrieval of avatar dressing choices for Jibe Mars customers for future implementation of immediate login of pre-dressed avatars.
• Simplified networking scripts for position updates of objects
• Recategorized Jibe scripts in Unity hierarchy for clearer organization
• Increased flexibility on login process
• Change from three scripts (ChooseAvatar, DressingRoom, SingleSceneConfiguration) for choosing avatars and logging in, to one single simplified script (JibeLogin)
• Combine Loader and Dressing room concepts into a Login scene where you can choose all outfit choices on login. 
• Or you can change which scene is the first in the build order and log in directly to the main scene where the activity will take place
• Dedicated dressing room can be reached from any other scene in the build and should return you to the last known location
• Extra sample scripts for more common functionality (such as taking screenshots from inworld)
• Spatial audio support for Vivox voice on web player builds
• Chat history plus ability to chat from the webpage (removing the need to have the chat textbox on screen all the time while inworld)
• Single player mode for offline testing - extremely useful for debugging while not connected, or for doing a demo from behind a tight firewall
• Improved event tracking scripts for capturing additional information about user interactions
• Improved tracking of Account UUID (Unique Identifier for a logged in user) for use within websites where tracking by known ID is important. This feature enables both understanding of the current ID of the player from the multiplayer server perspective and from a user-maintained system.
• 100% C# codebase with final scripts converted from Javascript.
• Updated Jibe manual with full information on each of the new features in the platform!

We've also updated our Jibe Web Suite for our hosted and behind firewall server customers to include a rich administration site and support for groups and role based permissions to give you more control over access to your Jibe worlds. We're rolling this out to all our existing clients (it is compatible with 1.4.2 as well as 1.5) - let us know if you would like to apply for a priority upgrade by dropping us a note to our ticket system at http://metaverseheroes.com

Jibe 1.5 will be coming out as soon as we finish our QA testing. In the meantime, customers who are eager to try out Unity 4 should do so with caution until we can isolate any potential issues with the new editor and have approved the use and support of the new editor, and any issues that the pioneers of you may find please contribute your findings to our Jibe-Unity Google Group! If there are any significant issues with Jibe 1.4.2 and Unity 4 we will provide updated project kits to customers as soon as we can.

Online Presentation at Agile Worlds 2012

I'll be giving a presentation today (Wednesday October 3rd) at 8pm Eastern as part of the Agile Worlds 2012 Online Conference.

My topic will be "Integrated Reality and Next Generation Virtual Worlds." Here's detailed info on my session.

Please feel free to visit my Agile Worlds Jibe space at 8pm if you'd like to attend.  Hope to see you there!


UPDATE 10/4/21: Here's a video recording of the event.

My slides are also online.

-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid, Inc

Building Immersion through Simple Design: Visit a Meteor Shower in Jibe

Anyone can create an exciting immersive experience in a multiuser 3d virtual world platform like Jibe.

It doesn't have to be complicated.

And it doesn't require loads of money and development time.

The trick is to follow a few simple design rules.

Using Virtual Worlds to Reduce Stress

relaxation training in a virtual world

A fascinating paper was just published on the topic of using virtual worlds to train people in stress reduction techniques.

"The Feasibility and Impact of Delivering a Mind-Body Intervention in a Virtual World"

The paper describes a pilot project using a virtual space to bring volunteers through a mind-body medical intervention. The volunteers learned how to elicit the relaxation response, a physical state of deep rest that changes the physical and emotional responses to stress.  Typically, people learn how to do this in physical-world training sessions.  But in this case, they were able to use a 3d simulation in a group learning environment.

Some of the challenges they faced in the course of the project included:

"...although it is indeed feasible to present this type of program in a virtual world, the user interface is problematic. Recruitment was limited to individuals with prior experience in Second Life since the interface was known to be a barrier to entry. Even with such inclusion criteria, some of the less experienced users had problems that likely affected their participation."

 and

"...in the absence of remote sensing technology, it is very difficult to know if the participants are taking part in the exercises or successfully eliciting the relaxation response."

Our next-generation multiuser virtual world platform Jibe addresses all of these challenges.  When you set up your own Jibe world, you have complete control over the user interface and can customize/simplify it however you wish.  A Jibe world can also be embedded in any web page, which makes it as easy as possible for people to access.  And finally, we've build our Jibe platform from the ground up so that it can directly interface with remote sensing technology.

Due to the positive results from this pilot study,  Dr. Daniel B. Hoch and his team are planning to conduct further research.  It will be very exciting to see techniques like this evolve to improve the quality of life of people around the world.  And here at ReactionGrid, we'll keep building the technological platforms that can help make it all happen.

UPDATE 4/6/2012: Here's a press release about the research project from Massachusetts General Hospital with additional quotes from Dr. Hoch.

-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid Inc.

Presentation at 2012 Follow the Sun: Integrated Reality and Next Generation Virtual Worlds

 

Follow the Sun 2012 is a free online conference that runs from March 27-30.  Here's a summary from their website:

"Digital Futures Institute, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, Athabasca University, and our commercial partners are proud to provide this year's 48-hour, online learning festival at no charge to all participants. The theme of this year's conference moves beyond educational technology to examine knowledge development and exchange across the disciplines."

I'll be giving an online presentation on Thursday March 29th at 2:30am EDT (yes, that's 2:30am).  The topic will be "Integrated Reality and Next Generation Virtual Worlds."

Here are my slides to give you a preview of what I'll be talking about, and I'll update this blog post with a recording of my presentation after the conference is over. 

Integrated Reality and Next Generation Virtual Worlds

Update 3/29/2012: Here's the recording of my presentation.


Presentation at Follow the Sun 2012: "Integrated Reality and Next Generation Virtual Worlds" from John Lester on Vimeo.

Take care,
-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid Inc.

Kyle Gomboy, CEO of ReactionGrid, Speaking at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) Conference

UPDATE 3/16/2012: Kyle is out sick today.  But John "Pathfinder" Lester (ReactionGrid's Chief Learning Officer) will be filling in for him.  The show must go on!

The 5th Annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) Conference starts today and runs through Saturday.  Check out their full conference schedule.

The VWBPE conference is an opportunity for innovative educators, teachers and designers to gather on a global scale for serious discussions and feedback about what is happening in 3D virtual environments and games. 

Kyle Gomboy (CEO, ReactionGrid) will be giving a keynote presentation tomorrow, Friday March 16 at 2pm EDT.  You can attend his presentation in Second Life or tune in and watch it streamed live.

We've got a ReactionGrid booth set up in Second Life during the conference, so please stop by and visit us.

And our good friend David Deeds has a booth right next to us with lots of great information about 3d virtual worlds in K-12/International schools as well as info about his new book, a Jibe/Unity: School Quick Start Guide.

 See you inworld!

-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid Inc.