Keynote at e-LEOT 2014 - "Augmented Mind: The Evolution of Learning Tools from Language to Immersive Reality"

The 1st International Conference on e-Learning, e-Education and Online Training is being held September 18-20 in Bethesda, Maryland.  This 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 have lined up a wonderful range of interdisciplinary speakers and are planning to attract a wide group of heterogeneous scholars and practitioners.

I'll be attending the entire conference, and I'm honored to be giving the opening keynote presentation.   Here's what I'll be talking about:

“Augmented Mind: The Evolution of Learning Tools
from Language to Immersive Reality”

Innovative educators are constantly facing the challenge of matching pedagogical goals with complementary technological tools.  Unfortunately, given the wide range of technologies and devices that vie for consumer attention, the right choices are not always clear and are typically obscured by media hype. In this presentation, John Lester will describe how focusing on the way the human mind interacts with the world and other human beings can help identify the right tools for the right jobs.  From a mind-augmentation perspective combining constructivist and behaviorist approaches, John will explore web based tools ideal for knowledge management, augmented reality based self-animated autonomous agents, and finally the unique (and sometimes over-hyped) affordances of perceptually immersive multiuser 3d virtual worlds for collaborative learning.

My goal will be to tell an interesting story with examples and demos of technologies that I think really leverage how our minds naturally embrace the world around us.  One such technology that I'm currently exploring and that you've probably never heard of are Wiglets.

Visit Wiggle Planet to learn a lot more about Wiglets.

Wiglets are autonomous, evolving, self-animated and self-motivated agents that can exist in both completely virtual and augmented reality environments.  They exist at a wildly creative intersection of artificial life, art and gaming.  And perhaps best of all, you can interact with them directly through touch and gestures.

Another topic of discussion will be the affordances of multiuser 3d virtual worlds, especially how one can reduce the barrier to entry for people interested in leveraging them for educational purposes.  ReactionGrid has recently developed some new tools that integrate with the Unity3d-based Jibe platform to provide on-the-fly content editing in a simple yet powerful way.  I'll be giving a sneak preview during my presentation.

Want to easily change this web-based 3d environment on the fly without having to muck around in Unity?
Now you can. I've got some new tricks with Jibe to show you.

I'll also be discussing and giving examples of innovative uses of commonly used virtual world technologies such as Second Life, Opensimulator and the Oculus Rift.  If you plan on attending and would like to connect with me at the conference, please drop me a line on Twitter or email.  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.

After my keynote I'll be updating this blog post to include my slides and links to any recordings.

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

Speaking at "Train for Success" Panel on the Future of Virtual Worlds - Nov 8 @ noon Eastern

The Gronstedt Group hosts a weekly "Train for Success" speaking series, and this week I'll be participating in a panel discussion on the State and Future of Virtual Worlds.

The panel will be held in Second Life and starts on Thursday November 8 at noon Eastern.  You can also watch and ask questions via the live stream on the web.  

For more details, please see Facebook.  Here's a summary:

"The landscape of virtual worlds is changing. Social and game mechanics make virtual worlds more engaging. Browser-based virtual worlds make them more accessible to a wider audience. The panel will discuss the state and future of virtual worlds. Join this conversation about the emerging platforms and applications of virtual worlds in learning and business." 

Hope to see you there, and special thanks to Anders Gronstedt for inviting me to participate.

-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer, ReactionGrid

Islands of Enlightenment at the Virtual Pioneer History Conference (Jan 20-21)

The Virtual Pioneer History Conference is an online history conference for educators interested in using virtual worlds for immersive learning.  It's being held today and tomorrow (Jan 20 - 21) in Second Life.  For more information and a full schedule, see the conference website.

Andrew Wheelock is an innovative Technology Integrator who works with teachers and students in k-12 schools in Western New York.  At 1pm EST tomorrow (Jan 21), Andrew will be giving a presentation in Second Life about his "Islands of Enlightenment" project using an Opensim environment from ReactionGrid.

Here are the details:

When: 10:00 am PST (1pm EST), Saturday January 21.
Where: Second Life - SLURL
Topic: "The Islands of Enlightenment" (project website)

"Andrew Wheelock (known as Spiff Whitfield in Second Life) will highlight his work using a ReactionGrid Opensim environment that gives students a glimpse into history as avatars.  The Islands of Enlightenment consist of 2 islands that have been developed as historical sims.  One of the islands has the Understanding the Holocaust Project whereby students are guided through a series of activities involving the 1942-44 streets of Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family lay in hiding.  Students can interact with the secret annex and learn from source material from PBS, Masterpiece theater materials. We may get a sneak peek at the second island which is going to be used for a Medieval Roleplaying sim for 6th grade students to learn about the life and challenges of this age."

At ReactionGrid, we firmly believe in the power of immersive environments to create incredibly moving educational experiences. Which is why we're so excited about Andrew's work!

A group of us from ReactionGrid will be attending his presentation tomorrow, and I'll be at the opening keynote presentation for the conference tonight at 4pm PST (7pm EST). 

Hope to see you there, and congratulations Andrew on your fantastic project.

UPDATED 1/21/12: If you missed the presentation, you can check out Andrew's slides or watch a recorded video stream of his presentation.

-John "Pathfinder" Lester

Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid, Inc.

The Hypergrid Adventurers Club RELOADED

I started the Hypergrid Adventurers Club (HGAC) over a year ago to create a venue for folks interested in exploring the Hypergrid together.  While we were working on some major OpenSim upgrades here at ReactionGrid the past few months, I decided to pause our weekly HGAC meetings.

We're all very excited about rolling out OpenSim 0.7.2 to all our OpenSim clients.  We're doing this major upgrade on a case by case basis, and one of the great new features of this newer version of Opensim is upgrading to version 1.5 of the Hypergrid.  This version is supported by the majority of OpenSim grids currently online.  Which means we're dramatically expanding the universe of interconnected OpenSim grids that our clients can explore during their hypergrid explorations.

And thanks to all the hard work of everyone at ReactionGrid, the Hypergrid Adventurers Club's home base on jokaydiaGRID is now running OpenSim  0.7.2.

Starting this week, I'll be resuming weekly meetings of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club.  The first new meeting will be Thursday, January 5th 2012 at 4pm Eastern Time.  We'll be meeting on the region "Scooter" on jokaydiaGRID.  For more details, please see this event on our calendar.

And be sure to join our Google Group if you'd like information about upcoming meetings.

See you on the Hypergrid!

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

Testing ReactionGrid's Opensim 0.7.2 Alpha Grid with the Hypergrid Adventurers Club

Today, the Hypergrid Adventurers Club tested ReactionGrid's Opensim 0.7.2 Alpha Grid. It was quite an adventure, spanning 4 different Opensim grids running 4 different versions of Opensim.

We gathered on the region HGBridge on ReactionGrid’s 0.7.2 Alpha Test Grid, and from there we began a series of Hypergrid jumps.

About 10 of us joined in on the Adventure. Here's where we went if you'd like to follow in our footsteps:


1) START: ReactionGrid Alpha Test Grid  
HG Coordinates: secondlife://alpha.reactiongrid.net:8002:HGBridge/139/156/22  
Grid Location: (4000,4000)  
Grid Software: OpenSim 0.7.2 ReactionGrid.  

2) NewWorldGrid  
HG Coordinates: secondlife://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002:BioZone/  
Grid Location: (6991,6995)  
Grid Software: OpenSim 0.7.1.1 Release  

3) GermanGrid  
HG Coordinates: secondlife://login.germangrid.de:8002/  
Grid Location: (8000,8000)  
Grid Software: OpenSim 0.7.2 Dev  

4) END: FleepGrid  
HG Coordinates: secondlife://fleepgrid.com:8002/  
Grid Location: (9013,9013)  
Grid Software: OpenSim 0.7.2 RC2

I chose these locations because they represented 4 different versions of Opensim which, theoretically, are all Hypergrid-compatible with each other. It's always good to test theory by putting it into practice. Some folks initially had difficulty logging in to our Alpha Grid. This caused some chat and movement lag/freezing. But despite this initial glitch, the region and grid recovered all on its own. Then we were able to start jumping.

Starting out on the region HGBridge in ReactionGrid's Alpha Grid"

A few of us made it to GermanGrid when it suddenly stopped accepting connections. This might have been caused by a region crash due to the load of our visit. Our apologies to the GermanGrid admins if we caused any problems.

Those of us who couldn't make it to GermanGrid simply hopped from NewWorldGrid to FleepGrid, since both grids are within the 4096 region limit for Hypergrid jumps.

We arrive in FleepGrid

 Fleep Tuque, the owner of FleepGrid, joined us on our Adventure. She welcomed us all when we all finally arrived on her grid, and grid performance was excellent.

Chris Hart, ReactionGrid's CTO, attended the test. Here's what she had to say about the event.

"Overall the event was pretty successful. While we had some issues with teleports between regions, the server stayed up and running for the whole time. We had a wide variety of clients logging in to the grid at the same time which seemed to cause a few lockups, but after a little perseverence most made it inworld and were able to HyperGrid teleport out successfully. Those that had difficulty logging in, and even those that didn't, we welcome feedback on your experiences, please let us know which clients you were using to connect and whether you were logging in locally or were visiting from another grid."

As always, the best way to give us feedback is to submit a ticket on our Metaverseheroes support site. If you were part of our adventure today, please let us know all the details about any glitches you experienced. We want to make sure ReactionGrid's version of Opensim 0.7.2 is as stable as possible before we officially release it.

This upgrade to Opensim 0.7.2 will be a big step with many new features and additional stability. And once it is finalized, ReactionGrid will be part of a much bigger universe of Opensim grids interconnected by the Hypergrid.

Thank you all again for helping test things out today. I hope you had a fun time, too!

Take care,
-John "Pathfinder" Lester

OpenSim 0.7.2 Alpha Test Grid Open to Public

ReactionGrid is now testing 0.7.2 Opensim code on a private test grid before rollout. Please help us test the code for bugs and glitches.
Head over to: 
http://alpha.reactiongrid.net/register to register a user account.
Then add a grid to your grid list in your preferred viewer to:
http://alpha.reactiongrid.net:8002 and head in!

This space will be open 24/7 over the next week but we really need immediate testing to be able to rectify any issues in the next week so we can get this on your grids.


We are leaving build rights open like this were a sandbox so please use the tools - script - build - test the daylights out of this system. 
We need you to test everything including the new web on a prim feature, groups, friends and hypergrid.
We are leaving hypergrid boxes on the Hypergrid Bridge for testing to known grids running either 0.7.1 or 0.7.2 so you can test that as well.
The public HyperGrid address of the HGBridge region (located around 4000,4000) is secondlife://alpha.reactiongrid.net:8002:HGBridge/139/156/22


Also with the 0.7.2 code you are now able to use the SecondLife Viewer2 which I believe is needed for the web on a prim functionality. Please help us test this!
We are aware of some features that do no work in Viewer2 including but not limited to:
Map does not populate - map tiles are handled differently in Viewer2 than older viewers such as Hippo or Imprudence.
Searches do not function properly they will lead to SL.
Please do not report these issues as we already know they exist. Thanks.


Upon finding any bugs or areas that are not functioning properly please submit a support ticket with your findings to http://metaverseheroes.com so we may look into the issue and see if we can repair. We have not yet implemented the user profiles feature, so you will not be able to edit your profile "About" section, interests or similar until this has been completed.


Thank you for your assistance in testing this alpha code for 0.7.2 - we appreciate your help!

Moving to OpenSimulator 0.7.1

The recent release of OpenSimulator 0.7.1 has been widely welcomed by the enthusiastic OpenSim fans and many have asked us what our plans are for upgrading. There has been some speculation about why we have not yet upgraded, and I'd like to explain what's involved in upgrading our systems, and why we are usually a little behind the bleeding edge!

I say bleeding edge speaking from experience -when we first started hosting OpenSimulator back in 2008, and our official ReactionGrid opensim grid launched at the end of that year. For the first few months we stuck to the subversion trunk of core code, upgrading every few weeks to the latest and greatest. Mostly, we were fine to follow this track, but occasionally we got bitten and had to roll back to a previous release - such is the bleeding edge! As time passed, it became clear that we could not continue this pattern if we were to grow, so we re-evaluated our strategy.

We now knew the platform well and were starting to host grids for customers, and we had a duty to them to ensure that we were able to offer a known good configuration within acceptable tolerances. Once the project moved on to 0.6 we moved to following official releases with minor tweaks for our own purposes. As we grew, each upgrade would take longer to roll out, since it was no longer just our own grid, but also those of our clients.

Our most recent upgrade was to 0.6.9 last year, and the full rollout to our customers took several months. For the most part this release has proven to be a significant improvement over previous releases, though it does have a few issues that continue to frustrate us to this day. We have been looking forward to 0.7.1 for some time now. 0.7 was tagged very soon after 0.6.9 was released, and I was aware that some of the core developers had planned some major work that was not going to happen after this point, and would likely be included in 0.7.1. As such, I recommended that we hold off 0.7.0 and waited for the next release, including improved HyperGrid security that our customers really have been asking for.

We are now in the process of upgrading our core systems and applications to work with 0.7.1. Our servers use the MSSQL database platform for OpenSim, so I'm adding additional support to those modules to be compatible with 0.7.1 and will contribute this code back to the community once completed, as I have done in the past. We'll also be upgrading our groups server, our core admin applications for user registration and administration, as well as many other systems. Testing different configurations; with & without HyperGrid, FreeSwitch voice, megaregion, single regions (one console), multiple regions per console, multiple region servers per server, with groups, no groups, etc. It's a significant undertaking, and we are committed to doing this to the best of our abilities for the benefit of our customers.

We want this release to be a success, and will be doing all we can to ensure any upgrade we produce for our customers has been tested as much as possible before we offer it to them. We will not accept any release of OpenSim that is less stable than our current builds. The goals are clear - improved stability, more features, increased compatibility with newer clients, and increased security wherever possible. We still believe that the OpenSimulator platform is a great tool for working in 3D and are very grateful to our clients for understanding the work that goes into preparing for each upgrade.

As for a specific timeline (I know you're all jumping up and down asking for a date!) I simply cannot say for certain at this stage, but so far code is going well. I'm hoping very much to have a release ready before July, and as soon before then as possible, but this all depends on how testing goes. I'll be working with the team on all aspects of the upgrade, and we will keep you all updated as soon as a release is imminent!

--

Chris Hart, CTO ReactionGrid Inc.

Jibe Server Control Room - Update

We've been working to enhance our virtual Operations Center this week, and now have 95 virtual servers reporting in and visualized. COO Robin Gomboy and I have had a super week tending to the fleet, catching issues and fixing them before they become critical, identifying troubled machines in a timely fashion and working with their owners to fix and improve performance.

Our latest edition of the operations center can be seen in the latest video.