How I used kitely to tell a recent news story to students

[Ramesh Ramloll]

Hello,
For those of you in the US, you may recall the Elk's River spill in West Virginia that was in the news recently.
http://youtu.be/XwbUQP-5g40
I thought that even though it would be hard to duplicate the environment in the virtual, some elements of it can be extracted in order to explain to students what happened ... perhaps in a more experiential way.
http://youtu.be/5t1B3RJC_Kk
I used my own scaffolding (application) to generate the world but all is implemented on kitely.
Constructive criticisms needed, welcome.
Thanks

[Constance Peregrine]

That is very good-)) I am going to share it around a bit.

[Keith Selmes]

Very good. I liked the idea of using the npc video team, which connects with the usual experience of seeing on TV, and I liked the general scenario. Looks very useful.
I did wonder whether students would be able to explore on their own, or whether it was purely done for the video.

I see this was done using Rezmela, which looks very interesting (http://www.rezmela.com/)
It's in the same direction as the ideas I had for using OpenSim in house with nursing and medical students, where the lecturer (and possibly students) would have a set of ready made objects and wouldn't have to build them or hunt them down. And Rezmela has a set of objects very suitable for Health Professions.

Rezmala is very close also to the concept outlined by Doug Maxwell at MOSES, where the software complexity would be at a similar level to Powerpoint, so instructors with practical knowledge can quickly set up novel scenarios. This why they set up the 3Drepository for materials at http://3dr.adlnet.gov/default.aspx (It's mostly available to anyone who registers)
There's an article by Doug at Hypergrid Business http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2012/1 ... nce-goals/

That seems to be what Rezmela are doing on Kitely, and the water treatment works is a very topical real world example, so thanks for sharing.

[Ramesh Ramloll]

Thanks Keith for your input, Maxwell and Daden are awesome, I was off the radar for a while. I wanted to share a couple of our findings to add to your very important information. Our evaluations show that the time to build a scenario with our approach is about one tenth of the time it takes to build even if you have a whole library of objects available to drag and drop from your inventory. And this factor increases as the complexity of the world increases. We build on a 2D ish surface in a 3D world, whatever we add to this 'control' surface appears in larger scale in the 'exercise space' appropriately. This minimizes camera manipulations and positioning/aligning and so on. Really trivially simple. But our NasaTLX tests shows that frustration and subjective mental work load is cut by a big chunk. Our approach also allows multiple people to create an environment through the board. I am now building through the Oculus Rift directly inworld, because the building interface is in the 3D space, this will bypass issues with having to create on the desktop application (and then to go in).
Now when students make changes in the exercise space, this is reflected back on the board (this is the radar functionality) for instructors watching what is going on.
The same board is used to control events in the 'exercise space', each 'icon placed on the board' as it were controls the behavior of each object in the 'exercise', this allows the instructor to play a wizard of Oz role. S/he can move crowds, make NPCs appear more intelligent than they are, control leaks, start fires for e.g. Just plodding along, building takes a lot of time, hoping to find a way to streamline the library development.

[Keith Selmes]

Actually, I mentioned the Daden 2D design system, and then edited that out as I'm out of date with what they are doing.
It sounds as though it worked out well. Is that "trainingscape" ?
I came across Daden when they were doing the PIVOTE PBL system, which looked very useful, but it had a big workload both for IT staff and academics. Later on I planned on doing something simpler for a pedagogic research project, and the systems you are describing would have been ideal. If I were still in that job, I'd be getting very enthused. However, work priorities changed, sadly, and it's not so relevant now.

[Ramesh Ramloll]

Hello Keith
Daden's trainingscape is super. Great work. There is a difference between Daden's web based authoring system approach and ours which inworld. Elevation information is available with our approach because of the nature of the system. So we are not only dealing with rapid building over flat worlds. When I started out I wanted to build something webbased in webGL or Flash even (can you believe) but I settled for doing everything in world precisely because I wanted to avoid the constraints that a purely 2D interface would bring. So if you have an arbitrary terrain for e.g. you can build anywhere through the control board, you can build buildings floor by floor ... (actually the systems allows a number of types of connections... e.g. objects can be aligned based on the normals out of the surface they are going to land on, simple case. And having multiple people involved in sharing the control space is also a natural extension, I could even have multiple control boards, so that you have like multiple views with different concerns point to the same data (ie objects in the 'exercise space'). I had to cut down my enthusiasm because the number of listeners allowed is the only thing that is preventing me to progress unless Illan does some magic. I wish I could get more funding to grow my little dev outfit which is myself at the moment.
R

[Graham Mills]

Nice work. I particularly like the news crew idea. I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to use them to drive a simulation with a student in the interviewee role. What, When, Who, Where, Why-type questions from the NPCs could get you quite a long way. I'm playing around with some scenario-based learning myself and it would add another dimension.

I've explored the "design on virtual paper" approach myself in the past though never really got close to implementing something others could use so kudos on that.

I suspect the Daden system Keith mentioned was OPAL: https://vimeo.com/34121543

[Graham Mills]

Hmm, I'm wrong: it looks like it is TrainingScapes etc and not (O)OPAL. I get the impression (based on the availability of mobile options) that Daden are evolving towards a primary focus on Unity3D.

The latest Daden White Paper is an interesting read: http://www.daden.co.uk/downloads/Immers ... g%20v1.pdf

[Ramesh Ramloll]

Definitely interesting. I ve been following Daden's work since their early days in Second Life with their virtual hospital project. I had to go through a lot of thinking whether to go for opensim vs unity3D. From my own perspective, unity3D opens doors to access because people can reach unity3D worlds trough mobile devices and so on. But the thinking was cut short because in the end, I found myself progressing further in opensim, so that starting a prototype, and seeing results quite early kinds of locks your attention in. Opensim to me appears to make it easier for applications constructed around avatar to avatar interactions, it's more collaborative centric. And my background PhD (well ancient history now) is in CSCW. I think if an average guy like myself can assemble something that is fun to me (may be that's a problem ), I wonder what a well oiled team could pull off with opensim. Keeping an eye on Philip's voxel based stuff, I kind of have a hunch that their first version will look like a finer grained minecraft (ha am digressing).
p.s. when I said one person effort it's only true from the perspective of designing and implementing RezMela (the idea), of course without being in the opensim community, and using Kitely for e.g. this effort would never have seen the light of day... just imagine how much time would have gone into setting up and managing a home based grid (and I bet it would be subpar because it takes tremendous effort to get a proper grid running, So thanks Kitely )