Educational Class Questions

[I Techonomics]

Greetings:

I am seeking to turn a class of college engineers into virtual world builders this fall. Ideally, I want to have a large region to build a walk thru model of our university, building by building and team by team. How can I obtain land and hold it for my 35 students only? Build the buildings, relocate them, collaborate in teams openly (but only for my students), etc?

Would like to finish the semester with a tie in to Oculus RIft for viewing. I have looked briefly at SL, but the individual memberships, the buying and the monthly rental start to add up for this. Not poor, but want a workable solution.

Help!?

Thanks.

I Techonomics

[I Techonomics]

Hi I Techonomics,

You have two options if you need a world that can hold 35 people inside it concurrently. Either use a Premium World or a fixed price Standard World (or Advanced World). If your students are going to spend a lot of time inside that world then you can save a lot of money by going for a fixed-price world. With 35 students the safe bet will likely be to go for a fixed-price world.

Building is a relatively CPU and network intensive operation. If many people are going to be doing it inside the same world at the same time then I'd recommend going for the Advanced World. If they won't all be building at the same time then a Standard World (which gets less server resources than an Advanced World) may work for you as well.

A Standard World will enable you to create a 4-region sized Advanced Megareigon, the Advanced World will enable you to create a 16-region sized Advanced Megaregion (you can create smaller worlds with those world types if you prefer). The total prim allowance and avatar limits for these world types are listed in our services page: http://www.kitely.com/services

Please note that the more resource intensive your activities the less avatars your world will be able to accommodate while retaining good performance. In any case, I recommend you avoid using Physical objects in the build as even a handful of those can slow down a server considerably (there is no problem using phantom and non-phantom objects).

As for Oculus Rift support, you can use this viewer to access Kitely with VR equipment: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

[onyxty delta]

As for allowing access only to your students, you can setup a group that they are members of and set access to the world just to members of that group. You can change that at any time, so when you're ready to let the world see your work you open it up.

[Graham Mills]

Another option would be to divide the class into four groups, give each group a quarter of the campus to model and then merge the different builds using Sim-on-a-Stick before reuploading. You might want to try that in advance with an alt to ensure you get any perms issues right.

[I Techonomics]

Hi I Techonomics,

You have two options if you need a world that can hold 35 people inside it concurrently. Either use a Premium World or a fixed price Standard World (or Advanced World). If your students are going to spend a lot of time inside that world then you can save a lot of money by going for a fixed-price world. With 35 students the safe bet will likely be to go for a fixed-price world.

Building is a relatively CPU and network intensive operation. If many people are going to be doing it inside the same world at the same time then I'd recommend going for the Advanced World. If they won't all be building at the same time then a Standard World (which gets less server resources than an Advanced World) may work for you as well.

A Standard World will enable you to create a 4-region sized Advanced Megareigon, the Advanced World will enable you to create a 16-region sized Advanced Megaregion (you can create smaller worlds with those world types if you prefer). The total prim allowance and avatar limits for these world types are listed in our services page: http://www.kitely.com/services

Please note that the more resource intensive your activities the less avatars your world will be able to accommodate while retaining good performance. In any case, I recommend you avoid using Physical objects in the build as even a handful of those can slow down a server considerably (there is no problem using phantom and non-phantom objects).

As for Oculus Rift support, you can use this viewer to access Kitely with VR equipment: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Thank you, Ilan, for the prompt and detailed reply. I do not anticipate that all students will be online simultaneously working on the models. The Standard World with 4-regions should be large enough for our portion of the campus. I will study your comment about physical vs phantom objects to seek understanding. I also have to dig a little further on creating a restricted membership for my class, but that is obviously possible. Any pointers on documentation of the rich capabilities and how to access them would be appreciated. Your pricing model is very reasonable and I am impressed with your fast response on inquiries.

Regards,

[Ilan Tochner]

You can set world access in the Access tab of that world's Manage World dialog. You open that dialog by pressing the Manage link next to that world's name in your My Worlds page.

You can view a, somewhat outdated but still informative, how-to presentation that also overviews our unique benefits to educators in the following video: