It’s official – we are expanding into Reaction Grid

It’s official! We are expanding into Reaction Grid for college and university customers, and for corporate meetings and event needs.

We have assembled a team of key people to make offerings that are effective and efficient.

Colleges and universities have embraced virtual worlds (thanks to library scientist in large part) and are now at a point where more economical (higher ROI) and less political alternatives to Second Life are desired (Microsoft moves from Second Life to Reaction Grid).

For meetings and events, think Webex, but with the added interaction of a true 3D virtual meeting. IBM embraced virtual worlds early on and discovered an unforeseen benefit. People would arrive early to a meeting and stay after a meeting to collaborate and build on new ideas with each other.

The synergy of “impromptu” meetings is well known and companies such as Pixar ensure that their real world spaces present opportunites for people to cross paths and bounce ideas off one another.

Some of the best ideas come from “water cooler” moments.

A virtual world meeting option does not mean a replacement for meetings. Linden Lab does a good job touting that with their IBM white paper. But truth is, there are, and will always be, times when real face-to-face meetings are needed.

Having a virtual venue as an offering, like any other amenity, is an added value to hotels and convention centres that they can include as an option to their clients.

After a wonderful and educational teleconference with Kyle Gomboy, Reaction Grid CEO, and Chris Hart, Reaction Grid CTO, we have been offered a wonderful opportunity to become a reseller.

What does that mean for iliveisl?

It means I am out of Ener’s hair (isl anyway) and won’t be “donating” any estate land to educational purposes (read: Ener won’t get mad at me for my elearning freebies!).

It also means that iliveisl will be offering Reaction Grid (OpenSim) land in addition to Second Life land. Thus fulfilling our mantra of “i live in simulator lands”. The additional offering will help even out economic ups and downs of Second Life and will help the iliveisl Second Life estate grow.

Stay tuned as we develop the supporting website and look for our Reaction Grid info so you can come visit and experiment on our OpenSim land.

Wow, go eLearning Guild go!

I am so excited to get another chance to share my passion for Second Life with the great members of the eLearning Guild.  It was truly humbling to be so well received at DevLearn08 and to be able to have three opportunities to work with you (DemoFest, Breakfast Bytes, and a session).

January 29th & 30th are the dates for an Online Forum put on by the Guild.  I am honoured to be able to teach more specifics on the use of Second Life as a true 3D tool rather than an application.

I have used Blender 3D extensively and it is an excellent program, but is very steep to learn (all keyboard driven, but that makes it very fast once you learn it).  I have also used tools specific to Flash such as Swift 3D.  Blender can yield great results (comparable to Maya) but is not designed for online delivery as in eLearning. Plus the rendering times are long (for examaple, a 90 second chess match with only the board and pieces took 20 computers two weeks running 24 hours a day as a render farm).  Swift 3D is intended for web delivery via Flash and is faster to render, but I find it has a “stronger” niche look than Second Life.

My approach is easy to learn in short order, renders real time, and yields animation similar to virtual agent software.  The total cost (money and time) is very low and the results are more tied to your imagination than any hard to achieve expertise.

Resources will be available in the form of video tutorials (even no frill mp4 versions for your iPod) and PDF guides.  More to come and thank you for looking at this as an option and possible tool for your toolkit.  :)

Happy Holidays! And tutorials update . . .

It’s been a hectic month and holidays are a small part of it.  Much time has been spent working with the Second Life private estate iliveisl.

In a nutshell, pricing changes on one of Linden Lab’s products has resulted in a refocus of goals.  For those not familiar with how Second Life works from a private estate point of view, you basically act as a reseller, similar to website hosting.

Fortunately (for Subquark Hax), I am in the background acting as a sounding board and futurist for the estate. Many estates were abusing this product (Openspace sims).  By abuse, I mean running so many scripts that the performance of these particular simulators (sims or islands) was very low. Anyone exploring Second Life as a corporate or educational tool that ended up on one would likely deem Second Life as a poor option.

Corporate adoption is a significant focus for Linden Labs in 2009.  There is much to say about the prestige and press that large players, such as IBM, bring to Linden Lab.

It was also nice to see educational development of Second Life as a priority as indicated in this blog post.  Educators have been early adopters of Second Life as a delivery tool and over 250 universities have a presence inworld.  Even Moodle, the LMS, made it into Second Life as SLOODLE.

As a passionate and long time corporate eLearning person and college professor, I am glad to see Linden Lab’s commitment to both the corporate and educational communities.  I would love to help shape both goals (hint: read the upcoming post on the Czar of Education and Creative Culture Development). On the educational front, I have been working on a set of 20 video tutorials developed for the eLearning community and in support of my presentations for the eLearning Guild.

Being both an eLearning developer for training used by 70,000 people a year and a multi-sim owner gives me a unique perspective.  Professionals that I am in regular contact with, from my conference presentations and publications, can attest to my evangelic passion for Second Life.  I sincerely believe that it is the best virtual world and will remain so for years to come (I have explored the OpenSim network and Openlife Grid, and they are lacking the tremendous user-generated content that sets Second Life apart; even with tools such as Second Inventory, Linden Lab has the capital, expertise, and passion to outpace the competition – and the loyal core of virtual land entrepreneurs).

The videos are a small part of what I can offer back to the eLearning community. I truly believe that teaching is one of the most rewarding endeavors and sharing new tools to reach more people is a responsibility of all educators.  The final video library (lol, it will never be final, I keep jotting down more topics) covers all aspects needed for current corporate eLearning departments to start using Second Life not as a delivery platform, but as a 3D application for creating high quality video.

The quality of Second Life video, when done right, is comparable to CodeBaby’s virtual agents.  I have nothing against CodeBaby and think highly of their product.  It has distinct advantages in that it is true software that can be run stand alone and audio can easily be changed for localization purposes.  However, the price tag puts it out of reach of me as an individual and even my company Newmarket International.  Our education development department is of good size with 10 people, but the price tag for CodeBaby makes it impossible for us to justify it.

Look for a library of video tutorials (sneak peek), in the next two weeks, that will help you start using Second Life to create engaging video that will increase learner retention and add to your marketable skills!  It’s fast and easy to use once you learn a few tips and tricks (and almost free).

Happy New Year! =D

Sample Avatar Alternative to Higher Priced Software

I have nothing against great eLearning tools.  But . . . budgets make us aggressively seek out viable alternatives.  At Newmarket, we have gone down the road of using “talking heads” that output to Flash and were easy to incorporate into our eLearning.

Before that we had used the Microsoft animated characters which work quite well.  Petey the parrot would fly in and out of the page and offer narration to help drive key points home and engage learners.

And then we looked at Blender 3D, the price was right (open source) but the development time followed by the incredibly long rendering time and subsequently huge files made it impractical to use.

At about that same time, Second Life was getting a lot of press coverage.  So we looked into that.  I made a test video (still the same one I point to since it showed decent results for the very first video I made) and it was certainly to the quality required.

We looked at out of the box solutions, like CodeBaby, but the cost was too high for our budgets. It’s a great product and easy to use and has some distinct advantages when it comes to lip syncing and localisation.

So at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn a few weeks back, I had the honor to participate in their DemoFest, facilitate a BreakFast Bytes session, and hold a session on the use of Second Life as a virtual film studio.

Because of the requests I had during DemoFest about whether Second Life could produce something close to avatar programs, I created this sample in my hotel room on a laptop.

First eLearning Guild video podcast

Thanks to the patience and phenomenal work that Brent Schlenker has been doing for the elearning Guild, their first video podcast is up on GuildCasts!  And I am humbled to be the first one, albeit there were some technical difficulties.  Brent was very patient and it was a new exercise for me.  I never use audio in Second Life mainly for selfish reasons.

With the ability to IM anyone anywehere in Second Life, it is not uncommon to have several IMs going on while chatting to one or two people working together.  I can not imagine doing that with voice!  I also find that text chat is more cocise and to the point.  Imagine how much I would ramble if talking!

So we started off great guns and then I lost his audio.  Well, not so much lost as it went from clear and an equal level to mine to being what sounded like a fly!  We bothe relogged but to no avail. 

Fortunately, Brent was quick on his feet (and that was after he had done a full day of online forums!) and recored himself and sent me the file.  The final video is clearly edited (as in obvious) and a combination of his audio track, the original audio track pulled out from the video to remove the failed audio noise.  This then resulted in some whacked out lip synching (but SL is not the best on that front yet).

It did reinforce the approach I have to using audio in Second Life when being fiolmed for elearning material.  In the time it took to piece (butcher?) the vodpod for the Guild together, I could have filmed enough material for a lesson!

Well it was fun and frustratiting, but a great learning experience as well.  And done mainly with free tools which is a big part of my session.  It’s great if you have Avid and Adobe Premiere like we do and certainly makes editing go far faster, but the reality of corporate eLearning departments is that they have very tight budgets.  And that is important for me to get accross and also opens this up to the person doing this as a one person shop.

Thanks Brent!