Category Archives: virtual worlds

Lively limps out of the MUVE game

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I blogged about Lively, Google’s browser plugin-based take on virtual worlds, when it went live back in July, thinking that it offered an interesting ‘entry level’ approach to customising 3D spaces and online interaction. Google have now announced that they’ll be closing Lively at the end of December, pretty unambiguously stating that it was simply a bet that didn’t pay off.

There’s no real information yet about why exactly it didn’t work out, although not being available on Mac or Linux, or even Google’s own browser Chrome, couldn’t have helped. Techcrunch reproduce a Google Analytics graph showing just how transient interest in Lively really was, and I know that my own use of it exactly mirrored the inital spike of interest followed by never returning to it.

Like the FaceBook groups and protest sites that sprang up when FaceBook’s News Feed feature was announced, there are some rooms on Lively aimed at protesting the closure, but unlike the more than 500,000 people who signed an online petition protesting against News Feed, the two rooms I’ve linked there have had less than 200 visitors between them. It’s always sad when something doesn’t work out, but is there really any point in a virtual world where the only person there is to talk to is yourself?

Update: Jason Calacanis asks why Google didn’t sell off Lively and wonders if its closure is a prelude to layoffs. Google’s announcement does state that Lively staff will be redeployed on other projects, for what that’s worth :) but Valleywag, who aren’t slow to point out where signs of the recession are evident within the Silicon Valley giant, have a pretty unambiguous view of why Lively, and by extension Second Life, just aren’t that appealing to that many people. Massively also offer their own interpretation of the closure.

Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning

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That’s the title of a joint JISC CETIS and Eduserv event we’re running on Friday 16 January here at the University of Strathclyde, and it’s an event I’m looking forward to enormously.  If you fancy coming along I’d advise you to register as soon as possible, as places are already filling up rapidly and if you’re not on the list you ain’t getting in.

Although there is an understandable emphasis on Second Life, the event will look beyond that particular environment to consider some of the issues and barriers to the use of virtual worlds in general in education.  It should be a hugely interesting and valuable event.

It’s only a game

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Well, I could hardly let today go by unmarked after all: at 00:01 this morning the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, officially launched.  Currently played by over 11 million people worldwide, and by far the most successful MMO ever, the launch provided an ideal opportunity for the BBC to film girls dressed up as elves and turn concerns that a few people may deal with real life difficulties by becoming addicted to the game into a hand-wringing breakfast time piece featuring a ubiquitous, apparently publicity-addicted psychologist.

Despite the discredited claims of flawed studies, eccentric opinion pieces and extremist activists that computer games cause real life violence and social problems, there is significant evidence that they can actually improve skills and academic performance.  JISC have funded a significant amount of work in this area, and it’s been a popular theme at our own conference.  Multiplayer gaming, with the social and mental engagement it involves, seems to me to be a far more worthwhile activity than passive television watching, and as Mark Barrowcliffe says in his wonderful memoir, The Elfish Gene, ‘much less dangerous than horse riding or wind surfing, and no one seems to bother too much about those’.

BlackBoard investigate Second Life integration

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BlackBoard have awarded a $25,000 Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds to Ball State University to ‘to foster and promote the integration of virtual worlds into everyday teaching and learning’.  The work will explore a range of pedagogic and administrative issues (you’ll need to scroll down a bit to the right section) around linking BlackBoard with Second Life, some of which could have quite far-reaching outcomes for the use of virtual worlds in education. 

Security issues are explicitly addressed, as is the validated association of avatar names with student names for the use of assessment management and enterprise systems.  The development of a best practice model for instructional design within virtual environments could help produce structured and carefully directed learning activities with tight control over locations and sequencing of activities that may help overcome the aimlessness that students who don’t engage with SL complain about.  Although the award will directly fund development for BSU’s cinema arts course, outcomes will be made available to the BlackBoard community as a whole. 

There’s likely to be some way to go before this work can compete with Sloodle‘s achievements in linking Moodle with SL, but it does open up the possibility of secure and suitably controlled use of SL for institutions tied in to BlackBoard.

Thanks to Daniel Livingstone on the Virtualworlds JISCMail list for pointing out this award.

Lively start for 3D mashups

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Google’s tentacles have now penetrated the 3D space with this week’s launch of Lively, a 3D social environment which allows users to furnish and style their own rooms and invite their friends round to admire them.  Is that really all it is?

Well, apart from anything else, it’s Google: as Google’s Head of 3D Operations Mel Guymon says, ‘Google making a play validates the space like no one else.’  It’s straightforward to install, runs via a plugin in Internet Explorer and FireFox (but, significantly, not yet on the Mac OS or Linux), and like Vivaty, it provides a 3D context in which to view 2D user generated content like YouTube videos.  Every room comes with HTML code to allow users to embed them into a web page or, in Guymon’s ‘standard use case’, their Facebook page. 

The obvious comparison is with Second Life, but they’re really very different creatures.  Reuben Steiger, CEO of one of Lively’s two preferred content developers, says:

I think you’re going to see a lot of blowback at first from people that don’t matter.  The Second Life cognoscenti.  They’ll be pissed because they can’t build stuff and blah, blah, blah.  The real test is whether other people like it.  If they do, that’s when it gets interesting. 

To be honest, I think it’s a pretty superficial comparison.  SL offers a fantastic space for those with the skills and inclination to build content – but at a price.  If you don’t own or rent land, you can’t really build anything.  If you can’t afford land, you can’t afford to be creative, and your in-world experience is reduced to passively consuming other people’s creations. 

Lively, by contrast, is currently completely free for the end user, but provides them with no content creation tools whatsoever at the moment.  Users create rooms by selecting a room name, and can then choose from around seventy shells or bare environments (both indoor environments such as two, three and five room apartments, a coffee shop and a dungeon and outdoor environments such as treetop windmills, a graveyard and a winter scene).  These can then be furnished from an extensive catalogue of furniture, toys and other goodies.  Avatar choice and customisation are pretty limited but movement and camera use are very easy to get to grips with (and infinitely easier than Second Life at its worst).  There’s text chat but no voice, and you can stream music or embed videos from YouTube; further integration with Google Gadgets is planned for the future which is where things could get really interesting for educators.  On the downside, it’s pretty laggy: popular rooms such as World of Warcraft (how could I resist?) and presumably also the inevitable sex rooms that keep springing up despite regular weeding-out took a while to fully rez, although you can start to move around and interact with content fairly quickly.  There’s a limit of 20 avatars per room at the moment, with additional users becoming passive observers.

I don’t really think there’s any need for the SL community to feel threatened by Lively – in fact, just the opposite.  Lively really isn’t trying to compete with SL in terms of direct content creation, although its potential as a 3D environment for mashups is very exciting.  Where SL could really benefit from Lively is in familiarising reluctant users with 3D environments: it’s so user friendly and so easy to quickly create your own little space without learning sophisticated and intimidating building techniques and without financial investment that it could create a whole new audience for virtual worlds, with SL providing a natural next stage for those who become frustrated with the limitations of Lively.

One of the ten percent

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Andy Powell delivered a fascinating and thought-provoking presentation yesterday at the UCISA User Support Conference at the University of Reading.  Not that I was there to see it…

As Andy took the stage in Reading in front of around 120 delegates, his Second Life avatar Art Fossett waited in front of an audience a tenth of that size in the Eduserv Island Virtual Congress Centre, ready to deliver his presentation simultaneously in both venues.  Andy’s slides were projected on the large screens in the virtual centre, and (as far as I could understand anyway) it was this that was broadcast to the real life attendees.  Andy used SL’s talk facility, fairly recently implemented, to speak to both actual and virtual attendees together.  For me, the voice channel and 3D sound worked extremely well: it’s very well implemented and I had no problems with it at all, although a couple of my virtual colleagues were unable to hear his talk.  Virtual delegates benefited during the curtailed Q&A session that followed (as Andy warned, it seems that presentations in SL always overrun) by having one of our number also present in Reading and able and willing to relay questions and comments from the RL audience to us.

Although those of us attending virtually definitely benefited from the event being made available in SL, I’m curious as to how much the RL attendees benefited from it.  Despite my previous peenging about highly visible backchannels at conferences and events, Andy was keen to encourage ‘chat heckling’ from SL delegates in order to demonstrate the value of the mixture of text and voice channels running simultaneously.  Being bound by the conventional format of a RL event of a static speaker, slides and an attentive audience, the real potential of SL was rather hidden: as Andy’s own presentation says, while ‘SL can be used to deliver lectures… [it is] most suited to “active” learning styles’ such as building, coding, discussion, role play, machinima and performance.

Andy did offer some caveats for the use of MUVEs in education.  Just as virtual attendees numbered about a tenth of the number of RL participants, so only around 10% of the RL audience had a SL avatar.  Andy cited Linden Lab’s own research that a massive 90% of accounts don’t make it past the orientation stage, and 90 day user retention remains at 10% despite significant changes and improvements within the environment and associated support.  He also argued that as many as 90% of people feel ‘alienated’ by virtual worlds and it is therefore inappropriate to focus pedagogic activities around MUVEs.  Unsurprisingly, there is evidence that they are much more effective for distance learning than for face to face classes.

Issues of identity in MUVEs are deeply fascinating.  At a recent Engineering Subject Centre event exploring the use of SL as a teaching aid, we were asked to identify ourselves and our institutions at the start of the session and almost all of us happily did so.  The suggestion by one participant that we should add this information to our avatars’ profiles, however, caused consternation:  people seemed very resistant to the idea, and one individual pointed out that people who use the same avatar for non-work activities would not be happy to share such personal information with random people they may meet inworld.  Despite the fact that I only use SL for work-related activities, I felt exactly the same sense of discomfort about explicitly associating my avatar with my real world identity.  Similarly, despite signing up for the Twinity beta, I’ve never actually logged in as by the time I got around to it they’d decided to embrace the use of real names – something I’m just not comfortable with. 

However, Andy raised the suggestion that the nebulous nature of identity in MUVEs might be part of what is turning off so many people: as well as students having to remember different RL and SL names for their teachers and peers, and lecturers (and possibly enterprise systems) needing to associate SL names with RL students for assessment and accreditation, appearance and even gender can be completely transformed in moments.  As we all know, we never really know who we’re talking to online no matter how much we want to fool ourselves, and perhaps the way an environment like SL celebrates and revels in that rather than trying to disguise it contributes to the alienation so many people seem to feel.

virtuALBA student showcase

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I dropped in to the virtuALBA exhibition a couple of weeks ago to view projects created by some of Daniel Livingstone‘s students studying collaborative virtual environments at the University of the West of Scotland.  The projects explored various aspects of Scottish achievements in technology and sport, as well as some distinctive Scottish wildlife (of the non-human variety).

Displays on Scottish inventors were set up in a real-world style exhibition hall:

Although most of the exhibits replicated real life displays, one that particularly stood out as taking advantage of the opportunities offered by SL was the display on Charles McIntosh, which incorporated a mannequin in a raincoat being rained on by their own personal indoor climate (unfortunately my screenshot really doesn’t do it justice):

Outside the main exhibition hall, a virtual Hampden included an interactive game and displays of sporting achievements:

Various beasts, real (wildcats, cattle, seals) and debatable (haggi and the Loch Ness Monster) completed the exhibition, with a particularly skillfully built pair of peregrine falcons and the unofficial CETIS mascot, badgers (don’t ask…):

It was good to see that a number of people had turned out to visit the exhibition and discuss the students’ work with them.  The exhibition will be available at least for a few more days, and is well worth a visit.

World of Conferencecraft? Probably not.

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I was hugely excited to hear about a proper, grown-up scientific conference taking place in my second home, World of Warcraft.  Excitement waned a bit when I discovered that it was a) on a US server (which means acquiring a copy of the US version of the game) and b) in the past, both being factors that rather limited my ability to participate, but I was keen to learn more about this intriguing event.

I’ve idly wondered in the past how an event like this might work in WoW, and reluctantly concluded that it was impractical, so I was impressed to see how smoothly it seems to have run.  One of the big problems I’d come up against was the inability to provide a secure, private space within WoW: unlike an environment like Second Life, where sim owners can forbid access to anyone not ‘on the list’, the entire WoW world is open to any player who chooses to go there, making events vulnerable to (intentional or otherwise) disruption.  The conference organisers minimised this risk by selecting locations that would be relatively easy for low level characters to reach but unlikely to be stumbled upon by passers by, such as the sewers of Undercity and the battlements outside Booty Bay.

The conference attracted around 130 participants, who attended sessions on research and WoW, relationships between WoW and the ‘real world’, and the future of virtual worlds.  In sympathy with the unconventional surroundings, the organisers attempted to create a ‘spontaneous and creative‘ discussion rather than ‘the (dreary) experience of traditional academic conventions, where high-status individuals read aloud long papers, while the low-status masses in the audience sit like victims rather than engaging in a more equal debate’. 

Much as I loved the idea of this conference, in both content and location, I’m inclined to sympathise with Giulio Prisco’s comments on the practicality of WoW for such events.  It doesn’t, and shouldn’t, provide such mundane but essential facilities as streaming video or PowerPoint presentations, and the reality of travelling through a world environment specifically designed to be dangerous and challenging is rather more frustrating than simply entering coordinates and teleporting to the meeting location as in Second Life.

WoW has been subject to a great deal of research into its educational aspects, but the real lessons to be learned can’t realistically be applied within the game by educators.  It’s incredibly engaging, but part of the engagement is the rapid early progress that comes from the extensive scaffolding beginning characters receive, with quests designed to introduce them to the world and to the skills and abilities which their characters slowly acquire as they level.   Particularly in the early stages, learning players are subjected to considerable hand (or hoof) holding which is at odds with the free-form, unstructured approach implied by this conference or by this video: what frustrates me about the video in particular is that progress in the game is achieved precisely not by sitting around talking but by acting and doing.  There’s a very real place for theorycrafting, but to support success in precisely defined and structured challenges.

Second Life on a mobile phone – part 2

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As an alternative to the Vollee mobile phone Second Life client I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, there’s this Samsung mobile phone due out later this year in the US which also claims to run SL.  The Blackberry-style phone and keyboard do seem to lend themselves better to the SL experience than the regular type of phone featured in the Vollee demo, though Vollee does seem to offer more flexibility in general.   It’ll be interesting to see which, if either, of these take off and how well they actually work.  I don’t know, you wait forever for a mobile solution then two come along at once :-)

Second Life on a mobile phone. Yes, really.

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Wired and Newsweek are reporting on a new client which allows users to run Second Life on a 3G mobile phone.  By customising the Second Life client to suit a small phone screen and limited controls and streaming content from their own servers, developers Vollee have produced a system which appears to run extremely well.  The beta launches next month in the States, before being rolled out elsewhere; you can sign up now for future access.  Having just got a new laptop on the grounds that my desktop machine has a fit of the vapours every time I try to log in to the resource greedy virtual world, I’m more than a little impressed with this – certainly the signficantly lower cost of a 3G phone and appropriate data plan will make Second Life more accessible and participation a more realistic possibility for future learners.