More details will be released gradually. For now we can say that these drones will be light-weight, will fly using four propellers in a standard quadcopter format, and will be programmable. There will be plenty of room for third parties to develop software for these robots.

One of the disadvantages of relying on a third party to store and host your content, is that you can be at the mercy of service outages, policy changes, and price increases. A critical principle of owning your own content is the ability to back it up and transfer it whenever you like. Otherwise, it’s out of your possession.

Second Life is an excellent platform for hosting user-created virtual worlds, but it does not offer a comprehensive back-up service. Today, Pleiades is pleased to announce that we are stepping in to fill that gap.

Pleiades is dedicated to the use of virtual worlds as a learning platform, and we are working with educators to ensure that this platform meets their needs and addresses the unique challenges inherent to teaching. Our new backup service fits into this mission, helping us to ensure that learning communities are able to maintain control of the content they’ve invested countless hours of work and passion into creating.

The service

The service allows you to back up the contents of any full region at once, including all rezzed objects, buildings and terrain. These are packaged into a single download for you, using an industry-standard OAR file, directly compatible with platforms that use OpenSim. The contents of the OAR can also be transferred back into Second Life. This means that you can transfer your content to another platform, work with it offline (for example, on a LAN or desktop installation of OpenSim), or simply save and duplicate it elsewhere in Second Life. Either way, you can be sure that your property is in your control. We charge a one-time introductory fee of $80 USD per full region back-up, with discounts available for back-ups of multiple regions.

At no additional charge, we can copy the contents of your OAR file onto a dedicated OpenSim region for viewing and verification—you’ll be able to view and test your content on our pre-production Global Metaverse Campus. This is not yet guaranteed for classroom use, but we’re working hard on that, too.

Find out more

For more information about this service or to schedule a backup, you should contact us: click here.

We look forward to helping you.

A note on scripts: Many scripts will work automatically, but we cannot guarantee them yet. We will work with you to understand what problems might arise with backing up your scripts, and you can decide whether to re-implement them yourself or have us do it.

A note on ownership: Pleiades honors intellectual property. Service back-ups will only be provided for your content. You must have the right to copy the content you are asking us to back-up.

One of the struggles of building good educational content is making it engaging, something books and games have been doing for ages. Join us for a light-hearted look at the narrative possibilities of an interactive medium and some of the weird hybrids (successful or otherwise) that people have tried. Can we learn from history to make better learning materials in Second Life? (Yes.)

This is a presentation that steps a little outside of Second Life to look at how other mediums deal with the kinds of challenges that Second Life creators face when they are building compelling interactive content.

This session will be about analogy building. We’ll look at how game makers and book makers have approached the kinds of problems that Second Life content creators face. You’ll come away with some new ideas about how narrative and interactivity fit together as well as ways in which they can fall utterly flat.

With that in mind, here are some things that virtual worlds do really well:

1. Give a sense of space. This is the number one promise of virtual reality – that you can explore a 3d environment. In education this could mean exploring an ancient ruin, comparing the scales of different stars, or flying through the structure of a protein.
2. Bring people together remotely. No surprises here, this is the promise of the Internet as a whole. Unless you are teaching a distance learning course, this feature may not seem very useful. But consider arranging an exchange with students in another school somewhere across the globe. How about having an expert come in remotely and interact with the class? The Exploratorium in San Francisco sends teams to the best spot on the planet to observe an astronomical event and then uses Second Life to broadcast live solar eclipses to people all over the world.
3. Allow multi-channel communication. In virtual worlds, you’ve got a whole host of streams of communication available at once. This allows a highly granular flow of communication. For example, students can send in questions over private chat without disrupting the larger flow of the lecture. It is very easy to convene and flow between groups, simply by setting up small group chats.
4. Offer easy light interactivity. Although the scripting languages used in virtual worlds are robust and powerful, they can grow very complicated. But for simpler needs, it can be very easy to script interactions, allowing for lessons and demonstrations that respond to the actions of students. This can allow them to investigate things at their own pace, watch key events over again and generally engage with the materials in an exciting way.
5. Provide easy resets. If you’ve ever spent several periods setting up some kind of demonstration and lesson, only to have to do it all over again for your second period class, you’ll greatly appreciate this. Like any computer file, you can save your virtual environment at a specific point or set up scripts that allow you to recreate certain conditions. This means that students can come in, mess around with the environment to their heart’s content and if there is a problem, it’s easy to start over, and it’s easy to reset for the next class.
6. Take us to other worlds. Dream big! A virtual world allows you to create places that are impossible in the real world. Whether it’s back in time to historically recreated environments, across space to a place you can’t safely or affordably visit, or to a realm of fiction, be it from a book or your own students’ imaginations. Create a movie studio, visit a volcano, soar through the solar system, explore 1920s Harlem, map out Hamlet’s Denmark.

They key term when it comes to virtual worlds is the second word, “world”. Virtual worlds allow you to collapse and transform geography. Communicating over remote distances, teleporting, and flying, these are the basic moves of the virtual world. People from opposite sides of the planet can be in the same place, and the place they are in can be very interesting.

When you are considering a lesson plan that makes use of Second Life or OpenSim, ask yourself “does my lesson mostly revolve about space, geography or communication? If so, you are probably on the right track.

The answer we give is always the same: “You can.”

But then we have to quickly follow up with some clarification. Because the problem is that they’re asking the wrong question.

Technologies like OpenSim and Second Life are designed to be incredibly flexible. Any virtual world worth using will offer a robust scripting language and with good scripting, the possibilities of what you might create become nearly limitless, given enough time and ingenuity.

Educators, however, don’t have limitless time, especially educators who are just trying to get up and running, or learning to use virtual worlds for the first time. So the real question to ask is “Does what I want to do suit the medium?”

There are some things that virtual worlds do very well, and others that can be done but that go against the grain of the technology. For instance, you can surf the web from within the world. That’s pretty cool, but you are almost certainly better off using a regular web browser day-to-day.

It can be easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of what you can do in a virtual world to the point of forgetting to wonder if it’s what you should do. When planning a new project it’s always worth stopping and asking, “Would I be better off just handing out pencils and paper for this lesson?”

Meerkat is a project of the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), and Pleiades has been actively contributing for some time. We see the ability to customize a viewer for educational users and content builders as the path forwards for wider adoption in virtual worlds. To that end, we showed off a few of the new features in Meerkat including:

• The Avatar Radar
• Tweaked usability and better defaults
• Higher precisions and tweaked buildings tools
• The ability to build content offline and import it to Second Life and other Virtual Worlds
• The Grid manager and grid-to-grid teleporting, allowing you to switch between Virtual Worlds without quitting the client.

Pleiades’ involvement with the OMF is part of our wider vision for a metaverse of loosely coupled virtual worlds. Our long term goal is to get Meerkat compatible with as many grids as we can. We want Meerkat to be the link between SL-like virtual worlds, similarly to how a web browser allows you to switch from Facebook to MySpace without any trouble.

Check out the lastest build of the viewer on the project’s website. It is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

“Virtual worlds offer an opportunity to experience a sort of language and cultural immersion that once required us to live abroad. Coupled with the motivational and addictive qualities of play, we are presented with a new set of tools with respect to language acquisition.” Patrick Edwards-Daugherty was addressing to an audience of design, management, and computer science graduate students.

Developers at Pleiades, the Sorbonne, and at the University of Central Missouri have been cooperating on a virtual world based on Montmartre, a Paris neighbourhood, in the 1920s.

“Meerkat will leverage the knowledge and skills of the open source community and leading virtual world firms to advance the platform,” says James Neal, President of the Open Metaverse Foundation. “Our goal is to expand the scope of metaverse development.”

Pleiades is contributing source code to Meerkat. “We see this viewer project as an opportunity to experiment with new features for educators and students,” says Amanda Levin, who manages Pleiades development efforts on Meerkat.

“Pleiades is extending its long-standing policy of cooperation with open source projects and developers into virtual worlds,” says Patrick Edwards-Daugherty, President of Pleiades.

Professor Bryan Carter, who has been involved for more than ten years in various 3D modeling projects related to the Harlem Renaissance, will be using Virtual Harlem for pilot studies.

“Teaching methods will evolve to match this amazing technology,” he predicts.

Virtual Harlem was built by Pleiades, which retains an interest in any potential commercial revenues it generates.

“We are continuing to develop and expand Virtual Harlem, both within the Second Life grid and beyond,” says Project Manager Amanda Levin.

Virtual Harlem can be found in the Second Life grid at:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Harlem/127/130/30