We are excited to announce that we are wrapping up the China simulation build in the OpenSim. We are currently building 8 sims in the OpenSim for our client to teach Mandarin Chinese in this virtual space. We had previously provided you with screen shots of the traditional side of China, but have not yet provided you with images of the modern side of the development. We are pleased to now be able to provide you with images of this work below:

MORE TO COME SOON!

It has been a month now since we provided details on our Chinese OpenSim Virtual World Development. We are currently building the Forbidden City of China to provide students with familiarity with their surroundings in the virtual space. From our studies we have found that virtual world users often enjoy recognizing their virtual surroundings. Therefore, by creating some of the well known spaces in China we hope to help the students feel comfortable within this virtual learning space. Not only are we building these structures to resemble the Forbidden City but are actually building these to be dynamic classrooms. Within the classrooms you can click a control panel located in the back of the room and change the layout of the room to a round table, formal classroom, breakout sessions, and even one-on-one meeting spaces. These dynamics allow for the classes to be held in one single location and will not disrupt other classes being held on this private grid. Additionally, we have developed an innovative interactive white board for Second Life and OpenSim. This board is one of the only boards that will allow users to do all of the following: 1. Easily change the video media (all-in-one) with a click of a button 2. Easily drag and drop PowerPoint screens on to the board with the board automatically arranging the items in the appropriate fashion 3. The ability to rez objects on the whiteboard such as pointers, boxes, circles, text, etc. To see some of the progress of this development take a look at the screen shots below.

Forbidden City:

Country Side of China

Interactive Whiteboard & Video Player

Dynamic Layout 1 of Classroom:

Dynamic Layout 2 of Classroom:

Control Panel For Dynamic Classroom:

We will keep you posted on the development as our team continues to design and develop. Keep watching our blog for more updates!

We are at it again! We have broke ground on a very large OpenSim private server grid development. This development will be for teachers to conduct online lectures with their virtual classes. We are building this tool outside of Second Life so that we can have full control over the system. The virtual world will have a learning management system tied into it which will allow teachers to track the students progress throughout the classes, and allow them to take their tests within this virtual world. We are building this custom virtual world to help support the large audience (around 800 concurrent users by 2010) that will be on these grid servers. We look forward to building this very large simulator (roughly around 6 sims connected) for our client. Be on the look out for new blog posts from our team to see the project come alive!