Entries Tagged 'PWL' ↓
December 14th, 2007 — learning, John Seely Brown, education, UK, Futurelab, PWL, Virtual Worlds
Today’s email contained my regular dose of news from Futurelab, an excellent UK group that is worth checking out around education and technology. As I poked around, I found a link to a very interesting article on the Blog of John Seely Brown, entitled “Why Virtual Worlds Can Matter“. Definately worth a read for those interested in the Parallel World. An excerpt to wet your appetite:
To that end, we believe that these games are, at base, learning environments. The kind of learning, as we explore throughout this paper is radically different from what we traditionally think of as the accumulation of facts or acquisition of knowledge. Virtual worlds require us to think about knowing, rather than knowledge, what Cook and Brown have called “knowledge in action.” The problems players face inside virtual worlds, the things that require players to put knowledge into action, are not simply game design problems. While games like World of Warcraft do present real challenges that need to be solved, much like puzzles, the real challenge that these games present is the problem of collective action and knowledge in action. They involve the experience of acting together to overcome obstacles, managing skills, talents and relationships and they create contexts in which social awareness, reflection and joint coordinated action become an essential part of the game experience.
December 12th, 2007 — commerce, vCommerce, research, Otherland, PWL, Gartner, Virtual Worlds
In my usual daily hunting around the net, I found a blog posting about a recent set of Gartner reports on vCommerce:
By 2010, 20 percent of global Tier 1 retailers will have a marketing presence in online games and virtual worlds. […] These virtual worlds and video games are emerging as places where consumers can shop and retailers need to be ready to respond to this growing demand.
Both the Gartner research and the general information in the Otherland Group Blog will be of interest to those following the evolution of the Parallel World!
November 21st, 2007 — fan, social graph, YouTube, Facebook, PWL
Stay in touch with events, new software, and offer your feedback/insights on how parallel worlds should develop!
On Facebook you can join as a ‘Fan’ at the link: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7472551362
On YouTube I’m posting many of the PWL old and new videos at the link: http://www.youtube.com/rhoinkes
October 31st, 2007 — PWL, Stacey Spiegel, Rock & Roll, Virtual Worlds, Rockheim, Norway, PwlMMO
The Norwegian government continues to leak more project information to the press. Highlighted in this article is Virtual Rockheim once again - showing an image of the Holodeck-like 3d playlists amongst more information on the whole Museum project itself.
For those who can read Norwegian and wish to know more, see this link.
October 8th, 2007 — McIntosh Gallery, Conference, UofWestern Ontario, Playing the Gallery, PWL, Stacey Spiegel, 2007
While I was busy in Halifax @ ACADIA 2007, Parallel World Labs was involved in another Conference at the University of Western Ontario.
From October 3rd -5th 2007, the McIntosh Gallery at The University of Western Ontario hosted an international symposium called “Playing the Gallery: the art of games”.
Invited experts from creative industries, social sciences, humanities and applied sciences will discuss their current work in computer games with a perspective on what the implications of this dynamic form of cultural expression might imply for social change.
Stacey Spiegel, Co-founder and CEO of Parallel World Labs was the driving force behind the conference and a keynote speaker.
October 8th, 2007 — PWL, Sustainable Cities, ACADIA, 2007, OrbisRT
OrbisRT was featured at the ACADIA 2007 Conference, in the Sustainable Cities Workshop. OrbisRT provided the real-time visualization tools to explore and understand new development alternatives under study in the workshop for an area of Halifax, Canada.
Model data was imported from GIS, CAD, Google Sketchup, and the Polytrim software and explored interactively with different design alternatives from the local area and even from the Halifax Citadel.
As we evolve OrbisRT a little further, we will be releasing it as free and Open Source software to allow more informed design and decision-making in our urban environments, and encourage greater research collaboration in spatial disciplines.
October 8th, 2007 — Canadian Architect, CDRN, PWL, UofWaterloo, UofToronto, collaboration, OrbisRT, PD
I finally got my hands on a copy of the June 2007 issue of Canadian Architect. This issue features a number of articles by the Canadian Design Research Network, of which I am a Board Member. One of those articles is entitled The Changing Face of Practice which highlights the PWL software Poetic Dimensions (which is now merging into the new OrbisRT). Of specific note is the use of PD in an Immersive Media Lab environment, and for collaborative use.
September 12th, 2007 — UofWaterloo, UofToronto, OpenGL, OpenSceneGraph, PWL, ICDVM, CLR, PD, Immersion Studios, Polytrim, OrbisRT, 3d, PwlMMO
OrbisRT is a next-generation visualization/game engine. It is a new Parallel World Labs initiative and builds upon prior work in the Centre for Landscape Research (UofToronto), ICDVM (UofWaterloo), and Immersion Studios. OrbisRT is a fully Open Source application (under the Apache license, though some components are LGPL, etc.), based on OpenGL, OpenSceneGraph, and a number of custom tools/modules (including some very nice Shader/Normal Mapping capabilities for terrain).
It is still very early days for this new application but the image here is from a model being constructed for an upcoming workshop and includes data from GIS, a 10kx10k aerial photo texture set, and photogrammetrically corrected (well in progress) models created in SketchUp (a 170+MB dataset), running at over 60fps on a 1920×1200 resolution screen (2.8GHz Pentium D, Nvidia 7950GX2 card not running in SLI mode). Thanks go to the Waterloo team for continuing to model this excellent new dataset!
Network control will be coming in the next week to complete the wrapping of the core PD and NeoPD tools that were used before, then on to all the new Game/MMO features of the previous PwlMMO client based on Torque Game Engine.
September 6th, 2007 — PWL, Rock & Roll, music, Rockheim, Google Earth
The Norwegian government has officially released some early information on the new Rockheim Rock & Pop Museum and Virtual Rockheim Experience that Stacey Spiegel & I have been working on (well I’ve been focused on the Virtual side). Time to show Web 2.0 what ROCK & ROLL is all about. A PDF of the full-page article in the Norwegian press is viewable: Rockheim in the News! (the article is in Norwegian FYI)
August 13th, 2007 — technobabble, PHP, PWL, login, accounts, wiki, MediaWiki, PwlAMS, PwlMMO
WARNING: This post is very technical and therefore only for those who care about such stuff.
Today I tackled an interesting problem - that being the integration of user accounts/login between PwlMMO and MediaWiki. This will allow users of any Pwl MMO to have linked pages & edits in an associated Wiki. The following post discusses the method used for this integration… Continue reading →
