How to add a Memory Puzzle Game to your Jibe world

One of the great things about creating your own multiuser virtual world with Jibe is that you can use all kinds of assets created specifically to work in Unity.  And in addition to tons of interesting 3d models, you can also pull in pre-made Unity-based games.

Here’s how you can add a classic Memory Puzzle Game to your own Jibe world.

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Over 1,000 unique visitors to my Jibe world. Thank you!

It’s been 2 months now since I first opened the doors to my Jibe world.

In that time, I’ve had 1,269 different people visit it.

To everyone who has visited, thank you.  And to those of you who haven’t visited yet, I hope you stop by someday soon!

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Flying Avatars and Space Shuttle Orbiter in Jibe

Jibe 1.3 has been released by ReactionGrid!

In addition to a bunch of bugfixes and new features, we’ve now added the ability for avatars to fly.

To celebrate, I imported a model of the Space Shuttle Orbiter and placed it in the sky of my own Jibe world.  To visit it, just fly up!  And to learn how I set it up, read on…

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Summary of ReactionGrid’s ISTE SIGVE presentation in Jibe

ISTE SIGVE (International Society for Technology in Education – Special Interest Group for Virtual Environments) is a group of educators, administrators, and educational technologists who are interested in the development of 3D Virtual Environment platforms for connection and collaboration.

They hold online meetings each month, and on May 17th they invited me to speak to their group about Jibe and Virtual Worlds on the Web.

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Jibe demo at GAMBIT Lab at MIT – Friday May 20 @4pm Eastern

GAMBIT is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore, created to explore new directions for the development of games as a medium. The lab focuses on the creation of video game prototypes to demonstrate their research as a complement to traditional academic publishing.

Tomorrow (Friday) at 4pm Eastern, Chris Hart (ReactionGrid CTO) and I will be at the GAMBIT lab at MIT to talk about Jibe!

More details can be found on the GAMBIT blog.

There will be a live video stream of the presentation, so you can also tune in to watch.

UPDATE 5/24/11: Here’s a recording of our presentation.

-John “Pathfinder” Lester

Authentic Animal Conversation #7: “Walnut Hose”

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Customized Reality: Creating Local and Networked Events in Jibe and Unity3d

We all share a common physical reality.   A leaf gently falling from a tree, a chilling breeze, a startled rabbit running across a field.  We experience these things in the physical world and know that others experience them the same way at the same moments in space and time.

But what if you could change that?  What if you could customize reality so that different people perceive things happening in the world differently?

We don’t have this ability the physical world.  But it can be done in virtual worlds.

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Live Tutorials on the Web for Jibe and Unity3d

I like to write tutorials to help people learn how to do things with Jibe and Unity3d, and you can find them all on my blog.  But sometimes it’s easier to learn by joining a live tutorial.  Doing it live also lets people ask questions during the tutorial.

I  host Live Tutorials using a web-based screen-sharing application called Join.me.  Just go to my Join.me page in your web browser and you can jump right in without having to download any software.  Once you’re in the meeting, you’ll be be added to a Skype conference call so we can communicate using voice.

My Live Tutorials are open to everyone, and each week I’ll be teaching people how to use Jibe and the Unity3d editor to do something new.

More information about my Office Hours and Live Tutorials (including a calendar of scheduled events) can be found here.

And be sure to watch the #ReactionGrid hashtag on Twitter for special announcements!

Want a Personal Tutorial on Unity3d and Jibe?

If you’d like to schedule a time for a personal tutorial to learn more about Unity3d and Jibe, you got it!  Just email me at pathfinder@reactiongrid.com and let me know what day/time works for you.  We can meet using my Join.me page and I can walk you through whatever you’d like to learn.  Beginners welcome!

-John “Pathfinder” Lester

Click me!: How to make an object move and play a sound when you click on it in Jibe and Unity3d

I’ve been playing a lot of Portal 2 lately, and one of my favorite elements from the Portal series is the lovely Weighted Companion Cube.

Today we’ll explore how to create a Companion Cube in Jibe and Unity3d that will spin and speak to you when you click on it.

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Railing Against the Gods: The Unfortunate Metaphor of Virtual World Administrators

Metaphors are powerful tools.

Our minds instinctively grasp for metaphors as a way to more easily understand and classify novel situations.

But some metaphors are more deeply resonant than we may initially suspect.

Which can sometimes lead to unexpected and rather unfortunate consequences in the broader cultural context of online community development.

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