Tag Archives: education

My Office Hour in your Browser

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Welcome to Jibe!

We’ve been working very hard at ReactionGrid on our virtual world platform called Jibe.

Jibe is a great way to give people access to virtual worlds through a web browser, and future versions will support mobile devices and even game consoles.  You use the Unity3D editor to create environments in Jibe, and I’ve been having a lot of fun learning how to use it as well as finding cool places to get reusable 3D mesh content.

I now have my own Jibe-based virtual world online and accessible by anyone who wants to visit.  So I’m officially expanding my weekly Office Hours to include a couple new meetings each week that I’ll be hosting in my Jibe world.  See my Office Hours webpage for all the updated details.

You can visit my Jibe world even if I’m not around.  Just open it in your web browser and have fun exploring.  I’m still building it out, so please mind the mess.  I plan to add some fun games and hidden secrets in the future.  Hope to see you there!

Sitting at my workbench in Jibe. And yes, having a fire that close to my spaceship is probably a bad idea.

Jon Brouchoud’s Prefab Full Sims for Opensim

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Jon Brouchoud is an insanely talented designer of 3d spaces.  His personal website has lots of information about his work, and Jon also runs a site all about Architecture and Design in Virtual Environments.

Here’s a blurb about Jon.

“As a freelance design consultant, Jon Brouchoud has created a variety of award winning designs, 3D experiences and serious game applications in Unity3D, Second Life and OpenSim.

Jon holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and draws from his architectural background to create design concepts for a wide range of client types – including education, healthcare, government, advertising, and private enterprise.”

Jon recently announced that he is selling some of his prefab full sims for Opensim at the discounted price of $60 USD.  Each full sim package is delivered as an Opensim OAR file, and Jon accepts Paypal.

If you’re looking for prefab virtual spaces with a clean design and stunning looks, you really should check these out.  Here are some examples.

Avatars in the Boardroom – A Presentation at Tuck School of Business

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I recently visited Tuck School of Business and gave a lecture on virtual worlds.

You can read all about it on the ReactionGrid blog.

 

 

Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #36+37: Visiting Help Island on ReactionGrid

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The region Help Island on ReactionGrid is being developed by Tinsel Silvera.

It contains resources for new avatars including a freebie area, a Gallery of Prims for new builders, and Hypergates to various places to explore.

For today’s two meetings we visited Tinsel’s region and had a great discussion about best practices for helping new users in virtual worlds.

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My interview with Paisley Beebe on “Tonight Live”

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On January 23rd 2011, I was an invited guest on Paisley Beebe’s “Tonight Live” show in Second Life.  Thank you again to everyone on the Tonight Live and Treet.tv team for working so hard to put on such a professional show and the opportunity for me to participate.   I had a fun time, and thank you to everyone who attended as well.

I shared some of my thoughts about my time working at Linden Lab, some simple advice for Linden Lab’s new CEO, my new gig with Reaction Grid, the state of education in virtual worlds, and the future of interconnected virtual worlds in general.

I hope I was entertaining.  If anyone would like me to expand on anything I said in the interview, please leave a blog comment and I’ll happily reply.

Here’s a recording of my interview.

-John “Pathfinder” Lester

Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #31+32: A Message in a Bottle for StaminaGrid

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For this Sunday meeting, we made a couple very special excursions on the Hypergrid.

Instead of discovering strange new worlds and interesting new creations, we found an empty and vacant place.

So we left a message in a bottle.

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Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #30: Exploring giant geometric models and mathematics

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At this meeting visited the region Wizzy on ReactionGrid.  At this location, Wizard Gynoid has created a giant model of the E8 Polytope, one of the most complex and elegantly beautiful geometric objects known to mathematicians.

Read on for a full transcript and photos of our adventure.

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The next 4 meetings of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club will be hosted by Vanish Seriath

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I’ll be offline for a week starting Jan 12.  So I won’t be around to host the next four meetings of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club.

But the show must go on!

Vanish Seriath frequently attends our club meetings, and he has graciously offered to lead the next three meetings.

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New Mailing List for the Hypergrid Adventurers Club

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Our Hypergrid Adventurers Club continues to grow.  At our last meeting we set a new record by having people from 5 completely different grids attending our club via Hypergrid connections.  We typically have about 20 people attending our big Sunday meetings. And we’re even expanding our collaborative efforts to other grids.

In addition to our weekly inworld meetings, we stay in touch with each other via this blog, our #HGAC hashtag on Twitter, and our IRC channel.

It’s always good to have different options for communicating.  And it’s especially important to use the right tool for the right job.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to create a Google Groups mailing list for the Club.  This will allow us to have more detailed ongoing discussions.  I also hope this new list will allow us to talk about broader topics such as education and the exploration of all kinds of different virtual worlds.

I’ve had very good success with mailing lists in the past.  They’re a great way to help a growing community evolve.

And boy, we are growing!

Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester

 

Hypergrid Adventurers Club meet #28+29: Physics Education and Giant Laboratories on NewWorldGrid

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This past Sunday we made two excursions to the region Physics on NewWorldGrid, where we discovered and explored a giant-sized physics lab as well as a planetarium.

In our second meeting of the day we met with the creator Aime Socrates, who also built the amazing CERN nuclear physics area we explored in a previous visit.

Read on for a full transcript and many photos from our two meetings on Sunday.

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