Immersive Education and Virtual Worlds: Croquet and MPK20/Wonderland/Darkstar

My colleague Nicole and I recently attended the Boston Digital Media Summit, an event sponsored by the Grid Institute, the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, and Federation of American Scientists (FAS) with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.  The event was organized by the Grid Intitute's Immersive Education Initiative and coordinated by Grid Institute Director Aaron Walsh of Boston College.   The summit's goal was "enabling the age of immersive education" and it attempted to mitigate technology challenges associated with appropriating cutting edge virtual world platforms for educational use.  I've attempted to summarize the key presentations of day 1 of the summit, hi-lighting the overviews of the Croquet and Wonderland virtual world platforms.

The Media Grid and Immersive Education

First, a bit about the Media Grid and the Immersive Education initiative. The Media Grid is:

...a computational grid platform that provides digital media delivery, storage and processing services for a new generation of networked applications...As with the national power grid, which standardizes the production and consumption of power in the United States, the Media Grid establishes open software standards that enable computer applications to “plug in” to digital media delivery and processing services over the global Internet. Applications that only need to consume media content or access media processing services can do so at a fair and standardized price, while the owners of computers that host and deliver media or provide media processing services receive compensation for their contribution to the grid.

In other words, the grid is an open and extensible platform that enables a wide range of applications not possible with the traditional Internet alone. The Grid Institute was founded to build and maintain the grid. One of the initiatives spawned by the Institute is the Immersive Education initiative (immersiveeducation.org). Immersive education is defined as education that:

...combines interactive 3D graphics, commercial game and simulation technology, virtual reality, voice chat (Voice over IP/VoIP), Web cameras (webcams) and rich digital media with collaborative online course environments and classrooms. Immersive Education gives participants a sense of "being there" even when attending a class or training session in person isn't possible, practical, or desirable, which in turn provides educators and students with the ability to connect and communicate in a way that greatly enhances the learning experience. Unlike traditional computer-based learning systems, Immersive Education is designed to immerse and engage students in the same way that today's best video games grab and keep the attention of players.

The initiative itself is "an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems." Increasingly 'immersive education' and 'immersive learning environments' are being used to describe this type of experiential learning (and also used to describe simulations and serious games -- see the eLearning Guild's report on Immersive Learning Simulations).  But in this case the focus is decidedly technical and standards-based.  Walsh and his organization are trying to develop standards to reduce the barriers-to-entry for educational institutions to play in a space dominated by gaming companies with formidable budgets. And they also hope these standards allow for the portability and scalability of content across platforms. 

The initiative focuses on 10 specific areas:

• Next-generation platform selection and development
• Web3D Books; Best practices related to pedagogy, learning assessment, and learning outcomes
• Best practices for constructing Immersive Education learning environments
• Open and platform-neutral 3D/VR file formats
• Curricula; A.I. and game-based learning frameworks
• Immersive illness (mental health)
• Summits, conferences, meetings and training
• Communities of Support

The summit began with opening remarks and continued with a presentation by Henry Kelly, President of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS in 2005 released a report on educational games and in general has some great resources on educational technology). He stressed the benefits of immersive learning and the need for middleware solutions that would include object repositories, student data, structural concepts, etc, and would thus serve as a bridge between various flavors of virtual worlds and persistent online environments such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. This is in stark opposition to the current trend, where these environments are based on proprietary technologies that 'lock in' the user -- an especially risky proposition for educators with limited funding. The summit then continued with a meandering presentation on Second Life by Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium.

The Education Grid and the Platform Ecosystem

But Kelly's presentation set the tone for what Walsh was hoping for here, which was to focus on technology initiatives that would facilitate educational use of existing environments.  Walsh then announced that the Immersive Education Initiative was launching an Education Grid and corresponding Platform Ecosystem.  This ecosystem amounts to a middleware solution that would serve as connective tissue between existing virtual world platforms. They chose three environments with open-source foundations for which to pilot this middleware solution:

• The Croquet Consortium's Croquet virtual world platform
• Sun Microsystems' Wonderland platform
• Linden Labs' Second Life virtual world environment

Diagram of the Platform Ecosystem pilot:

The Initiative later defined the ecosystem as follows:

Based upon open source technologies and open standards, the Education Grid and Platform Ecosystem will provide educators with a comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of virtual world learning environments, interactive learning games, and simulations.  The first three platforms in the ecosystem were introduced at the Summit: Second Life, Sun Microsystems Laboratory's Project Wonderland, and Croquet. These platforms will be enhanced to utilize the server-side Education Grid that will deliver a rich library of learning objects, digital media assets, learning games and services from which a wide variety of Immersive Education experiences can be assembled.

Enough has been written for now here and elsewhere about Second Life. Related to the middleware discussion is the point that only the client in 2L is open source. But the other two platforms were fascinating and worth a closer look.

Croquet

The Croquet Constortium is "an open source metaverse software foundation" which has developed Croquet, a development environment/architecture for creating virtual worlds. The presentation was given by two of the founding architects of the platform: Julian Lombardi, Duke University's assistant vice president of Academic Services and Technology Support (Julian's blog), and Mark McCahill, also at Duke (and creator of the Gopher protocol). Their point was that the Internet was designed as a client-server model back when computing power and bandwidth were scarce, so authoritative servers were needed to provide clients with the necessary state.  But that model is no longer valid -- 30 users can stress a game server using that antiquated architectural model.  And so to build new virtual environments using that schema is thus fundamentally flawed.  Their Croquet platform is peer-to-peer based, so the users retain the current state of the virtual worlds, and new users logging on get the latest version of the world from the closest node on the network.  The architecture stresses the replication of computing rather than of data -- it is a coordination protocol. More from their website:

Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, it features a peer-based network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation between multiple users on multiple devices.

Some more information can be found here:

• Short video on Croquet
• 7 ways that Croquet is better than Second Life

Project Wonderland

Next up was Kevin Roebuck, e-Learning Worldwide Market Development Manager for Sun Microsystems and Community Manager for Immersive Technologies, Global Education and Research. Kevin explained that Sun was working hard to figure out how to better acknowledge, manage, and leverage the remote workforce culture.  The growing remote workforce was already reporting increased loneliness, depression, and reduced productivity due to the decreased  opportunities for social interaction.  The 'disembodied voice on the polycom' syndrome represents the degree to which current communication and collaboration technologies deny emotional engagement for this workforce segment. And to make matters worse, strategic imperatives such as brainstorming are increasingly difficult or impossible in current dispersed-workforce environments.

Sun's answer to this challenge was to create a virtual workplace. Dubbed MPK20 (named after their Menlo Park campus), the 3-D environment was designed to be fully open source (GPLv2) and completely extensible. The promise is to "create a new corporate culture independent of geography." Instead of calling into conference calls, remote workers log into a virtual 'team rooms' workspace where they can walk up to a group of workers and join a conversation.  Their avatars can concurrently edit a large shared document and share applications. They can then walk over to another group that might represent designers from another division (and via Sun Labs Voice Bridge, both recorded and live audio is high-fidelity stereo 'immersive audio' so the initial conversation audio fades as you walk away from it and the new conversation gets louder as you approach it). 

MPK20 utilizes innovative server and client technologies developed by Sun. The client technology is called Wonderland.  This can be thought of as their 'virtual world' open source client. From the Wonderland website:

The vision for this multi-user virtual environment is to provide an environment that is robust enough in terms of security, scalability, reliability, and functionality that organizations can rely on it as a place to conduct real business. Organizations should be able to use Wonderland to create a virtual presence to better communicate with customers, partners, and employees. Individuals should be able to do their real work within a virtual world, eliminating the need for a separate collaboration tool when they wish to work together with others. Individuals should also be able to tailor portions of the world to adapt to their work needs and to express their personal style.

The server technology is called  Project Darkstar -- "the game industry’s first open source, enterprise grade, highly scalable, online game server."   It is the communication and event processing system on which a game client can be built, and Sun released it entirely as open source.  It is platform and game agnostic and is therefore used on a variety of applications from massively multiplayer games to casual games to serious games.

At the summit Sun announced a $25,000 Series of Technology Grants for K-12, Community College and Higher Education Institutions in support of Wonderland Development. Proposals will be accepted in a variety of interest areas ranging from Core Platform, Inter-operability, Content and Curriculum and Pilot Deployments.

Some more information can be found here:

• Sun Immersion Special Interest Group
• Virtual Northstar -- an example of Wonderland/Darkstar

Walsh later was quoted saying: "The previous two generations of Immersive Education were based on specific client-side platforms tied to proprietary server-side infrastructures. The future of Immersive Education revolves around multiple platforms working in unison through the open Education Grid that is built by educators for educators." It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.