Otago and Canterbury universities have created an experimental Grid to host a virtual world. Students and staff across NZ tertiary organisations are ‘in-world’ investigating the potential of this environment for education and research.

Virtual worlds and education

Online virtual worlds are computer systems that immerse the user in a realistic three dimensional simulated environment. They take the ordinary channels of communications over the Internet, e.g chat rooms, and embed them in a world more closely mapped to real-life social interactions. Users are represented by an ‘avatar’ that embodies their persona in the virtual world and enables interaction with other users within the environment.

Online virtual worlds are a relatively new phenomenon, and their use for education is even newer. Despite this, there is much interest in their potential to offer a new direction and culture for education, and many users or ‘residents’, including tutors, scientists, researchers and students, are exploring these worlds for their educational potential.

Many educational institutions also have a virtual presence (particularly in the virtual world Second Life) through the ownership of virtual land and buildings, and teach courses and hold meetings and other events ‘in-world’.

Virtual worlds can offer new and innovative learning opportunities, rather than simply being a tool to augment elearning activities. Not only do virtual worlds allow distance students a more social educational experience, the inclusion of multimedia such as video, images, presentations and web content in-world makes for a much richer experience.

Dr Melanie Middlemiss, project manager from the University of Otago, says “these virtual world environments can be used to augment traditional learning approaches with techniques that are more engaging to the ‘digital natives’”.

Grids and virtual worlds

The ONGENS OpenSim Virtual World Grid uses grid architecture. This means that different processes of the simulation are handled by different servers at different locations.  This provides a scalable architecture and improved performance, enabling more users spread over more locations to participate at one time. Currently the virtual world is hosted on servers at Otago and Canterbury universities, and connected over KAREN.

Access over KAREN means that users connecting to the grid from KAREN member institutions will be able to experience improved performance compared with other virtual world services, such as the US-based Second Life. Better performance means a more convincing or ‘immersive’ experience.

Dr Middlemiss says that “with virtual worlds becoming more complex and providing increasingly rich and immersive content to users, high-bandwidth, high-speed networks such as KAREN are essential. The use of KAREN to provide these environments can ensure that critical issues, such as scalability and quality of service can be dealt with, ensuring that New Zealand educators and researchers have the support and access to take advantage of this emerging field”.

A collaborative virtual adventure

In the spirit of collaboration and experimentation, anyone in the education and research field who wants to explore the possibilities of virtual worlds for teaching and learning can join and teleport into the world.

Current users hail from Otago, Canterbury, Auckland, Victoria and Waikato universities, Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, Wellington Institute of Technology and Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology.

The scalability of the grid architecture means that the number and location of servers can expand across the country to meet the demand of users without compromising performance. This is what is envisaged for the next phase of the project: the development of a National Virtual World Grid.

More information

ONGENS Virtual World Grid
SLENZ | Second Life Education in New Zealand
OpenSimulator
Second Life

Contact

Dr Melanie Middlemiss
Department of Information Science, University of Otago
mmiddlemiss [at] infoscience.otago.ac.nz

[Top: Melanie logged in as a 'resident' in the ONGENS Virtual World. Bottom: In-world, an avatar at a University of Auckland created meeting space in the ONGENS Virtual World]

Updated 28 October 2008