OpenSim in stereoscopic 3D

Last week we (3DLES) did a presentation on an educational fair in the Netherlands in stereoscopic 3D with a Epson 3D beamer and the CtrlAltStudio viewer for OpenSim. The Dutch company EPS-presentation invited us to present our educational OpenSimulator environment on this fantastic beamer. The result was amazingly good and it was also quite easy to work and build in this 3D mode. Some teachers were uncomfortable with the 3D view but the young students were all very excited.

Epson 3D beamer(s)

As you can see the beamer is actually two beamers in a frame. One beamer for the left and one for the right eye. See the specs of the beamer, and it has a very good pricing, around € 1600. The CtrlAltStudio viewer version 1.0 (ctrlaltstudio.com) on a Windows 7 computer connected it all to our 3DLES OpenSim environment.  Really a great experience.

3DLES partner in European TILA project

TILA welcome area in OpenSim

This year 3DLES teamed up as a technical and educational partner in the European TILA project. This project aims to improve the quality of foreign language teaching and learning processes by means of meaningful telecollaboration among peers: that is the aim of the European project Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition (TILA). The project is funded by the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Programme and will run from January 2013 to 2015.

What does 3DLES do? 
3DLES takes care of the technical department. Installing and running OpenSim on a dedicated server, the website and Moodle, Big Blue Button teleconferencing software, etc. But we also build and script new tools and regions in OpenSim and take care of educating teachers to work with these environments.

TILA project Objectives

The TILA project seeks:

1. to innovate and enrich language teaching programmes at secondary schools and make them more motivating and effective by stimulating telecollaboration for intercultural awareness with peers of other cultures;
    
2. to empower language teachers and teacher trainers and contribute to the development of their ICT literacy skills and organisational, pedagogical and intercultural competences for telecollaboration, by promoting experiential learning in telecollaboration tasks development, implementation and evaluation;
    
3. to study the possible added value telecollaboration might have in language learning for intercultural understanding of younger learners.

More information about this project can be found at tilaproject.eu 

MetaMeets 2012

Last year I visited MetaMeets 2011 in Amsterdam and was impressed by all the OpenSim knowledge that was walking around in real life there. Great presentations and a real Amsterdam ambience.

This year MetaMeets 2012 was held in 's Hertogenbosch (the Dutch just say Den Bosch) on Friday November 30th and Saturday 1st December. The theme is: “The Art of Creation : Virtuality meets Reality” 

On Friday I spoke there about how we have used OpenSim so far to create and run virtual language villages for K12+ and how OpenSim is a great addition for educators world wide.
Other speakers on this 'Open Source Worlds' topic were: Maria Korolov of Hypergrid Business (www.hypergridbusiness.com), Justin Clark-Casey, a core developer of OpenSim (justincc.org) and Jan Northof of YOUin3D (www.youin3d.com).


Watch the  recorded livestream of Justin CC and Nick Zwart