Creative and engaging "Small World" developed with Adobe Flex application

One of our senior engineers has a colleague who is part of the Outsmart team, a company here in Auckland, New Zealand that develops unique Rich Internet Applications (RIA). He showed me a new web based 3D virtual world called SmallWorlds that Outsmart has developed.

Once I got my beta invite (and some time in the early morning to have a play) I was able to quickly build my avatar, shop to buy some furniture for my new home, play games, watch YouTube videos on my flat screen or sit and chill and admire my personally designed art work.

If you are interested in giving SmallWorlds a whirl...email me at brenda.frisk@nextspace.co.nz (it is a closed beta) and I will email you a beta invite (put in your subject header: "smallworlds beta invite".)

I was able to catch up with Darren Green, Technical Director for Outsmart, and ask him a few questions:

1. How did your concept evolve for Smallworlds?
   
   SmallWorlds has evolved from several product ideas we have been considering over the past 18 months. We (Outsmart - the company behind SmallWorlds) have been designing and building products for numerous Web 2.0 start-ups, and through this process have been in an ideal position to get a feel for when the convergence points were forming for web applications and services.
   
   SmallWorlds evolved from several products we were considering to build:
   • collaboration
   • sharing and realtime communications applications (groupware)
   • game building and sharing platforms
   • and several ideas around social networking applications.
     
     
   While SmallWorlds is in essence a casual virtual world, it is in a broader sense a new way of sharing and consuming web content, media and other forms of digital entertainment. Our vision for SmallWorlds is for it to become a place for like-minded people to socialize, share, play and even create on the web.
   
   
2. Who is the target market for Smallworlds?
   
   Being a convergence product, SmallWorlds has several target markets that we hope to cover. Our primary demographic would have to be users 15-30 years of age who like socializing on the net, but we intend to cover a broader range than this by including casual games and group collaboration capabilities.
   
   
3. What will a user find when they come into Smallworlds?
   
   An easy to use, yet powerful avatar builder. A room builder where you can create your own perfect socializing and entertainment space. We have virtual shops full of items and widgets (such as Graffiti Canvases and YouTube TVs), and there are plenty of spaces to explore. We are in the early stages of a private beta presently so the options currently available are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to come.
   
   
4. Adobe®Flex™Builder™ 2 is now free for education institutions. Do you foresee that skills in this area is something students in senior/high school could/should focus on?
   
   We see Flex as being one of the most advanced and powerful application development platforms available today. Combine that with the ubiquity of the Adobe Flash player (the virtual machine that Flex applications run in), and the explosive nature of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and you will see (as we do) that Flex Development will become one of the most highly demand skillsets for graduates in the coming years.
   
   
5. What other skills could you suggest to students if they were looking to get into this field?
   
   Modern applications are bringing together both technical and graphic/visual design skills. Having some exposure to tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash is definitely an advantage.

Picture Gallery

Here is my avatar just hanging out listening to music in the public chat lounge.





Shopping for furniture (you start with 1500 tokens) for my new "digs."





Starting to setup my virtual home with the some of the furniture that was purchased from the Modern Living furniture shop.





School Chat....
Navigation and the user interface is very easy to use and get around in. I see a lot of education applications where SmallWorlds could apply....I look forward to further discussions with the developers to see how this can be implemented.

Have Fun!

Synthetic Worlds - New Scientific Guinea Pig

Virtual Parallels collide at the Synthetic Worlds Institute at the University of Indiana.

Arden was developed by Professor Edward Castronova and colleagues to explore the economic changes that can occur in a synthetic world and real world and how one impacts the other. Arden "gives social scientists an entire populated world on which to perform experiments - something always lacking in the real world." (BBC.com)

The Shakespeare era has been created to engage with online players to create a social laboratory without the users realizing it. Social scientists will start tweaking within Arden and see how the synthetic community within Arden will respond.

Takes the white lab rat to a whole new level.

Classroom chats.....
Will synthetic worlds take over social research? Is it a reflection of directions that societies will take...evolve to? Will social scientists be able to predict and be able to stop potentially harmful events from happening? Time will tell.....

Researchers develop a virtual elearning teacher that responds to learner emotions

A research team at Massey University in Auckland have created a virtual teacher called Eve that is part of a new teaching system.

The Massey scientists, led by Dr Hossein Sarrafzadeh at the Auckland-based Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences have developed the system initially for "one-to-one maths teaching with eight-year-olds."

"The animated Eve (with a human-sounding voice) can ask questions, give feedback, discuss questions and solutions and show emotion. To develop the software for this system the Massey team observed children and their interactions with teachers and captured them on thousands of images."

"From these images of facial expression, gestures and body movements they developed programs that would capture and recognise facial expression, body movement, and (via a mouse) heart rate and skin resistance."

Read press release....

School Chat....

A very interesting concept to discuss with your students....computers that can detect and react to human emotion.

This new technology could take computer/human interaction to a new level.

Will emotion now be a part of digital virtual worlds such as social network websites?

How will this "human factor" be able to help businesses build global networks?

Could this have an impact on reducing a global carbon footprint?

Where does this take the learning classroom of the future? As a life-long-learner, will we all be assigned a virtual tutor that could adapt to our career pathway and keep learning from a global knowledge gateway?

Will the virtual teacher become the news aggregate of the future?

So many questions.........

Looking at developing a meaningful online experience for children.

The Virtual Worlds Conference is wrapping up this week in London (Oct 23 - 26). An article posted on the BBC News [ Virtual worlds threaten 'values' ] caught my eye, a summary of the opening key note from Lord Puttnam.

BBC News stated that Puttnam "feared" most of the virtual worlds for kids offered nothing more than a way to sell products/services.

Further quoting Puttnam as saying "The challenge ahead is this - to ensure that virtual worlds are increasingly places that offer real meaning to their lives and in the real world to learn from the sense of community and collaboration that's been experienced in virtual worlds."

There was a panel of "virtual world creators" that focused on children's content that were there to respond. According to the BBC News article, most seemed to have a weak response to Puttnams' challenge.

Having said that, I remember when I was a kid and many articles/discussions occurred over the "dangers" of television for youth. Advertisers were targeting my young mind in between Yogi Bear and Disney....my parents were used to being targeted through radio and print.

Is this scenario much different?

New generation of media - new generation of consumers.

Here are a couple of virtual world models to take a look at:

http://www.metaplace.com/ Metaplace looks like a great idea....although there doesn't seem to be a place to sign-up and give it a try. Metaplace reported over 10,000 applications of keen alpha testers in the first week. In the world of tech testing...beta will be next....so if you sign-up for metamail....you may get a chance.

What is Metaplace? "Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web."

http://www.kaneva.com Kaneva is looking to bring social networking to a virtual world level. The website reports "think of Kaneva as Second Life meets MySpace, with a dash of Match.com thrown in - aimed not at tech-savvy teens but at a mainstream."

Users are able to new view and share YouTube videos through Kaneva.