Real time avatars

Over the last month or so I have become aware of initiatives to assist users to create life like or even real time gestures for their avatars. It all seemed like a dream of the distant future – well a couple of years at least! But then I came across this posting from the ACM Tech News today – and it looks as though that distant future is just around the corner!

Avatar Mimics You in Real Time
PhysOrg.com (03/25/08) Zyga, Lisa

A digital avatar capable of mirroring a person’s movements in real time has been developed by researchers at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, and Israel’s Ben Gurion University. The researchers say the technology opens up new possibilities for touch-free, intuitive human-computer interaction. The prototype system features real-time performance of audio-visual analysis so that the avatar can move immediately. The system’s hardware ingredients are an inexpensive Webcam and a pair of standard headphones, and the system interoperates with a standard PC. Users must wave their hands around at first so the system can identify their skin color, as it depends on recognizing skin color to follow hand and head movements. The system is capable of recognizing a series of 66 parameters that classify facial expression, and there are also high-level facial expressions that users can manually activate with buttons. The system can recognize many basic gestures, including those from the American Sign Language alphabet, by finger position analysis. Future applications include its employment in virtual chat rooms and online call centers, where users are represented by avatars to maintain privacy. In mobile devices the avatar system could function as an interface that promotes user-friendliness.
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How awesome will this be! except that now everyone will know if I am yawning or dozing off or just staring out the window or doing other things that maybe I shouldn’t! The potential uses seem endless but is it an invasion of our privacy – do I want someone else to know what my real self is doing? It raises all kinds of questions about what we expect our avatar to be and how far it is us and how far it is a fantasy! One part of me is fascinated the other is somewhat wary!

Funding at last!

Well what an exciting couple of days! I heard about 7.45am yesterday that our consortium’s application for funding from the NZ government’s Encouraging and Supporting Innovation fund had been successful! With around NZ$500,000, it will allow us to devote some real resource to exploring and developing education and education resources in Second Life.  The consortium is made up of Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, Otago Polytechnic, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and Wellington Institute of Technology and IBM are giving us their support too.

Our current plans include a research report looking at the pedagogy of immersive environments, the identification and building of two learning activities designed to take best advantage of SL, the introduction of educators to Second Life and assistance for them to effectively teach there, the piloting and evaluation of the learning activities with students by these educators. Ambitious? You bet! It’s going to be a busy 18 months I think but hopefully we should learn a huge amount and be able to pass on a number of tips on what to do (and what not to do!).

Part of the project too is to extend and maintain a community of practice for NZ educators and both Koru and the Kiwi Educators group will be big players in that. Watch out for news of events happening soon.

Sharing Second Life life stories

Just had a neat Kiwi Eds session on Koru tonight. Iphi came to talk to us about International Day for Sharing Life Stories and how we might play a role in Second Life. Those of us there thought it would be a great idea to use Koru for a two hour (perhaps) session. The day is on May 16th and we will use this blog posting to gather some of the ideas on what we might do – so if you have any ideas – please comment!

This is from the the blogsite that Iphi told us about:

“The Museum of the Person International Network (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA) have announced Listen! – International Day for Sharing Life Stories, an international celebration of life stories to take place on May 16th 2008. They are launching the project website, www.ausculti.org to assist with information sharing and coordination of the campaign. The goal of the campaign is to gain broad recognition of May 16 as an annual day for sharing, listening to, and gathering the stories of people’s lives.”

We wondered whether it would be fun to have part (or all ) of the session on Second Life life stories – what do you think? And would you be prepared to share a story of your life (second or first?) let me know so that we can think about some planning!

Using Profiles

As I have been thinking about ‘what do you need to know’ to be ‘competent’ in SL – it occurred to me to remind people to use their profiles! In my very early days in SL I was a little hesitant to click on someone to view their profile – somehow it seemed like an invasion of their privacy! – but I have long since realised that a) no one knows if you click on their profile (they don’t feel it! honest!) and b) people only put in their profile the things that they are happy for you to read!

I have also learned that it is a VERY useful way of finding new places (check out people’s PICKs),

finding out the LM for their shop(s) (check out their Classified),   finding new groups (just double click on a group name in a persons profile for more info on that group) and occasionally interesting web pages and bits about them in Real Life (Click on 1st life).  It is also an interesting way of discovering about the different online identities that people have and sometime who their friends are!

BUT imho the most useful tab of all on anyone’s profile is the My Notes tab – here you can write notes to yourself about the person – real name, email address, what they are interested in – where you met them etc etc and it is all totally PRIVATE – you are the only person who can read what you have put in the My Notes page! I use it all the time to keep track of all the different people I have met for the first time in SL – I find it the most useful way of keeping notes in SL about people.

And while we are on the subject of profiles – have you looked at your own recently? The more info you put in your profile the more chance there is that others will be able to see what you have in common! And don’t forget photos – SL or RL. Next time you are in SL, have an explore of your profile – and of the other people you meet!

SL Core Competencies

One of the things that has puzzled me for sometime is how people with little knowledge of SL can contemplate bringing students into SL and doing anything useful with them.  I found that it took me some time to ‘learn the world’ before I felt I was ready to start coping with helping others!  I wrote about this (and other early impressions of Second Life) in an invited paper for the Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology (BACIT) last year.   So it always amazes me when someone posts a request for basic assistance on the SLED list,  for example how to open a box in SL, and yet believes that they will be able to function as a teacher in SL.  (I don’t mean that there is anything wrong with not knowing how to open a box or move an object around, we all have to learn these things, – only that you HAVE to know those things before you even think about teaching there!).

So when I came across the Second Life Core Competencies Framework being put together by Chris Eggplant over at EducationUK (RL Chris Swaine), I got quite excited and I have been using it as a an informal list of things that people need to know at different times.  The framework has three levels and is described in the document like this (for practitioner read educator, as that is the context):

  “Education in Second Life requires the acquisition of three sets of skills:

1. A set of core skills / competencies to become an effective SL resident.

1. To be an effective learner requires the resident core skills, plus a further set of skills / competencies which would enable the use of tools and functionality to support their learning within Second Life.

1. To become an effective practitioner requires both resident and learner core skills, plus a further set of skills to enable them to identify and setup tools, as well as using appropriate and pedagogically sound approaches to learning and teaching, which support the personalisation of learning. “
   

A group of interested educators who felt this was a worthwhile project have helped to create a list of the required skills which can be found here (I hope! You may need to register with the EducationUK site to access the pdf.)

I have found this to be a very useful list and I would love to hear what others think.  Unfortunately I can’t find any further work that has been done on this but I will keep looking.  It is a framework that I think we could usefully adopt in our BIG Second Life project that might happen next semester (if we are successful in getting our funding! more later!).

Another good meeting

I have just returned from the second midwives meeting in SL. It was an interesting challenge as Second Life was having a bit of a bad hair day and being just a little temperamental! Poor Dacary kept crashing and none of us, except Petal, had much luck with getting (or keeping) voice working. We reverted to text alone which can be difficult for some (but at least I could eat my hot cross bun without anyone knowing!)

We were joined by two midwives from North America today – Sudbury Runningbear and Lisachris Latte and also Moonshadow Questi from Australia. A different set of people today probably because of time differences. All the resources for the midwives group and meetings are to be found either on Carolyns blog here or on the wikieducator site which she had set up here.

We ended up in the cave in Arwenna’s Secret Garden – which was a neat thing for people fairly new to SL to see – and I just had to show off and turn into a mermaid for a while!

I also promised that I would seek out the SL Competencies that had been suggested by Chris Eggplant over at Education UK. I will post about that shortly!

An interesting (and local) conference

I became aware today of a conference being hosted by the University of Otago in June 2008 which I thought might be of interest to a number of people.  It is the International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking  (more details here) and in the call for papers they say this (among other things!)….

“An important new platform technology where all these developments come together and which has inspired many expert observers is that of the new virtual environments, such as Second Life and There, which enable people to meet and engage in virtual, three-dimensional social interactions. The future of SNS will certainly be played out on these platforms, and their scalability can only be tested presently on high speed networks.”

Unfortunately paper submission closes on March 9th and I don’t think I will have anything ready in time for that, but nevertheless I am going to try to attend, if only to network with another (mainly university I expect) community that is interested in virtual environments for education.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, for a conference in this area there doesn’t appear to be any intention to use Web2.o to broadcast the conference out beyond those who are physically attending! But maybe I’ve missed the information *grins*.

Midwives meeting debrief

A number of people who attended the meeting have blogged about the experience and have photos and even a short screencast from Petal (aka Sarah Stewart).  It is good to see that it is inspiring others to think about how they could potentially use Second Life in their own areas too – and Koru Bracken (aka Merrolee Perriman) has suggested that perhaps people in her own area of  Occupational Therapy might think about its potential for them too.

Great stuff!!

Midwives Meet

It was a pleasure to host the inaugural (I think!) meeting of the Midwives in SL group on Koru yesterday. Over the last few months I have had the fun of helping Carolyn McIntosh (aka Dacary Dumpling) becoming a little more familiar with Second Life and it was great to see her many hours of SL learning coming together in such a positive way.

Carolyn is a midwife who teaches at Otago Polytechnic and keeps an interesting blog here - she identified Second Life as a potentially exciting way of networking with other midwives and it was great to see midwives from UK, US, NZ and Australia in attendance.

I agree with Carolyn about the power of SL as a networking tool – for me it has been as much about that as it has about actually teaching here – although hopefully that will change soon!