NZVWGrid Upgrade – VLENZ Update, No 179, January 24, 2011

NZVWGrid  news

Auckland  U Portal ‘upgrades’

OpenSim  hardware

Will host 30-50 sims

The water-driven sawmill on Avalon (akl.nzvwg.org.8002.Avalon 2)

The  “virtual world team” at the University of Auckland will be “productionising” its  Opensim installation – Hypergrid address: akl.nzvwg.org.8002.aotearoa – over the  the next couple of weeks which should see the university’s portal on the New Zealand Virtual World Grid ready to accept more tertiary institutions.

Announcing the move,  Dr Scott Diener (SL: Professor Noarlunga),  the Associate Director, IT Services,  at the University of Auckland, said the university  would now have separate servers for Development, Test and Production.

“The system will have four grunty production servers, which should host 30-50 sims, along with a separate database server for it all,” Dr Diener said. This  would add further stability to the user experience on the opensource OpenSim Version 7, HG 1.5 portal, he added/

The Auckland Portal now has voice working with Freeswitch, but the team is investigating licenses for Vivox as well. It also is investigating the use of the Havok physics engine which when and if implemented should further enhance the NZVWGrid experience, making  it near if not eqaul to the Second Life experience.

Dr Diener said  it  planned to subdivide  sims and “sell for $0 of course” the parcels to individuals  on the Auckland portal, which already includes Auckland University  and Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology sites as well as a SLENZ site  which will include the SLENZ Project builds from Second Life. There are also plans for a Virtual Life Education New Zealand  entry point.

The gateway point for Auckland Portal will become the Aotearoa sim which  also includes a Hypergate point to the hundreds of virtual world OpenSim  grids already mounted around the world.

Scott Diener, on Aotearoa, with Combat System sword

Dr Diener has written a gaming system that includes a battle meter and weapons scripts that works well  in Second Life (0n sale at Academe), and appears to work  in the Opensim environment “….not great…but okay,” he said.

“I will be refining that as well, and intend to use it with some of the projects I laid out last year (eg involvement in the Life Games Project), he said, adding he was seeking other interested participants for this project.

Meanwhile the SLENZ project developer and wellknown Second Life builder, Aaron Griffiths (SL: Isa Goodman) has been given a commission to build some facilities for the University of Otago on the Otago portal (www. nzvwg.org) and he has also secured design work with the Manukau Institute of Technology, an orginal participant in the SLENZ Project, which is still determining whether to go with  Second Life, JokadyiaGrid or  the NZVWGrid for its current year foundation education work.

At

 

Academe in SL ... where the Falcon gaming system was developed and is on sale. The Falcon system sale site in SL pictured above.

NZVWG – VLENZ Update, No 172, June 03, 2010

Does the Emperor have any clothes?

New Zealand’s NZVWGrid  ‘newbies’ get

free avatar skins, hair, eyes and clothing

A ‘noobie’ appearance is no longer necessary in the  NZVWGrid …

free avatarskins, eyes and hair have been made available for users  …

New Zealand academics, researchers and  virtual world builders,  using and testing the alpha phase of the New Zealand Virtual Grid (NZVWG), no longer have to look like ‘noobs’ even though given some of the vagaries of the OpenSim environment they might sometimes feel like that.

Open source  avatar skins,  eyes, hair and clothing  have  now been made freely available on the Auckland  portal of  NZVWG at Kapua 6  (NZVWG  Kapua 6/88/116/34), and are  likely to be made  available  near the Auckland entry point to the MUVE on Kapua 3  as well as at other Portal entry points.

The full permissions skins have been created by the likes of Eloh Eliot,  Ziah Li,  Greybeard Thinker and others, with  the clothing obtained  from a variety of sources outside  the Second Life environment, such as free, full permission listings of clothing textures.

All are being made available under   “Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported” Creative Commons licenses.

The  NZVWG Project which grew out of  Otago University’s ONGENS programme is a joint venture of the University of Auckland,  the University of  Otago the University of Canterbury and  the Wellington Institute of Technology, Weltech.  A number of other institutions both in New Zealand and oversea have expressed interest in the project which is supported by New Zealand Telecom.

It is an open access national virtual world grid based on open source software. It operates on NZ-based servers hosted at Otago, Auckland and Canterbury Universities, and leverages other national investments in IT infrastructure through deployment on the high-speed KAREN (Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network).

The grid has been set up with an academic focus and will be used for research and education, as well as for proof-of-concept application deployments and testing.

The project, based on opensource OpenSim  technology, is being led by one of New Zealand’s foremost virtual world education   champions, Dr Scott Diener,  an academic and  Associate Director, AC Tech, Information Technology Services,  at the  University of Auckland. Diener is well-known, both  as himself and as his Second Life personna, Professor Noarlunga, in MUVE  education circles around the world for his development of medical simulations and teaching programmes within Second Life.

Although little educational research is currently being done  in the alpha test phase of  the NZVWGrid there are opportunities once testing is completed. Besides  Diener’s Second Life University of Auckland virtual medical centre project in Second Life, which  may migrate to the NZVWG,  Otago University  has set up  the Otago Virtual Hospital in NZVWG (OtagoMedicalSchool/162/99/2800)  and is also hosting scenarios for medical students to gain experience practicing as doctors.   Some members of the now completed SLENZ Project are also active in the NZVWG although  there are no plans at this stage for a sequel to that successful research project.

… as well as  both men’s and women’s avatar clothing

and a limited range of footwear.