Sarge -- Thanks for the kind words!
Lisa --
Here are my recommendations, in order of difficulty:
1. Easiest and cheapest: go to http://www.kitely.com and sign up for the free
six-hour introductory month, which comes
with a free region. You will be asked to download a small plugin, then it will
automatically install a viewer for you,
create your region, and take you in-world. Easy, peasy. You can practice
building, or upload any of the OARs available
free to educators to start with.
Check out:
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/06/where-to-get-content-for-opensim/
If you like it, $35 a month gives you unlimited use of Kitely, plus 20
(twenty!) regions. You can add extra regions
for just $1 a month each. Each region can hold up to 100,000 prims and up to
100 simultaneous visitors. (No kidding!
They run it in the Amazon cloud and the scaling is excellent.) For educators,
it's the single best deal out there.
Here's the downside: your visitors will get two hours a month free (six hours
the first month) but after that they
either have to sign up for a plan or pay 20 cents an hour for usage. Or you can
opt to pay for their usage.
Let's compare this to the Second Life deal, with $300 a month per region, and a
$1,000 setup fee. For the $300 you can
have something like eight users with unlimited use accounts (you, a couple of
fellow teachers, the students doing the
heavy building) and 8x20=160 regions and you can put the $1,000 you'd otherwise
spend for a setup fee towards 300,000
minutes worth of access time for visitors.
If you ever want to leave Kitely for any reason, you can export your entire
regions (terrains, objects, scripts,
everything on them that you have rights to) with a single click, and import
them to anywhere else you want in a couple
of minutes. They have Vivox voice (the same as Second Life), mesh,
media-on-a-prim (to put interactive Web pages and
videos on in-world surfaces) and megaregions. The only thing that's missing is
hypergrid, and that's coming with the
next hypergrid security update. They also have bots -- aka NPCs (non-player
characters) -- which you can use to create
robots that simulate historical characters and interact with your visitors.
2. Easy, a bit less cheap, but more options: go to Dreamland Metaverse
(http://www.dreamlandmetaverse.com/) or one of
the other vendors in our hosting directory:
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/opensim-hosting-providers/ I particularly
mention Dreamland because they have an excellent reputation with educators, all
the latest OpenSim features, and are
currently running the grids for a school district in suburban Atlanta. They can
set you up with a private grid, or
land on any of the open grids out there, including OSGrid. They can set it up
so your teachers can hypergrid teleport
to other grids, and your students can't. They can automatically create user
accounts for all your students and
teachers at once -- and there's lot of other custom stuff they can do, as well.
They have moderate prices -- they're
not the most expensive by far, nor the cheapest, but have a good reputation for
reliability and service. And whle
Kitely regions are only up when people are on them, and are put to sleep
otherwise, Dreamland regions are up 24-7.
While this means higher prices, it also means that visitors don't have to wait
for a region to boot up when they first
teleport to a sleeping region, which can take a minute.
3. Not easy at all, but free. You can run your own grids on your own servers.
You will have to set up a MySQL
database, and an Apache server, and the OpenSim server, and keep all of those
patched and updated and regularly backed
up. The easiest way to do that is to use New World Studio --
http://nws.virrea.fr/ -- which installs all of those for
you automatically. You will still have to learn how to use the OpenSim
management console, however, and, unless you
hire a consultant, if you want to manage users or inventories or terrains or
OAR files you will often have to go to
the server console and type in server commands. The commands are here, to give
you a taste:
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Server_Commands
If all your visitors are local -- behind your school firewall -- then this will
give you the fastest possible
connections, since the OpenSim grid will be hosted right where the visitors
are. Some of the OpenSim hosting companies
will do by-the-hour consulting for you, helping you set up your first grid and
installing and configuring routers and
viewers and all that other messy stuff. And you can have as many regions, prims
and simultaneous visitors as your
network can bear -- which could be quite a lot, depending on your
infrastructure. And if you want to allow remote
logins, or hypergrid travel to and from other grids, you will need to configure
it for hypergrid connectivity, and
punch a hole in your network's firewall to allow the traffic to go through.
Feel free to contact me directly if you have any additional questions!
Best,
-- Maria
____________________________________________________
Maria Korolov • 508-443-1130 • [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
<http://www.china-speakers-bureau.com/>Editor & Publisher, *Hypergrid Business*
<http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/>
/The magazine for enterprise users of virtual worlds. /
