Hi Lisa,

I've been following your discussions with some interests. I am based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and we have done some work with similar goals to the ones that you describe.

We have been developing historical reconstructions with the goals of supporting learning and promoting cultural heritage. I think that all the things that you describe are possible, with sufficient resource.

Please feel free to have a look at some of the resources that we are developing. Be aware that they are all work in progress ... in fact reconstructing the past may by definition be a work in progress!

There is a reconstruction of St Andrews Cathedral. The most important religious building in Scotland from the 12th to the 16 Centuries,inextricably tied up with the wars of independence and the reformation and associated with historical characters such as Robert the Bruce.

A reconstruction of Linlithgow Palace, an important residence for the Stewart Kings of Scotland and closely associated with MAry Queen of Scots.

There is also a reconstruction of a 5th Century Spartan Basilica, which is part of a Virtual Excavation game aimed at archeaologists.

A reconstruction of a 16th Century Salt Pan and a reconstruction of the related excavation site - developed through imnporting points cloud data into opensim.

CErtainly connecting with web resources is a powerful way of enriching these 3D reconstructions. Within the Cathedral their is a virtual exhibition of rare books that links to web and library resources and the Linlithgow Palace resources makes extensive use of linking to online videos images and other resources. Connecting with social media to enable visitors to contribute to the resources is also possible.

It occurs to me that it would be excellent to create some kind of "Virtual Grid" which enabled navigation through virtual world/opensim historical reconstructions.

If you want to have a look at some other information related to this work have a look at our blog:

http://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/openvirtualworlds/

There is also a face book page, you can like if you feel so inclined!
http://www.facebook.com/OpenVirtualWorlds

If you want to crate an avatar, login and have a look around then try:
http://openvirtualworlds.org/cathedral/

There are some pre installed images of resources mainly for windows boxes here:
http://www.openvirtualworlds.org/demiurge/sticks.html

Hope this helps and would be happy to cooperate in taking historical reconstruction and education in virtual worlds forward.


Cheers,

Alan




This is actually the kind of thing I was imagining we would do. First of all divide the grids up by historical eras, but within an era there would still be a lot of jumble, with different stories happening in the same spot at different times with the same buildings but people wearing different kinds of clothes and so on. I envisioned that you should be able to work out what date you want to visit, and only load the stories that are current at that date, with "permanent" structures always loading. I'm glad you suggested that independently of me bringing it up :)

On 08/21/2012 04:25 AM, Mic Bowman wrote:
Just to throw something out...

What about a region module that can play a "log" of events by adding
and removing objects according to some script (add this object here,
remove that one, ...). There are certainly temporal databases that can
determine the "state" of the elements at a particular time...

--mic

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Miller, Peter <[email protected]> wrote:
Q: My main issue right now is trying to work out how you create sims that represent not only a region in space but also a period in time. I've been
thinking that I would have a grid that contains regions in which only
stories from, say, 1950 to 2000 were created. Then another grid would
represent the same real world area, but contain stories from 1900-1950. The further you go back in time, the longer the time intervals would get, along an approximately logarithmic scale, so if you were telling stories about the dinosaurs one grid would represent the entire Jurassic era, for example.



A: There's theoretically nothing to stop you doing this as far as I know. Different grids use the same coordinate space. In practice there have been
reports that teleporting to identical locations in two grids can be
problematic -- to quote:



"You can’t hypergrid teleport from one destination to another one that has exactly the same grid coordinates. This can be a problem for standalones,
since many use the default 1000,1000 coordinates."
http://www.hyperica.com/how-to-travel/



I have no idea whether that is still the case. Of course, incorporating an
offset would not be difficult.



One nice thing you can do with OpenSim is to merge regions derived from OARs so you could in theory superimpose a succession of eras in a single region.
Again, there's probably a little more to it than that but it's an
interesting place to start :)



Best wishes



Peter

________________________________
From: [email protected]
[[email protected]] on behalf of Lisa Evans
[[email protected]]
Sent: 19 August 2012 18:18
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Opensim-users] Some questions about recreating history in OpenSim

Hi all,

I'm very new to OpenSim and just signed up to this list to ask a few
questions. Sorry if I come across as a bit of a newbie, although I've been studying OS for a few days and I have my own standalone grid up and running
at home.

I'm putting together a proposal for this educational portal run by the ABC
here in Australia:

http://www.abc.net.au/learn/proposals.htm

My project is all about teaching history, the idea being that students and history classes could put together simple sims telling stories about the
history of their own local area, linking them up with videos, photos,
essays, etc (which you could hopefully launch from within the sim). Their
sims would all be linked up in a hypergrid, so students from all over
Australia (later maybe the world) could get into a virtual time machine and
visit different places at different times, to see what was happening.
Students would be able to chat with each other and show each other around their creations. Hopefully the act of collaborative world building would engage them in learning about history, but I would want them focussed on just telling small stories, involving a small number of characters (which would be created as NPCs if that's possible, with simple, looping animations if not more complex behaviour) and buildings, objects, etc. (I have ideas
about how to source lots of 3D content, which I need to explore more).

I'm sure none of this is an original idea, but it seems like a good
opportunity to put an idea like this forward. I just was wondering if anyone
could tell me whether it would work in OpenSim or if there are some big
barriers to creating something like this.

My main issue right now is trying to work out how you create sims that
represent not only a region in space but also a period in time. I've been
thinking that I would have a grid that contains regions in which only
stories from, say, 1950 to 2000 were created. Then another grid would
represent the same real world area, but contain stories from 1900-1950. The further you go back in time, the longer the time intervals would get, along an approximately logarithmic scale, so if you were telling stories about the dinosaurs one grid would represent the entire Jurassic era, for example.

Would this be the right way to go? I've been reading about regions and grids
and hypergrids but I'm pretty sure there's a lot I don't understand.

My own background is that I've been working in 3D animation for film, TV and games for the past decade, as a 3D all rounder and a technical artist. I've worked on one big MMO for three years that was never released. So I know about 3D modeling, animation, worldbuilding, etc. but I've never spent much
time around Second Life or OpenSim, so a lot of this is new to me.

Thanks for any help!

Cheers,

Lisa Evans

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