This discussion has been the most enlightening I've seen in a long time!
Thank you everyone!
My experience agrees that faculty don't generally want to learn 3D
content creation.
Students are an interesting mix, and in high-stress programs also have
very little tolerance or capacity for steep learning curves.
===
*On simplicity *
In terms of students building things that didn't exist, maybe there is
a game-principle based sweet-spot, because it's clear from the numbers
that tens of millions of people spend tens or hundreds of hours with
Minecraft.
That suggest to me that students would love to co-create cool stuff, but
the interface for doing so needs to have an extremely extremely simple
/*starter subset*/. I say "starter", because gaming-principles also
show that people who stick around and pay for worlds like World of
Warcraft*_like challenges_*, or "unnecessary difficulties" as Jane
McGonigal's "/*Reality is Broken*/ - why Games make us Better and How
they can Change the World" book explains so well. (Imagine the interest
in golf if the average length from tee to hole was ten feet, in a
straight line, on a flat course, and the hole was ten feet across.)
This is a great book, by the way, and very eye opening and challenging a
lot of misunderstood concepts about "games", the nature and type of
feedback that works, and why so many people voluntarily spend so much
time on them, that is directly applicable to building any learning
environment.
For experienced builders (or those past their anxiety - resistance
stage), yeah, prefabs in Unity are great!
What is even better is that in Unity you CAN build/*hierarchical
objects,*/ then mix and match the parts. In OpenSim and Second LIfe,
once you put the wheels on the car and make a link-set, all traces of
"wheel" are gone, and it becomes absurdly difficult to go back and put
different wheels on the car if each wheel has 47 parts like spokes or
lugnuts. You can approximate some of that capacity with "Builder's
Buddy" or other tools that let you rez an entire multiobject scene with
one click, but those are a true pain to load and maintain.
So, whether it's Unity or OpenSim, I think one thing that is needed
that is very hard to still see for Virtual reality natives is exactly
HOW SIMPLE the INITIAL interface has to be, so that it is satisfying and
rewarding to try to use for a terrified newbie, peeking though the
fingers of the hands over the eyes. So simple in fact that even a
faculty member might say "Oh heck, even I can do THAT!".
===
*On "weakest links" in collaborative environments*
And both faculty and students are greatly upset by technological failure
where they are used to trivial behavior, such as having voice working.
The collaborative environment is much harsher than individual user
environment since for voice (or many other things) to actually be
useful, it has to work for EVERYONE, not just most people.
This is a feature of collaborative environments that I didn't realize
till Gary Olsen pointed it out. A collaborative environment can become
a "weakest link" exposer, where everyone's experience is limited by the
least capable user. This is one of the issues with, say, Electronic
Health Records systems that is underappreciated and distinguishes it
from, say, a cloud-based spreadsheet.
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