Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
I'm late to the party here, but...wow. This is the most interesting and enlightening discussion I've ever seen about the affordances of Opensim and Unity. This thread needs to be referenced in a FAQ somewhere! Fleep already nailed my own perspective on things. To contribute something of my own, I like the idea of trying to summarize the most unique and most important affordances of each platform in a single sentence. Here's my attempt. Opensimulator: Collaborative in-situ content creation using atomistic building tools in an open source client/server environment that has the potential to grow into an interconnected constellation of mutliuser virtual worlds. Unity: A game-focused development environment leveraging industry-standard content creation tools and programming languages to allow the deployment of single or multiuser experiences across as wide a range of platforms as possible. - Pathfinder [image: John Lester on about.me] John Lester about.me/pathfinder http://about.me/pathfinder“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 3:37 PM, Robert Martin robertl...@gmail.com wrote: what i would like to see in a viewer is 1 the ability to disable loading of chunks (if i do not use the voice parts let me not load them at all) 2 a way to load the stuff in your sight range FIRST (why are you loading the ground texture when im at 20K altitude) 3 better support for small screens (hint im running on a netbook with 1024X600 screen) 4 this is a wild dream but an embedded sandbox sim with a single hardcoded account would be grand. i suppose the human kit is nice but 20 gigs?? i couldn't do that with SoAS MakeHuman Gimp and Blender without having like 12 gigs of content. btw are we muggles going to get to play sometime?? On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Justin Clark-Casey jjusti...@googlemail.com wrote: I wouldn't agree that people don't want to use virtual worlds as a communication medium. I suspect it depends heavily on the context. For instance, I'm currently involved with a student programme where many meetings are held in-world and there don't seem to be too many problems apart from occasional Vivox issues. In another context, we hold in-world meetings all the time for OSCC planning and that seems to work pretty well - for instance I could post up performance report graphs in world without having to direct people to an external website. But I do agree that ease-of-use is a major issue. I think it would be very interesting to see a viewer that provided a configurable way to strip out the features that aren't needed in particular situations (e.g. education). I think Firestorm provides skinning that can do some of this, but these viewers are still pretty oriented towards Second Life and so that stuff doesn't have much focus. Making such a viewer is something I would do myself if I had double the amount of time I do now :) On 22/07/14 09:14, Tom Willans wrote: I agree with Justin about a big difference being to persistent metaverse and longer term social dynamics, formation of identity etc. I suspect that many educational uses think in one off terms eg a collaborative class in business collaboration even if there is concern about reuse of assets o reusable learning objects etc. Not the development of university, school or wider social network. Most Unity examples are one off uses eg teach sensitive sex education, help the emergency services learn to communicate etc. rather than an ongoing world of Warcraft scenario. So one question is what is OpenSim used for? It is also a fact that OpenSim is tightly coupled with Second a Life, and this is not unsurprising given its heritage and the vast, in comparison, user base there and technical advice. There is of course the very tight link in terms of viewer technology. It was this link that, in part, made me choose OpenSim over Wonderland for instance. Whilst I predominately use OpenSim now it is not on social grounds but as a platform. People do not want to use metaverses on the scale of other social media ( viewing opensim as a social platform) or remote communication platform e.g. Skype meetings rather than OpenSim meetings. I once suggested a meeting in SL - might as well of mentioned someone has BO; move on quickly. OpenSim also shares a lot with virtual reality platforms - I do hate that term e.g. CAVE which like Unity tends to have a one off. The Rift is narrowing the gap, and OpenSim/SL has been displayed in CAVE environments. Technologies such as the Oculus Rift and other potential haptic technologies may have a impact. I had to halt my experiments for a while as Cybersickness on the DevKit1 caused problems. Still the Rift did score highly on
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
Hi Ramesh, I did not mean to drop a comment and disappear - focusing upon writing avoiding distractions. Doug captured my meaning in that I do not disagree with involvement or adapting for the student; quite the opposite. Synthetic environments are good interactive and collaborative environments - use them. I also agree with Doug that what you have displayed could be done in Unity but it might involve a lot of extra work for you. I do hope that grant bodies do not limit themselves to unity only solutions or just using professional graphic designers. Some of the amateurs in SL and OpenSim are either very skilled or in fact hobby professionals, working within its constraints. I also get the impression that even now a lot of academics are trying to fit in development work on the side though so the in-world design tools help here. Whether this is sensible use of an academics time is another matter. Your and Kay's research look fascinating. I am not sure to what extent you mean by built in to the core? Do you mean that different scenarios can be readily set up by the instructors? Unity, SL, OpenSim all have their constraints and limitations. In both unity and Opensim avatars have limited scope for emotional expressions and translating external movement and gestures although OpenSim and SL has a lot of flexibility in terms of dress and attachments helping with the formation of identity. I am not sure about the rigging in Unity though. I seem to recall the SGI in a school fire awareness game were able to download and change some textures e.g. warning signs (not sure about other assets on the fly) downloaded from an external WikiMedia using Unity to cope with changes associated with different languages and countries in the EU. Daden I think using OpenSim and SL developed a scenario editor. It might be nice if an easier front end to the OpenSim database would do the same. I came close to developing one in my Heritage business but could not see a way to make a financial return and pay the bills. Decided to do a PhD instead! Tom On 20 Jul 2014, at 19:54, Dr Ramesh Ramloll r.raml...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Kay, 'Even the online courses that utilize extensive instructor- or institution-created materials always simultaneously utilize a textbook (to insure the transmission of the relevant portion of the course-specific common body of knowledge). In turn, the textbooks I utilize in all of my courses change each year. Sometimes the textbook changes simply involve a [maddening] re-sort of the chapters (to enable the publisher to change the edition and sell more new copies of the text). Still (and more importantly), it is often the case that the material in the textbook changes (and these changes need to be reflected in the course materials and activities).' This observation is spot ON. Actually we have to face exactly the same issues for hazmat emergency response courses and I suspect this is true for most fields. R On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Dr Ramesh Ramloll r.raml...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Doug, 'Collaboratively manipulating things that already exist is much easier, and the basis of almost every multiplayer Unity game. You work with or against your collaborator to whack the head off of some villain or uncover the secrets of the story.' Just a note here, the system RezMela has already allowed instructors to create a wide diverse range of stories, so there is not one story. The malleable linkset does not contain a fixed number of parts, in fact, it grows and shrinks, so it is not just direct manipulation. The 3D molecule model kit I mentioned earlier for e.g. is in fact like a 3D editor, where atoms can be created, duplicated, connected joined ... in another example, you could use the same principle to teach garden design for e.g. where the task would be to great various plants instances and rearrange to create new garden experiences and so forth... So again, when I talk about malleability, it is really well defined and specific. I see it is being stretched too far so that it became meaningless and I probably should coin another term. Glad Unity is working great for you. Point to us some clips, your success is worth sharing absolutely, and will be very useful to me as I continue to explore. Ramesh On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 10:24 AM, Kay McLennan mclennan@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Tom tom.will...@bessacarr.com wrote: ...For many educational uses adapting and changing objects is not needed... While it is true that some types of educational simulations are well suited for static simulations (like a virtual tour of the inner workings of a human body part or a historic recreation of a city), static (Unity platform-like) builds are completely ill-suited for the types of online economics and business studies college courses I teach. Even the online courses
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
These folks have done some interesting work on creating characters that can be used in Unity. https://vhtoolkit.ict.usc.edu/ Doug Your and Kay's research look fascinating. I am not sure to what extent you mean by built in to the core? Do you mean that different scenarios can be readily set up by the instructors? Unity, SL, OpenSim all have their constraints and limitations. In both unity and Opensim avatars have limited scope for emotional expressions and translating external movement and gestures although OpenSim and SL has a lot of flexibility in terms of dress and attachments helping with the formation of identity. I am not sure about the rigging in Unity though. ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
Hi Kay, I think what Tom meant (and definitely what I meant) is that adapting and changing objects on the fly in real time by more than one person is not needed. What I referred to as collaborative content creation - two or more people/students creating things that did not exist previously in world. Updating resources such as a textbook in Unity and rebuilding the environment is a quick and painless process. I rebuild my simulations on a regular basis to change a character or access a different AI data set. I just create a new URL for the new sim. I completely agree that students don't have time to fuss with virtual world simulations that are not relevant to their courses. Nor do they have time to spend on orientation activities needed just to learn the interface. Anything that makes the experience easier and more relevant is desirable. It seems like your environment is working well for you and your students so there is no need to switch. That is probably true for most folks on this list. Doug On Jul 20, 2014, at 10:24 AM, Kay McLennan mclennan@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Tom tom.will...@bessacarr.com wrote: ...For many educational uses adapting and changing objects is not needed... While it is true that some types of educational simulations are well suited for static simulations (like a virtual tour of the inner workings of a human body part or a historic recreation of a city), static (Unity platform-like) builds are completely ill-suited for the types of online economics and business studies college courses I teach. Even the online courses that utilize extensive instructor- or institution-created materials always simultaneously utilize a textbook (to insure the transmission of the relevant portion of the course-specific common body of knowledge). In turn, the textbooks I utilize in all of my courses change each year. Sometimes the textbook changes simply involve a [maddening] re-sort of the chapters (to enable the publisher to change the edition and sell more new copies of the text). Still (and more importantly), it is often the case that the material in the textbook changes (and these changes need to be reflected in the course materials and activities). For example, social media marketing is now one of the most important components in the field of marketing but was barely mentioned in textbooks even as recently as a few years ago. Similarly, the cases in business ethics textbooks continue to change at an almost exponential rate owing to the abundance of new real work examples of unethical behavior (think GMC, BP, the financial meltdown, GMOs, fracking, and more!). Further, college students (including traditional and non traditional aged students) are pressed for time and require course-specific learning simulations only. That is, students do not have the time to explore virtual world simulations that are only tangentially related to the course learning objectives. Rather, the virtual world learning simulations have to be graded activities that are worth their time (in the sense of being detailed and expansive enough to contribute specifically to their understanding of the course material). Again, in the same way high quality college textbooks and online course sites require continual updates and upgrades, high quality virtual world simulations need to be updated and upgraded -- to contribute specifically to students' understanding of the course material. Also (and this is a BIG item), I am constantly thinking up (and testing) new types of virtual world learning simulations. In other words, my view is that it would be too limiting to be only be able to create a simulation once. In contrast, right now, I currently have about 40 or more different types of virtual world learning simulations in play [read: that I collect student feedback data on (based on student -- Likert scale-based -- views on the interactivity, engagement, and contribution to learning outcomes for each simulation -- see some of the early data collected at: https://sites.google.com/site/fvwc12mclennan/student-survey-data-2)]. Note: Over the years, students have provided excellent and surprising feedback. For example, in the basic economics course I teach, I thought students would be keenly interested in the Free Trade Game I built (with each student the president/king/queen/dictator of their own island nation). However, the in-world PP slides (from my lecture notes that are also uploaded into my course site) and the in-world vocabulary flash cards were rated markedly higher than the Free Trade Game in every category. Note: My college-level students almost universally [first] say they need asynchronous virtual world learning activities ONLY (in keeping with how all of my online courses are asynchronous). However, after the students get some experience with the
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
I think Doug's experience pretty much sums up my own. I remain interested in and supportive of OpenSimulator because it is open source, it's the only platform cracking the metaverse nut, and it's the only platform that supports certain use cases (like collaborative prototyping). I remain hopeful that it will evolve beyond its current iteration to eventually be much easier to use. But after 10 years of introducing Second Life and OpenSimulator to probably thousands of people, at this point, it's clear to me that the vast majority of faculty can't or don't want to use it in its current format. Even if they have a use case that might take advantage of the platform's capabilities, the learning curve and support overhead is still just way, way too darned high. We switched to Unity three years ago for 99% of our work at UCSIM. The types of scripted (or even open-ended within certain parameters) scenarios and simulations that most faculty want are much more easily achieved in Unity than OpenSimulator. The programming and scene creation tools are much more powerful (one word - PREFABS*), we can deploy it in web browsers, on tablets, or as standalone programs, and the technical support costs are much, MUCH lower for my team. As others have said, Unity does require professional level skills to be able to create content, but after a certain point, so does OpenSimulator or Second Life. In all the years we supported both SL/OS, how many faculty wanted to learn to create content anyway? A very very small percentage. Most faculty, unless they are in a discipline that already requires some 3D modeling or design skills, have zero desire to learn how to make 3D stuff. If they have the desire to use simulations or immersive learning experiences, they either want someone else to make it for them, or they want to use a very simple easy-to-use toolset to put their own scenarios together quickly. They don't have the time or desire to develop expertise in yet another domain. I still think OpenSimulator has plenty of promise, and I don't think it has to be an either/or choice. It's always about choosing the right tool for the job. If you need open ended sandbox building capabilities, OpenSimulator is the right tool. If you need synchronous virtual meeting space with spatial voice, OpenSimulator is still probably the best tool. If you're interested in the emerging metaverse, OpenSimulator is the only tool. Unity doesn't do any of those things well. If you need a single player scripted simulation experience, however, Unity wins hands down. If you need to be able to deploy to web or mobile, Unity can do that and OpenSimulator can't. Personally, I'm hoping that both platforms become easier for the amateur over time, and that some of these new interface devices will improve both immersiveness/sense of presence, AND make content creation easier. I guess we'll see, but in the meantime, I think both platforms are useful tools to have in the toolbox. * About prefabs - If you don't know the concept, a prefab in Unity is like a template object that you can deploy many instances of in a scene, and then if you need to update or modify the object, you just modify the template and it updates all the deployed instances in the scene. So for example, you build a lamp post and put a hundred copies of it in your scene, then later decide you need to change the model. Easy presto, change the template and it changes all 100 lamp posts in your scene. This is probably one of my top 10 wants for OpenSimulator. You don't realize how much time you waste updating content in-world until you start using Unity prefabs. - Chris/Fleep Chris M. Collins (Avatar: Fleep Tuque) Center for Simulations Virtual Environments Research (UCSIM) Division of Innovation Partnerships, Research Development UC Office of Information Technologies (UCIT) University of Cincinnati 400 University Hall PO Box 210658 Cincinnati, OH 45221-0658 chris.coll...@uc.edu (513) 556-3018 http://ucsim.uc.edu On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 7:33 AM, DrDoug Pennell drdoug.penn...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Kay, I think what Tom meant (and definitely what I meant) is that adapting and changing objects on the fly in real time by more than one person is not needed. What I referred to as collaborative content creation - two or more people/students creating things that did not exist previously in world. Updating resources such as a textbook in Unity and rebuilding the environment is a quick and painless process. I rebuild my simulations on a regular basis to change a character or access a different AI data set. I just create a new URL for the new sim. I completely agree that students don't have time to fuss with virtual world simulations that are not relevant to their courses. Nor do they have time to spend on orientation activities needed just to learn the interface. Anything that makes the experience easier and more relevant is desirable. It seems like your
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
I was going to sit this one out but seeing as Tom name-checked us I think what Toni, Doug and Maria have been saying is pretty spot on. It all comes down to the fact that SL (and to an extent OpenSim) is a complete virtual world environment, whereas Unity is a game engine. Out the box Unity does nothing, you have to build up what functionality you need - SL/OS gives you a huge head start by already doing avatars, chat, voice, multi-user, editing etc. You could, if you really wanted, build most, but certainly not all, of the SL/OpenSim functionality in Unity, but in reality you just build what you need for a given project. Collaborative manipulation and placement (as on your Rezmela video) is definitely possible, and when we redo our OOPAL system for Unity that is pretty much what it will do. What would be a lot harder is collaborative prim based building - still probably do'able though perhaps not with the flexibility of SL/OS. The link-set example you mention would be do'able, Unity has a similar concept, but in reality you might not do it in the exact same way. Collaborative white boards are certainly do'able (we're just doing one), but document editing isn't really viable as Unity does not have a MOAP equivalent - we've tried a few third party solutions but they all fall well short of the SL functionality - and of course that also means that there is no collaborative web browsing - a real issue for some uses cases. There are I believe a few bespoke solutions where people have used Unity as the basis of larger commercial virtual office offerings and built the collaborative document bit in. You don't see many voice demos as that is something that does have to be brought in through a third party service, Vivox/Teamspeak etc, so tends to just be rolled out as needed - although a lot of Unity use cases don't need it (or just use Skype/Google+). But is certainly an extra hurdle to jump if you need it and you're going from SL/OS to Unity. Can't comment on Physics as we rarely use it. We are also looking at WebGL, initially for non-avatar activities, but the DoD Virtual Worlds Framework that Maria mentions are some of the best avatar driven demos I've seen for WebGL and there are emerging WebGL game engines like GooEngine. Unity is though just such a different experience from SL/OS. With Unity you are building an app from the outside, with SL/OS you're building one from inside. Having spent a lot of time in both just in the last couple of weeks there are annoyances and strengths in both. Approaches like PIVOTE where we try and take the logic out of the environment certainly help, but we still don't have the ideal solution anywhere. You say that So I guess it will be a race between how fast opensim can get a browser based viewer solution, or less ideally, tablet viewers that actually work by providing a PC level experience, and how fast the Unity team can develop their server solution. but that is not the case - Photon and SmartFox are proper established MMO servers for people using Unity and other systems, any Unity corporate offering will only add to that. So with a Unity system already having multi-user, and web, and tablet, and having complete control of the user experience (cf Kay's comment - I think - about a simpler OpenSim browser, something we've also always called for) it has already won that race, and is why we end up using it on most projects. SL/OS really is just left for those cases where you either need a big populated shared world (eg for social science or AI research), or you need that highly collaborative build approach. We did a comparison paper a while ago at which might be of use - http://www.daden.co.uk/resources/download-white-papers/ - and our single user Unity demo space (although untypical of how we normally use Unity - see the videos for that) has just gone up at http://www.daden-cs1.co.uk/demos/dadencampus/DadenCampus.html (beware 88MB - not yet really optimised for web delivery) . We hope to add multi-user shortly, but it shows some of the things mentioned such as in-world video, in world white board, simple object manipulation etc - and the content of the space is certainly relevant to everyone on this group :-) David David Burden Managing Director Daden Limited t: +44 (0)121 250 5678 m: 07811 266 199 e: david.bur...@daden.co.uk w: www.daden.co.uk skype: daden5 twitter: www.twitter.com/davidburden Daden specialise in creating immersive learning visualisation systems. ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
I think that OpenSimulator and Unity have some overlap but not by a huge amount. My perspective is that the focus of Unity is very much on game development. It gives you a good and flexible set of tools but you need to do a fair amount of work to plug them together or extend them to create a high fidelity (ha) product. The focus is on creating a one-off experience, though the lines are blurring now that some games (e.g. Minecraft, DOTA2) are very long lived and keep receiving updates. The experiences are high quality because they are quite tightly controlled. High multi-user (let alone massive multi-user) has not been a focus area because this stuff is *hard* and nowadays not obviously a winning formula for gamers. For OpenSimulator, the focus and much of the raison d'etre is the unified and persistent virtual world. Thus, it gives you a high level set of tools which are much less flexible (inventory, attachments, linksets, etc.) but because everyone has them it allows collaboration and content reuse at a high level (e.g. scripted objects, OARs). Some games blur into this (Minecraft, etc.). It's a free-form environment so there's a high degree of freedom but a lot that can go wrong (analogous to open-world jank) [1]. I see it as more web-like because the same high-level software is evolved over time with the hosted content changing. Moreover, there's a very high social focus through time. Because the same high-level concepts are shared, there's more scope for network effects (esp. with the Hypergrid) but the technological base is much more primitive and relatively unexplored. So whilst I think Unity makes sense in many use cases, OpenSimulator is ultimately much more interesting to me (unsurprisingly) because it gives a glimpse into something radically new, a distributed, anarchic and evolving Metaverse rather than a single vendor game. I think there is vast scope for the OpenSimulator ecosystem to continue to evolve with features such as template objects, multi-level linksets, more intuitive viewers and to adapt to technological evolution as embodied by new hardware such as the Oculus Rift. Because it's open-source, innovation can happen anywhere and without a single company's permission. I believe the critical thing is that we arrive at protocols and formats that allow evolution by disconnected parties whilst still inter-operating with the existing system. Again, it's a comparison with a web ecosystem that has extensible formats such as HTTP and HTML (insert a tag that a browser doesn't understand and it doesn't (usually) stop your whole page from rendering). However, arriving at these formats and solving other hard fundamental problems takes an enormous amount of time and effort, not only through writing code but also in discussion and co-operation between parties with different interests. My hope has always been that the platform will become interesting enough to attract the critical mass of academics, enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who can generate the time and funding required. To some extent this happened but not enough (as of yet) to win any significant attention outside of this niche. [1] http://www.giantbomb.com/open-world/3015-207/ On 21/07/14 16:43, Wade wrote: 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
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
Perhaps this can be approached as a bootstrap recursive problem, in the sense that what many of want is an environment that improves collaboration,and that to get there we need a great deal of collaboration. That suggests that the tool-set that should move up to almost first in priority are the tools that USE virtual reality in order to improve the process by which we work and design improvements to virtual reality. In other words, if your own team or department does NOT currently prefer to meet in virtual reality over face-to-face, let's focus on what we can change to improve things for THAT sub-population, because any improvements there will pay off with massively compounded interest. Can we make Virtual Reality augmented reality literally better than being there?Seems like we should be able to discuss and evolve what would be the perfect world for virtual world designers to meet in and collaborate in, with a little thought, once, and then evolve improve it over time. Wade On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Justin Clark-Casey jjusti...@googlemail.com wrote: ... However, arriving at these formats and solving other hard fundamental problems takes an enormous amount of time and effort, not only through writing code but also in discussion and co-operation between parties with different interests. My hope has always been that the platform will become interesting enough to attract the critical mass of academics, enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who can generate the time and funding required. To some extent this happened but not enough (as of yet) to win any significant attention outside of this niche. ... ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
Hi Doug, 'Collaboratively manipulating things that already exist is much easier, and the basis of almost every multiplayer Unity game. You work with or against your collaborator to whack the head off of some villain or uncover the secrets of the story.' Just a note here, the system RezMela has already allowed instructors to create a wide diverse range of stories, so there is not one story. The malleable linkset does not contain a fixed number of parts, in fact, it grows and shrinks, so it is not just direct manipulation. The 3D molecule model kit I mentioned earlier for e.g. is in fact like a 3D editor, where atoms can be created, duplicated, connected joined ... in another example, you could use the same principle to teach garden design for e.g. where the task would be to great various plants instances and rearrange to create new garden experiences and so forth... So again, when I talk about malleability, it is really well defined and specific. I see it is being stretched too far so that it became meaningless and I probably should coin another term. Glad Unity is working great for you. Point to us some clips, your success is worth sharing absolutely, and will be very useful to me as I continue to explore. Ramesh On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 10:24 AM, Kay McLennan mclennan@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Tom tom.will...@bessacarr.com wrote: ...For many educational uses adapting and changing objects is not needed... While it is true that some types of educational simulations are well suited for static simulations (like a virtual tour of the inner workings of a human body part or a historic recreation of a city), static (Unity platform-like) builds are completely ill-suited for the types of online economics and business studies college courses I teach. Even the online courses that utilize extensive instructor- or institution-created materials always simultaneously utilize a textbook (to insure the transmission of the relevant portion of the course-specific common body of knowledge). In turn, the textbooks I utilize in all of my courses change each year. Sometimes the textbook changes simply involve a [maddening] re-sort of the chapters (to enable the publisher to change the edition and sell more new copies of the text). Still (and more importantly), it is often the case that the material in the textbook changes (and these changes need to be reflected in the course materials and activities). For example, social media marketing is now one of the most important components in the field of marketing but was barely mentioned in textbooks even as recently as a few years ago. Similarly, the cases in business ethics textbooks continue to change at an almost exponential rate owing to the abundance of new real work examples of unethical behavior (think GMC, BP, the financial meltdown, GMOs, fracking, and more!). Further, college students (including traditional and non traditional aged students) are pressed for time and require course-specific learning simulations only. That is, students do not have the time to explore virtual world simulations that are only tangentially related to the course learning objectives. Rather, the virtual world learning simulations have to be graded activities that are worth their time (in the sense of being detailed and expansive enough to contribute specifically to their understanding of the course material). Again, in the same way high quality college textbooks and online course sites require continual updates and upgrades, high quality virtual world simulations need to be updated and upgraded -- to contribute specifically to students' understanding of the course material. Also (and this is a BIG item), I am constantly thinking up (and testing) new types of virtual world learning simulations. In other words, my view is that it would be too limiting to be only be able to create a simulation once. In contrast, right now, I currently have about 40 or more different types of virtual world learning simulations in play [read: that I collect student feedback data on (based on student -- Likert scale-based -- views on the interactivity, engagement, and contribution to learning outcomes for each simulation -- see some of the early data collected at: https://sites.google.com/site/fvwc12mclennan/student-survey-data-2)]. Note: Over the years, students have provided excellent and surprising feedback. For example, in the basic economics course I teach, I thought students would be keenly interested in the Free Trade Game I built (with each student the president/king/queen/dictator of their own island nation). However, the in-world PP slides (from my lecture notes that are also uploaded into my course site) and the in-world vocabulary flash cards were rated markedly higher than the Free Trade Game in every category. Note: My college-level students almost universally [first] say they need asynchronous
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
At 11:00 19/07/2014, Ai Austin wrote: I am not an export in Unity and really just followed a tutorial book to learn about it a little.. Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone I meant not an expert of course... it would be odd to be an export - h? ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
There are two things that would make be ecstatic for teaching, meetings and presenting in opensim: 1) direct drive animation of my avatar as I present from my real world movements or very very good presenter animation stacks 2) something from webmeeting space which is to show any app window I wish live on a screen/prim in opensim. We aren't quite there yet with MOAP although it is a great beginning. - seren On 07/19/2014 11:50 AM, Toni Alatalo wrote: Really interesting research findings - thanks for sharing preliminary infos! On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 8:02 PM, Dr Ramesh Ramloll r.raml...@gmail.com mailto:r.raml...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Tom tom.will...@bessacarr.com mailto:tom.will...@bessacarr.com wrote: For many educational uses adapting and changing objects is not needed. I respectfully beg to differ. This is the core of the my research efforts. A learning environment needs to provide user level tailorability from the core. The fact that it is not available does not mean that it is not needed. I cannot count how many times, subject matter experts felt that their teaching is being canned by the environment, or that students find their expression (through actions) limited. This is the result of extensive evaluation on the ground, both from an ethnographic evaluation perspective and for a user level evaluation perspective. I hope to publish these findings soon (well after I get some time away from writing grant proposals or doing actual building work) -- 'Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin.' *Rameshsharma Ramloll* PhD, CEO CTO DeepSemaphore LLC, Affiliate /Research Associate Professor/, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID 83209 Tel: 208-240-0040 tel:208-240-0040 LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/rameshramloll, DeepSemaphore LLC http://www.deepsemaphore.com, RezMela http://www.rezmela.com, Google+ profile https://plus.google.com/103652369558830540272/about ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org mailto:Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
I am with Tom on this one. For many educational uses, adapting and changing objects is not needed. Of course there are educational uses where adapting and changing objects is critical, however many (most?) educational sims I visited in SL did not rely on students working together to create things, and there are plenty of uses where it is simply not needed. Simulations are a perfect example and an area where Unity excels over SL or OpenSim. I built some fairly involved simulations in SL and have since essentially abandoned the platform and switched to Unity. As has been said many times, SL/OpenSim is great for collaborative content creation. If you are doing that then sticking with SL/OpenSim makes perfect sense. If you don't need your students to work together and make widgets on the fly, then Unity might be a better choice. It is all about using the right tool for the job. Doug Danforth On Jul 19, 2014, at 1:02 PM, Dr Ramesh Ramloll r.raml...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Tom tom.will...@bessacarr.com wrote: For many educational uses adapting and changing objects is not needed. I respectfully beg to differ. This is the core of the my research efforts. A learning environment needs to provide user level tailorability from the core. The fact that it is not available does not mean that it is not needed. I cannot count how many times, subject matter experts felt that their teaching is being canned by the environment, or that students find their expression (through actions) limited. This is the result of extensive evaluation on the ground, both from an ethnographic evaluation perspective and for a user level evaluation perspective. I hope to publish these findings soon (well after I get some time away from writing grant proposals or doing actual building work) -- 'Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin.' Rameshsharma Ramloll PhD, CEO CTO DeepSemaphore LLC, Affiliate Research Associate Professor, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID 83209 Tel: 208-240-0040 LinkedIn, DeepSemaphore LLC, RezMela, Google+ profile ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
OMG, that video is awesome. So it is possible. Excellent! Thank you so much.I am very curious what the data stream in is. Would it be possible to just capture the stream and rerun it? I also wonder what can be done with this for bots.I am jazzed! - seren On 07/19/2014 04:23 PM, Wade wrote: @Seren,someone HAS used the X-box Kinect sensor to convert their body position to their avatar position real time for teaching in Second Life. X-Box is not required apparently, just the Kinect. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Animation-Forum/new-way-off-controlling-your-avatar-with-the-kinect/td-p/1519523 http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussions/Microsoft-Kinect-with-Second-Life/td-p/481989 Google Search on: Kinect and Second Life,or Kinect and OpenSim for more references! Wade On 7/19/2014 3:43 PM, Seren Seraph wrote: There are two things that would make be ecstatic for teaching, meetings and presenting in opensim: 1) direct drive animation of my avatar as I present from my real world movements or very very good presenter animation stacks 2) something from webmeeting space which is to show any app window I wish live on a screen/prim in opensim. We aren't quite there yet with MOAP although it is a great beginning. - seren On 07/19/2014 11:50 AM, Toni Alatalo wrote: Really interesting research findings - thanks for sharing preliminary infos! On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 8:02 PM, Dr Ramesh Ramloll r.raml...@gmail.com mailto:r.raml...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Tom tom.will...@bessacarr.com mailto:tom.will...@bessacarr.com wrote: For many educational uses adapting and changing objects is not needed. I respectfully beg to differ. This is the core of the my research efforts. A learning environment needs to provide user level tailorability from the core. The fact that it is not available does not mean that it is not needed. I cannot count how many times, subject matter experts felt that their teaching is being canned by the environment, or that students find their expression (through actions) limited. This is the result of extensive evaluation on the ground, both from an ethnographic evaluation perspective and for a user level evaluation perspective. I hope to publish these findings soon (well after I get some time away from writing grant proposals or doing actual building work) -- 'Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin.' *Rameshsharma Ramloll* PhD, CEO CTO DeepSemaphore LLC, Affiliate /Research Associate Professor/, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID 83209 Tel: 208-240-0040 tel:208-240-0040 LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/rameshramloll, DeepSemaphore LLC http://www.deepsemaphore.com, RezMela http://www.rezmela.com, Google+ profile https://plus.google.com/103652369558830540272/about ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org mailto:Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
Unity and OpenSimulator are not designed to cover the same application space. Uinty is designed for mostly single player gaming and adds a few features to help support multiplayer; whereas OpenSimulator is more designed for multi-user shared collaborative experiences. You can build a multi-user shared collaborative environment with Unity but it would require extensive development as it's not really designed for that purpose. Regarding physics, Unity has client-side physics. Whether this is better really depends on the application. For a single user game, client side physics can provide a more realistic experience as it's not affected by network communication time and physical actions/reactions occure relatively instantly. However, client-side physics brings about a new set of challenges in a networked, collaborative environent. Consider the following scenario: You have a space shooter game where asteroids are moving towards earth. Players fly around in spaceships and fire weapons at the asteroids trying to deflect them. Player A fires a weapon and the projectile strikes the asteroid, deflecting it and scoring a point for player A. While this happens, Player B also fires at the asteroid, destroying it. Due to networking delays, player B's computer did not receive the event signaling player A firing at and deflecting the asteroid until after player B had destroyed it. Both players believe they deserve the score but only one could have hit the asteroid. Had these events been processed by a central server, both players would have observed the events in order and it would be clear which player would deserve the score. Such situations are why multi-user shared environments usually rely on central physics and event processing. This is one area where Unity could use additional development. There are, however advantages to having some client side physics even when many interactions are controlled by a central server, such as some avatar animation effects. I believe there's a lot that could be done to make the SL/OpenSimulator experience appear more realistic by adding more client-side physics in areas where it clearly helps. I've had a fair bit of experience with interfacing Unity to OpenSimulator in the past; I wrote a Unity based web viewer for OpenSimulator a few years ago for a company named Rezzable. Around that time I was also experimenting with mixing client-side and server side physics and I learned quite a bit about what can go wrong with trying to share client-side physics over a network. Regarding collaboration, Unity's editor is a single-user application. Editing your environment and using it are completely different situations. In OpenSimulator, they are combined into the same experience and others can observe world building in real time and participate in the process. To recap: Unity is really designed for games, and OpenSimulator is designed for shared, collaborative experiences. If you want to develop single user games or limited multi-user games, Unity is probably the best choice. For shared experiences, OpenSimulator pretty much works out of the box. On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Dr Ramesh Ramloll r.raml...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I am starting this thread so that I can get some of your thoughts on this matter. Most of the time, from what I read, and from what prospective clients tell me, Unity 3D is so great! why don't you develop in unity 3D. Yes it runs on tablets is a big plus. This I do understand. It has better physics, yes clearly. What I am not sure about, and I hope you can share your thoughts, is whether it would be possible to create a collaboration centric, avatar centric application in unity 3D. What I mean, is that whether you can have within a unity 3D world, avatars using objects to create new ones *collaboratively* , whether you can provide users with the ability to change their environments in natural ways, whether objects can be collected and shared, whether you have a shared white board, or collaborative document editing within a unity 3D world. And if yes, how long will it take to make these happen, may be it has already happened, do let me know with pointers to examples. And btw, why is it that I havent come across any voice chat demos of unity 3D applications that run in a browser. I am thinking if Unity3D is really top notch, why have these things not appeared already as applications (may be they have, and I haven't seen them, please point to examples, if you know of them). And most importantly, what does opensim offers that unity 3D does not, that you think is important for users out there, from various domains, such as education, training etc... p.s. the thoughts about HighFidelity and all these new stuff coming up I still don't know, if all these wheels are going to be reinvented, the scene is really too messy to contemplate. It is becoming really hard for us developers to pick platforms. We don't have infinite
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
Dear Alan, Thanks, could you share with us if all the funcationalities, scripting, behaviors in the opensim region were also translated into the unity scene? I have had many people tell me what you just said, and they walk away with the impression that all functionalities are maintained, I just wanted you to confirm. Ramesh On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 5:16 PM, Alan Miller alan.mil...@st-andrews.ac.uk wrote: We’ve developed a system which translates an OpenSim region into a UNITY scene. If there was interest it could be made available. Though support would be low key. Best, Alan *From:* opensim-users-boun...@opensimulator.org [mailto: opensim-users-boun...@opensimulator.org] *On Behalf Of *Dahlia Trimble *Sent:* 18 July 2014 22:12 *To:* opensim-users@opensimulator.org *Subject:* Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D Unity and OpenSimulator are not designed to cover the same application space. Uinty is designed for mostly single player gaming and adds a few features to help support multiplayer; whereas OpenSimulator is more designed for multi-user shared collaborative experiences. You can build a multi-user shared collaborative environment with Unity but it would require extensive development as it's not really designed for that purpose. Regarding physics, Unity has client-side physics. Whether this is better really depends on the application. For a single user game, client side physics can provide a more realistic experience as it's not affected by network communication time and physical actions/reactions occure relatively instantly. However, client-side physics brings about a new set of challenges in a networked, collaborative environent. Consider the following scenario: You have a space shooter game where asteroids are moving towards earth. Players fly around in spaceships and fire weapons at the asteroids trying to deflect them. Player A fires a weapon and the projectile strikes the asteroid, deflecting it and scoring a point for player A. While this happens, Player B also fires at the asteroid, destroying it. Due to networking delays, player B's computer did not receive the event signaling player A firing at and deflecting the asteroid until after player B had destroyed it. Both players believe they deserve the score but only one could have hit the asteroid. Had these events been processed by a central server, both players would have observed the events in order and it would be clear which player would deserve the score. Such situations are why multi-user shared environments usually rely on central physics and event processing. This is one area where Unity could use additional development. There are, however advantages to having some client side physics even when many interactions are controlled by a central server, such as some avatar animation effects. I believe there's a lot that could be done to make the SL/OpenSimulator experience appear more realistic by adding more client-side physics in areas where it clearly helps. I've had a fair bit of experience with interfacing Unity to OpenSimulator in the past; I wrote a Unity based web viewer for OpenSimulator a few years ago for a company named Rezzable. Around that time I was also experimenting with mixing client-side and server side physics and I learned quite a bit about what can go wrong with trying to share client-side physics over a network. Regarding collaboration, Unity's editor is a single-user application. Editing your environment and using it are completely different situations. In OpenSimulator, they are combined into the same experience and others can observe world building in real time and participate in the process. To recap: Unity is really designed for games, and OpenSimulator is designed for shared, collaborative experiences. If you want to develop single user games or limited multi-user games, Unity is probably the best choice. For shared experiences, OpenSimulator pretty much works out of the box. On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Dr Ramesh Ramloll r.raml...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I am starting this thread so that I can get some of your thoughts on this matter. Most of the time, from what I read, and from what prospective clients tell me, Unity 3D is so great! why don't you develop in unity 3D. Yes it runs on tablets is a big plus. This I do understand. It has better physics, yes clearly. What I am not sure about, and I hope you can share your thoughts, is whether it would be possible to create a collaboration centric, avatar centric application in unity 3D. What I mean, is that whether you can have within a unity 3D world, avatars using objects to create new ones *collaboratively* , whether you can provide users with the ability to change their environments in natural ways, whether objects can be collected and shared, whether you have a shared white board, or collaborative document editing
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
'Opensim is a multi platform server envirionment. So I guess opensim runs on non graphical evririonments. It would not really make sense to wanna run opensim on a tablet, it is not much fun looking at the console with endless debug messages all the time. ' :) You are really witty, I am impressed. I think most people followed what I was trying to say. On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 5:05 PM, M.E. Verhagen marcel...@gmail.com wrote: Opensim is a multi platform server envirionment. So I guess opensim runs on non graphical evririonments. It would not really make sense to wanna run opensim on a tablet, it is not much fun looking at the console with endless debug messages all the time. I doubt unity would make a chanche if compiled as a server application. You probably would wanna compare it with a virtual world viewer. There are lots of viewers wich you can use to connect with an opensim. Some of them even run on tablets. When I remember correctly there have been some viewers made with unity. ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users -- 'Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin.' *Rameshsharma Ramloll* PhD, CEO CTO DeepSemaphore LLC, Affiliate *Research Associate Professor*, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID 83209 Tel: 208-240-0040 LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/rameshramloll, DeepSemaphore LLC http://www.deepsemaphore.com, RezMela http://www.rezmela.com, Google+ profile https://plus.google.com/103652369558830540272/about ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
Some good posts with links here I look forward to reading! voice --- Ramesh, from what I've seen there is no off-the-shelf browser-only voice client that works with Unity. One or two are sold in the Unity store, but the voice quality is not what I'd call suitable for collaboration, aside from yelling shoot! shoot! Last time I looked, Jibe was going with Vivox voice, but Vivox needs an installed client. I'm assuming you are looking, as I was, for a purely browser based solution, with capacity like Citrix GoToMeeting or such. Some people I know with non-technical or one-time visitors/users have gone with Skype as a voice channel, and OpenSim or SecondLife as the visual channel.You lose 3-D dimension of sound, but Vivox sound has proven to be quite erratic for class work, and for a collaboration either EVERYONE has sound working or it's a failure. Both Vivox and Linden Labs point at each other. Not much help coming there. --- physics -- As to physics, speaking as a former physics major, Unity physics is actual physics, not a piece of junk like Second Life or OpenSim. And, it's possible, gasp, to make a HINGE or an AXLE that won't explode as soon as you release it. So if you need to build equipment with complex moving pieces that are detailed and realistic, Unity wins hands down. Similarly, in Unity you actually know where things are, to a millimeter, such as, say, the blade of a scalpel in the hand of a surgeon or pathologist making an incision.You can do realistic simulations where there are fine grained interactions of people and objects, or people and people. This is simply not possible in OpenSim or Second Life. I built a really nice autopsy table for the Second Life Medical Examiner sim, but never could get a generic pair-based animation of an autopsy to work, and don't think anyone can, except in broad strokes, and certainly not for two unknown avatar shapes. -- props and clothes -- Moving from Second Life to Unity, things are priced about the same number, except that in Second Life it's Lindens and in Unity it's dollars.That is, a nice dress of a particular kind in Second Life might take you all of a minute to find, and cost $1.50. A workable mesh-based dress in Unity will probably not be available, aside from combat or sexy clothes, and going to Mesh real-life stores like TurboSquid, you are competing with people doing TV ads who think nothing of spending $300 (three HUNDRED) for an outfit for their model. Yes, you can get SOME avatars and clothes free from MakeHuman or DAZ, but the choice is extremely limited. Props similarly, you may need to pay hard cash for chairs, desks, etc. that work for you. Unity comes with NO PROPS. Unity is not designed for building props or clothes or avatars, it is designed for USING them. Generally, you build stuff, including possibly animations in Blender (free) or Maya or Autodesk and import them. Or you buy them at expensive mesh-model stores. -- multiuser mode -- I optimistically set out to master multiuser mode, first using SmartFox3D and then Photon. It's doable, but it is a real pain.If you need to do this, there ARE a large number of Unity Builders for hire that you can find via the Unity store or via some shop like eLance. https://www.elance.com Elance makes it easy to scan prior work, find people with good recommendations, deal with payment in a way that keeps both sides of a short-build-contract happy, etc. It's worth checking out. -- shared whiteboard -- After several years of using various techniques, including Google Docs, for providing a shared whiteboard in Second Life (and I think this would be true in Open Sim as well), I'm finally of the opinion that it's just not worth the effort. That is, I had a shared Google Doc on a whiteboard, and if each student logged into it with a password separately, exactly right, they could see each other's changes on the board at the front of the room. There were two main problems -- * first, it was hard to explain to new users how to do this correctly, so some would see the shared document and others would see their own document. * Second, and critically, in order to READ the document either we needed a large font size ( 24 point or larger) in which case we only had 8 lines of text, or they had to click the board to make it FULL-SCREEN. OK, once you are going to take over the entire screen with the shared document, a shared whiteboard INSIDE the application isn't worth the huge bandwidth required to do it. * Third, it was not possible to UPLOAD documents or DOWNLOAD them via Second Life shared whiteboard. So, conclusion, we're giving up on collaboration INSIDE SecondLife/Open Sim, and going with collaboration applications open along-side the virtual world window, specifically Instructure's Canvas ( http://www.instructure.com/ )
Re: [Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D
Did people see Maria Korlova's post today ? I got it in a different[ opensim ] thread, in the Digest. I don't think I'm supposed to repost from one list to another, but this was clearly intended for the open-sim community so I'll do it this time: == begin quote I second the comments above. In my experience, Unity 3D is primarily used by enterprises for promotional materials -- they build an experience, and then they publish it on the web. This could be marketing games, campus tours, product simulations, etc... Unity 3D is a development platform. You need developers to create anything in it. OpenSim is a good fit for someone who wants a Second Life-style virtual environment, with in-world building tools, avatars, inventories, etc... but with better controls, backups, and lower-cost land. Anyone can com e in and build, and there's a wealth of content available -- free OARs, Linda Kellie freebies, Kitely Market, hypergrid stores on many grids, etc... Developers aren't needed to create an environment. There are some overlaps, though. Jibe and SecondPlaces are two products that try to build a virtual world-like system on top of Unity 3D. Another option,if you're a developer, is WebGL and HTML5. You need a modern browser - Chrome or Firefox -- to visit these worlds but, on the plus side, you don't need to download any software or install any plugins. It just works. And I just got off the phone with Douglas Maxwell, and the U.S. Department of Defense has built an entire free, open source virtual environment framework on top of WebGL -- https://virtual.wf So if you're leaning towards Unity 3D, take a look at that, as well. -- Maria === end quote = wade.schue...@gmail.com ___ Opensim-users mailing list Opensim-users@opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
