World on a Phone

Here is another interesting tid-bit: The Hong Kong-based computer game company, Artificial Life, recently announced that it expects to release a Java-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) for third generation (3G) phones before the end of 2005 (hey - that should be right about now!). According to an article in The New Scientist:

"the game will let players assume a virtual persona and travel through a futuristic cityscape, the company says. They will be able to chat and interact with computer-controlled characters as well as other human players and tackle puzzles that can be solved more easily through cooperation."

If people actually begin using such handheld MMORPGs, wireless providers might profit greately since large numbers of addicted players would be compelled to spend many hours using their wireless devices. I actually don't think people will be inclined to run down their batteries to play an MMORPG over long periods on a small screen. It will be interesting to see how this all develops - and what role Croquet technologies might eventually play in the authoring of handheld social applications.

The complete article in The New Scientist may be accessed here.

A Croquet Cyberinfrastructure?

Within the National Science Foundation-funded report entitled Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Learning for the Future, there is what I believe to be a relevant section for those seeking NSF support for developing Croquet-based gaming, simulation, and modeling environments. The report was the result of a workshop on Modeling, Simulation and Gaming Technologies Applied to Education that took place from September 27-29, 2004.

Check it out this excerpt from the report:

"Gaming, simulation, and modeling. Games clearly motivate users in ways that much conventional instruction, including online non-routine challenge problems, does not. Some have observed that game players learn implicitly in the context of playing games, and are motivated to continue learning outside of the game in order to improve their game play. Game players are motivated to continue playing out of a sense of fun and enjoyment, characteristics that are often lost in formal instruction.

Simulations and models help provide (but do not guarantee) insights into scientific concepts and phenomena. Difficult abstract concepts and large data sets can be accessed in ways that are more visual, interactive, and concrete. As such, simulations and models, and the games that incorporate them, have much to offer throughout a student’s learning experience. Just as simulations and computational models play an increasing role in scientific and engineering practice, they can and should play a prominent role in learning. The challenge is to lay the scientific and technical groundwork to ensure that games and simulations have a positive influence on learning, not one that is negative or distracting.

To achieve these goals, a number of Cyberinfrastructure and research challenges must be addressed, including:

• Virtual learning environments need engines, authoring tools, and other modeling tools that make it easy for students, educators and other practitioners to create interactive services, games and simulations—quickly and at low cost. The current commercial game industry is characterized by proprietary platforms and licensing restrictions that create barriers for their educational applications. NSF and other government agencies can play a role in promoting interoperability standards, and in promulgating tools, platforms, and protocols for creating and modifying games.

• An infrastructure for data collection and analysis needs to be built into virtual learning environment engines to inform the development of Lifelong Learning Chronicles (LLCs; see chapter 3). Instrumentation is lacking from commercial game engines, yet is critical for the Cyberinfrastructure in general. This infrastructure must support distributed data collection, both at home and in school, yet be secure, sensitive to privacy concerns, and tolerant of network connectivity problems in real-life educational settings."

It seems to me that Croquet would provide a powerful and extensible technology environment for addressing these goals. Hopefully, the formation of a Croquet Consortium will assist researchers from multiple institutions to come together to seek NSF funding in order to address these challenges in a coordinated way. Unfortunately NSF does not have a good record in backing technologies that have any real impact in this area (that has been the domain of military-related funding - remember that thing called the Internet?). It should be interesting to see how things play out...

The complete NSF report in .pdf format may be accessed here.

The Devil Made Me, DoIT!

I am pleased to announce that I have resigned my position as Assistant Director with UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology (DoIT) in order to accept the position of Assistant Vice President for Academic Services and Technology Support wth Duke University's Office of Information Technology. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) is the primary central infrastructure and service provider of information technologies for Duke University. The organization provides a broad range of services, spanning the areas of networking, telecommunications, central computing facilities, enterprise systems, education and research support, general computing support, and security. In this new position, I have broad responsibilities for Duke's academic and research computing development and support efforts as well as all customer service functions of Duke's Office of Information Technology. I will also be working with others on the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI), a major instructional technology program focused on experimentation, development, and implementation of digital technology in academic environments and will be seeking to build Duke University's capability to develop, deploy, and support Croquet-based solutions for higher education in partnership with the newly forming Croquet Consortium. I am jazzed about the possibilities!

Apple Hill Learning Lab

Each year, Alan Kay brings a group of people together at the Apple Hill Center for the Performing Arts in the beautiful mountains of southern New Hampshire. This three-day event in August provides invitees with an opportunity to spend quality time interacting with one another. The group includes technologists, designers, artists, musicians, in the tradition of other north-eastern creative retreats (Yaddo, etc.). The event also features great food and great music (by the Apple Hill Chamber Players). As I reflect back on my experiences at Apple Hill, I am struck by the deep importance of the contextualized social presence that occurs there and the positive effect that it has in support of creativity among the participants. Bringing people together in a way that allows serendipitous social interactions to take place is a wonderful way of stimulating collaborative creativity - and at Apple Hill, it really does work. There is lots of group interaction and lots of one-on-ones. Hopefully, Croquet will provide a technological framework for extending the value of such contextualized social presence into online spaces. The success of doing so depends on how well applications are designed and built on the core technology of the Croquet SDK. Until then, Apple Hill will have to do ;) . This year's event was particularly interesting because of the presence there of many folks who are working on hardware and software for Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop Initiative and on the final stages of the Croquet 1.0 SDK.

Synthetic World Conference

The increasing popularity of synthetic worlds (embodied as MMORPGs, or massively multiuser online role-polaying games, avatar-based communication systems, etc.) is a phenomenon that several key academics believe is worth considering in terms of its potential impact on education. This is because many of the students entering our academic institutions do so with a deep experience with synthetic worlds in the form of console and computer-based 'video games'. Now, there is emerging a coordinated effort among researchers at several major universities that seeks to develop plans for the implementation of what is being called "synthetic world technology". Organized by Edward Castronova, the effort proposes the establishment of a Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds that will explore this technology, develop a deeper understanding of it, and then use it to build synthetic worlds for research and education. The inaugural conference of the Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds will take place later this month in Bloomington Indiana. For details on this interesting conference click here.

Critical 3D

The Croquet development team at the University of Wisconsin is now beginning work on a six month pilot project to demonstrate instructional potential of a Croquet-based learning environment. The project involves partnering between our group and Michael Connors, a professor in the Department of Art at the UW School of Education, to develop authoring tools that allow the instructor to create an instructional environment to address critical barriers involved with the art critique process and provide students with means to upload, share, and critique their art projects within collaborative online spaces. The goals of critique in art are to remove individual perceptual barriers, develop an appreciation of how others perceive one's work, to overcome biases related to psycho-social conditioning, and develop skills of articulation and critical discourse. We are hoping that this project will lead to the development of generalized Croquet-based authoring tools that can be adapted to many different curricula, such as those in Law, Sociology, Psychology, Guidance, Business Management, Medicine, etc..

Its About Time?

Some of the recently reported Socket I/O problems with UNIX Squeak 3.8a1 VM may be related to why Squeak tends to perform so badly as a webserver and why there have been challenges in getting a robust TeaTime working in Croquet on platforms other than Windows. Without going into the technical details (some of which can be seen in David Shafer's emails posted on the Squeak VM List), a Socket I/O problem cascades in a way that causes bad behavior in UNIX Squeak-based servers when those servers are receiving large numbers of closely spaced connections. In certain cases this problem may be responsible for intermittent bouts of long latency in Squeak VMs - of up to 1.5 seconds before an incoming packet is detected by the Socket plugin. At the same time, the Squeak VM appears to handle UI input events at rates of 400 per second or more without a problem. All of this may be related to why it has been a challenge to pull together a robust TeaTime in Croquet and it now appears necessary to do some platform specific network layer tuning of the VM as we close in on a working v 1.0 release of Croquet. David P. Reed has recently suggested that this aspect of Squeak performance may have gone unnoticed since it doesn't manifest in large file transfers which have been the primary form of benchmarking to date.