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Pleiades Present Meerkat at SLCC 2009

2009 August 16
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by pleiadesedu

Big thanks to everyone who attended our session at SLCC 2009, demonstrating the latest build of Meerkat, the OMF’s Free Open Source viewer for Second Life and Second-Life-like worlds such as Open Sim.

Meerkat is a project of the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), and Pleiades has been actively contributing for some time. We see the ability to customize a viewer for educational users and content builders as the path forwards for wider adoption in virtual worlds. To that end, we showed off a few of the new features in Meerkat including:

  • The Avatar Radar
  • Tweaked usability and better defaults
  • Higher precisions and tweaked buildings tools
  • The ability to build content offline and import it to Second Life and other Virtual Worlds
  • The Grid manager and grid-to-grid teleporting, allowing you to switch between Virtual Worlds without quitting the client.

Pleiades’ involvement with the OMF is part of our wider vision for a metaverse of loosely coupled virtual worlds. Our long term goal is to get Meerkat compatible with as many grids as we can. We want Meerkat to be the link between SL-like virtual worlds, similarly to how a web browser allows you to switch from Facebook to MySpace without any trouble.

Please, check out the lastest build of the viewer on the project’s website. It is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. And if you are interested in getting involved with the project, please get in touch.

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Benchmarking Project Announced

2009 July 13
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by pleiadesedu

Pleiades researchers, working with their counterparts at Intel, Amazon, and in the open source domain, have initiated a significant virtual worlds benchmarking effort. Work has begun today.

The project source code repository will be based at the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), which will also communicate data to users of virtual worlds everywhere.

“We want to give developers and users of virtual worlds the technical information they need in order to make informed platform and software design decisions,” says James Neal, President of the OMF. The OMF also maintains the source code base for the Meerkat viewer.

John Hurliman, Intel’s leading analyst with respect to virtual worlds, describes the technical situation as it stands. “Many virtual worlds are being developed independently with a wide variety of architectures and protocols. There is a range of open and closed source implementations and an increasing demand to connect worlds together and provide common services. All virtual world platforms are currently plagued by scalability problems.”

Pleiades has long sought a means to scale up the services educational institutions provide and connect them across platforms, including virtual worlds.

“A better scaling and connectivity model for educators means a better price and quality model for learners,” says Patrick Edwards-Daugherty, President of Pleiades.

Initial results from the project can be expected as soon as March 31, 2010, according to Project Manager Amanda Levin.

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Edwards-Daugherty Speaks at Le Sorbonne

2008 November 10
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by pleiadesedu

Pleiades President, Patrick Edwards-Daugherty, spoke today at France’s oldest university about the world’s newest technologies for teaching.

“Virtual worlds offer an opportunity to experience a sort of language and cultural immersion that once required us to live abroad. Coupled with the motivational and addictive qualities of play, we are presented with a new set of tools with respect to language acquisition.” Mr. Edwards-Daugherty was addressing to an audience of design, management, and computer science graduate students.

Developers at Pleiades, the Sorbonne, and at the University of Central Missouri have been cooperating on a virtual world based on Montmartre, a Paris neighbourhood, in the 1920s.

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