Interested in an Internship?
We are currently accepting interns in open source software development and in public relations. Contact info@pleiades.ca for details.The University of Central Missouri (UCM) and Pleiades opened Virtual Harlem today for use by students at UCM and the general public.
Professor Bryan Carter, who has been involved for more than ten years in various 3D modeling projects related to the Harlem Renaissance, will be using Virtual Harlem for pilot studies.
“Teaching methods will evolve to match this amazing technology,” he predicts.
Virtual Harlem was built by Pleiades, which retains an interest in any potential commercial revenues it generates.
“We are continuing to develop and expand Virtual Harlem, both within the Second Life grid and beyond,” says Project Manager Amanda Levin.
Virtual Harlem can be found in the Second Life grid at:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Harlem/127/130/30
Pleiades will unveil a new technology at a release event today in the Second Life virtual immersive environment. The technology, RESTbot (where “REST” stands for Representational State Transfer), allows popular web languages to work through Second Life. RESTbots appear as “unmanned” avatars in Second Life, and use XML to act as an intermediary between the world wide web and the metaverse.
“This is the first and only way for applications written in PHP or Perl to interact with Second Life,” explains Pleiades software developer Andrew Ortman. “It will let developers like me run web services that can access data Second Life exclusively provides to users of its client software. I think the community will find that very exciting.”
Pleiades President Patrick Edwards-Daugherty has indicated the code base will be available to developers. “RESTbot and its related plugins will be open source. They use the .NET framework and a Mono compatible codebase, which in turn are open source. That means developers will be able to extend the RESTbot code base freely. It is a key component in our latest immersive learning environments, and we expect other developers will benefit from, and add to, RESTbot.”
At a pre-launch demonstration of the technology, Ortman showed how a simulator monitor written in Javascript was able to use RESTbot to capture simulation statistics in real time. “Pleiades is looking to web services providers as early-stage adopters for the RESTbot technology,” he noted.
Pleiades Vice-President Jonathan Freedman will be on hand at the launch tonight to demonstrate the technology and to answer questions.
