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REP-3 - OpenVCE Project Report 3

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February 28, 2010 - 21:28 — Austin Tate

OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE

  • Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
  • Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
  • Task Order No. 118
  • Deliverables: VCE-3 and REP-3
  • Due: 28-Feb-2010
  • Date of Last Revision: 28-Feb-2010
  • To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
  • Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
  • Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents, Laurel Allender, Chuck Elder, William Kirby
  • Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

This report documents technical progress, problems that occurred during the period of performance, resolutions during that period, and activities planned for the next reporting period for each of the tasks in the SOW. A separate confidential section of the report describes expenditures to date, remaining funds, and planned expenditures. The workplan and deliverables map can be found at:

OpenVCE Project Progress and Review

The Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiment 1 (VCEE-1) was completed at the end of January 2010. VCEE-2 was held over the period 19th-26th February 2010. The OpenVCE.net web portal and 3D spaces in Second Life and Opensim are available for use by the WoSCR community, and the web and virtual worlds assets have been released in open source for all to use (OpenVCE-1 and VCE-3).  Work continues to make available experimental data from VCEE-2; to plan a Virtual Worlds Workshop (VIWS-4) to communicate the results of the whole WoSCR program including OpenVCE; to continue to promote and write-up the work; to continue to expand the open source software and assets; and to explore future uses and developments of the initial virtual collaboration environment.

Task 1: Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE)

The OpenVCE virtual worlds assets have been released for Second Life and Opensim, and a Drupal distribution made available to act as the basis for a Web Portal to support collaboration sites similar to OpenVCE.net.  This is internal milestone OpenVCE-1.

The team propose to continue to provide the OpenVCE.net web server and management of the Second Life VCE region and OpenSimulator (OpenSim) New World Grid NewVCE region for the community while staffing resources at AIAI allow it, and certainly to the end of 2010.  This is deliverable VCE-3.

Requests for changes or improvements will continue to be noted and acted upon where feasible.

The OpenVCE.net team will continue to encourage external and community participation in the development of the OpenVCE.net facilities on the web and in 3D virtual worlds spaces.

Following the release of the Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta in late February 2010, experiments on the OpenVCE region in Second Life have demonstrated a range of advanced collaborative facilities, and which seem likely to form the basis of much richer future collaborative systems for the WoSCR community. See

The viewer provides a new user interface and, importantly for those interested in collaborative systems, "Shared Media".  Shared Media allows a wide range of web pages, video types (including Flash and YouTube), movies, etc to be displayed on any face of any primitive in Second Life. This represents a vast improvement on the previous (Second Life Viewer 1.23 and before) "media texture" that was limited to a single URL for each plot of land in Second Life.

Here are some images of our tests of a range of capabilities of the shared media mechanism involving:

  • Google Docs
  • Google Wave
  • Shared Interactive Whiteboard with display of MS Office, Open Office and PDF content
  • Adobe Connect with live shared screen display, audio and video feeds.

 

 

The demonstration Shared Media displays are available to those using Second Life Viewer 2.0 in the I-Zone@VCE:

Task 2: Virtual Iterative Workshop Series (VIWS)

The team propose to work with the program mangers and the WoSCR community past the formal end of the project to use the OpenVCE.net facilities to conduct a further workshop (provisionally designated VIWS-4) to describe the results of the OpenVCE.net project and its experiments to the WoSCR community. See http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-4

This may also involve use of the OpenVCE Expo Pavilion and its displays about projects and tools relevant to the WoSCR community. See http://openvce.net/expo.

Task 3: Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE) - Limited Objective Experiment (previously VCE-LOE)

The Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiment 1 (VCEE-1) was completed at the end of January 2010, and logging information from the experiment was extracted and made available early in February. This included:

  • Adobe Connect recording of the plenary sessions, Team A and Team B 3D spaces - video, audio and text chat can be seen.
  • Audio (MP3) recordings of the meetings and team spaces.
  • Text chat log in a form compliant with Linden Labs' Second Life usage terms and conditions by allowing specific opt-in and opt-out on an individual avatar basis, and viewing or changing of logging status at any time.
  • Activity logs in the form of spreadsheet tables (CSV) for the web portal for Team A (http://easdale.aiai.ed.ac.uk) and Team B (http://fiaray.aiai.ed.ac.uk).

The experience gained during VCEE-1 was used to guide the design of the second, more ambitious, experiment, Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiment 2 (VCEE-2). This experiment was to involve two teams, as before, but now each team included more members (roughly twice as many active participants in each as in VCEE-1) with a wider range of emergency response experience, and there was to be a clearer distinction between the technology available to Team A (which had available to it: the OpenVCE I-Zone facilities; a dedicated OpenVCE web-portal; the Virtual Collaboration Protocol; web-based support for following the Protocol; and access to the Catalyst tool for searching for external expertise, if this were thought necessary) and that available to Team B (Adobe Connect for synchronous meetings and a support web-page). The experiment was to be based around the same scenario developed for VCEE-1, and, as with the earlier experiment, was scheduled to take place over several days. In the days leading up to the experiment, technology assistance and testing, orientation and induction was provided to Team A.

VCEE-2 was held over the period 19th-26th February 2010; see:

The images below show a Team A meeting in the I-Zone, with observers monitoring the proceedings, and the final wrap-up session.

  

The experiment was conducted successfully, a fact due in no small part to the dedication and effort of the participants (to whom we hereby express our gratitude). Data collection and archiving continues, with detailed recordings of activity during the experiment created across a range of modalities:

  • Adobe Connect video, audio and text chat
  • Audio (MP3)
  • Chat logs (text)
  • Activity logs in the form of spreadsheet tables (CSV) for the web portal for Team A (http://easdale.aiai.ed.ac.uk)
  • Screen images

These experimental resources are available for WoSCR community and participants' research analysis - please contact Austin Tate <a.tate@ed.ac.uk> in the first instance.

At the end of VCEE-2 a wrap-up review meeting was held on Friday 26th February 2010 with members of Team A and Team B attending via Second Life or the linked Adobe Connect meeting space.

One issue that was raised by participants, and that continues to be problematic, is the need for much easier ways to see the list of participants, their names, organizations, skills and experience, roles in the team, profile images for recognition, and the relation of this information to their virtual world avatar presence.  More work is needed to make this easier to set up and use during busy meetings. Work has been started on this during OpenVCE with:

  • I-Tags
  • Web link-up between real and virtual personas
  • Team and case support pages indicating team membership and roles
  • Improved and more easily visible and accessible real and virtual worlds profiles on the web and in Virtual Worlds (e.g. via the new Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta avatar information popup and profile pages).

Reporting, Outreach and Write-up

  • Entry for Federal Virtual World Challenge 2009-2010 - http://openvce.net/fvwc-2009-iroom
  • Entry for Linden Prize 2010 - http://openvce.net/2010-linden-prize-iroom and http://fvwc-iroom.blogspot.com/
  • Hansberger, J., Tate, A., Moon, B. and Cross, R., Cognitively Engineering a Virtual Collaboration Environment for Crisis Response, Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Working. (CSCW 2010), Savannah, Georgia, USA, 6-10 February 2010. Abstract and Poster.
  • Tate, A. (2010) I-Room: Integrating Intelligent Agents and Virtual Worlds, X10 Workshop on Extensible Virtual Worlds (http://vw.ddns.uark.edu/X10). Organized by the IBM Academy of Technology and the University of Arkansas. Second Life, March 29-April 2, 2010. [Submitted]
  • Tate, A. (2010) I-Room: Integrating Intelligent Agents and Virtual Worlds, Position Paper for the Architectures Working Group, X10 Workshop on Extensible Virtual Worlds (http://vw.ddns.uark.edu/X10). Organized by the IBM Academy of Technology and the University of Arkansas. Second Life, March 29-April 2, 2010. [Submitted]
  • Wickler, G. and Potter, S. (2010) Standard Operating Procedures: Collaborative Development and Distributed Use, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2010), Seattle, WA, May 2010.
  • Others are planned.

A number of other papers have been written for elements associated with OpenVCE, such as the use of I-Rooms.

  • Tate, A., Chen-Burger, Y-H., Dalton, J., Potter, S., Richardson, D., Stader, J., Wickler, G., Bankier, I., Walton, C. and Williams, P.G. (2009) I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction, IEEE Intelligent Systems [Accepted for publication, to appear in 2010]

Plans for Next Period (March 2010 onwards)

Work will continue on several work items:

  • Continued analysis of the results of VCEE-1 and VCEE-2.
  • Finalize the open source virtual worlds assets for Second Life and OpenSim, and promote them to potential users.
  • Plan and conduct a workshop (provisionally called VIWS-4) to describe the results of the OpenVCE.net project and its experiments to the WoSCR community.
  • Continued support for the http://openvce.net web portal and the VCE region in Second Life and the NewVCE region in the OpenSim-based New World Grid.
  • Continued experimentation with advanced collaboration tools and shared media facilities linking the web portal and the virtual world 3D spaces more effectively.
  • Planning for the future of OpenVCE and support to the WoSCR community.