Air France-KLM on a Cloud

You don't see too many new companies taking a dive into virtual worlds these days, so I was really excited to see Air France - KLM immerse last month.

Air France-KLM, is a European airline holding company incorporated under French law with its headquarters at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris, France. It is the largest airline company in the world in terms of total operating revenues, and the third largest in the world in terms of passenger-kilometres and passenger fleet size. Air France-KLM is member of the SkyTeam airline alliance. They offer a frequent flyer program called Flying Blue. The company's namesake airlines rely on two major hubs: Roissy-Charles de Gaulle International Airport, near Paris, and Schiphol Airport, near Amsterdam. [wikipedia]

The airliner has asked iMarginal to build a virtual presence where the company would be able to interact with their shareholders, or as introduced on the AFKLM Second Life website:

The Air France-KLM island in the Second Life universe aims to offer Air France-KLM shareholders a space with the Group’s financial news. For shareholders and visitors, this space is structured in order to help them learn more about the Group’s activity and to participate in financial events. On the island they can find an auditorium, a lounge, the share price in 3D, a Sustainable Development space and the Air France Museum.

I'm happy to see they've done a great job at the build; it's of exquisite quality and they've actually managed to skip a few of the traditional, gravity bound builds we often see in virtual environments. The island is called 'ile dans le ciel', or in plain English 'island in the sky', which suits the company as their core business mainly is up in the clouds.

As for moving around the sim you will need a jetpack to move from room to room, or use the teleport hub above.

There are four primary areas to explore: First there is the Home sphere: where you can view movies about the Air France-KLM group and download PDF's containing the latest financial reports. The second shpere is the 'mandatory' auditorium. A third sphere houses the Air France museum with and exhibition of early Air France and KLM posters, bringing pack memories of the past when flying still was romantic and adventurous. The museum also contains a number of fine scale models of Air France and KLM airplanes. Finally, the fourth sphere offers room to a lounge.

Late last summer I have had some contact with KLM exmployees who were looking into the possibility of building a Second Life presence and were looking for some sort of justification for an airliner to get into a virtual world, in which people don't need transportation as they can fly, or even better, teleport themselves from point to point. I pondered that question when I blogged the presence of the Brussels Airlines in Second Life in March, as I wrote:

... and what do you do when you're an airliner and get down to the Metaverse? Exactly, an airline's core business is to bring people from place to place. In the virtual world however, you don't need transportation. You can just teleport. Airliners have become obsolete. Yet Brussels Airlines knows that bringing people from place to place is just a means to a goal. It is actually about people going to destinations. So if you can't do the transportation part, focus on the destinations. That's exactly what the B-Places directory does.

There's a slight French domination at the build, so I'm trying to find out more with the Dutch wing..

Here's a slideshow from the build's Flickr pool:

More info can be found on the Air France-KLM website where you can watch a neat video about the Second Life presence and an introduction by group CEO Jean-Cyril Spinetta.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/SecondLife/Air%20France%20KLM/128/34/232

Past4Ward Licences Rome Reborn

Last week I blogged about Google Earth starting to explore the 4th Dimension by adding a special layer on Google Earth featuring ancient Rome. A few people had the idea they'd seen it somewhere before, like my chum from Ambling, Al Kronos:

AlKronos @vjburns Looks like the Virtual Roma DVD that was made a few years ago (got a copy somewhere). I assume they've decided to "re-purpose" it.

Well, he was absolutely right according to this article on Virtual Worlds News:

Past4Ward Licenses Rome Reborn for Educational Virtual World

Past4Ward announced this week that it had licensed Rome Reborn for use in a supplemental educational platform, games, and virtual worlds. I haven't written anything about Rome Reborn because, so far, it's been more about mapping and building a detailed virtual re-creation of the ancient city, but I've been following it with a lot of interest. As it stands, Rome Reborn includes over 7,000 buildings and covers more than 13 square miles of a city modeled strongly on research. You can check it out in a recently added Google Earth layer.

Past4Ward plans to incorporate it into a product for middle and high school students "featuring game play similar to a Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) title as well as other Virtual World techniques that will be integral parts of the design, which will map to existing curriculum standards."

As the license for video games is exclusive, Past4Ward also plans to make it available for licensing by game developers and publishers. The educational project appears to be in conjunction with Past Perfect Productions, which is also working with the Virtuality Group and Parco Colosseo to launch 3D Rewind Rome, an "edutainment center" near the Colosseum based on the Rome Reborn model.

“We are extremely excited to be working with Past4Ward in providing the historical architecture that will become a new format to teach kids about ancient Rome,” Joel Myers, CEO, Past Perfect Productions, said in a statement. “A video game of this nature, used in classrooms, combines a stimulating and entertaining learning process with the strengths and familiarity of communications tools students use in their everyday lives, from PlayStations to the Internet.”

New, or old, it still looks good

Entering the 4th Dimension - by Google

In the past months I've blogged quite a few times about the use virtual worlds in visualising and understanding history. One of these examples was IBM's recreation of the Forbidden City in China and I also blogged how cool it would be to walk more of these Ancient Sites.

One of the things I wrote when speaking of these ancient sites was;

"From about the day I signed on to Ancient Sites I've had the believe that this had the potential to change our Educational system in the way which students could globally interact, learn languages, geography, history, art and you name it."

There are many ancient sites I would like to visit. In real life I have walked across the ruins of Olympia, of Mycaena and Sparta but one place I like in particular is ancient Rome. Currently I act as a Gladiator in the online game Gladiatus (by the way, I changed my handle from VeeJay to Verritus in this game) so Iam pretty excited of yet another Google thingy. Although I got pretty negative on Google yesterday in their quest for world dominance, this is a cool thing as they bring the 4th Dimension into Google Earth. Here's the full story from Thomas Clayburn at Information Week.

The mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, on Wednesday invited the hoi polloi to visit Rome in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Earth.

Not modern Rome, but the Eternal City as scholars believe it was in 320 A.D., based on the Rome Reborn model constructed by the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

"What fascinates me most about this project is the accuracy of the details of the three-dimensional models," said Alemanno in a guest post on the Google blog. "It's such a great experience to be able to admire the monuments, streets, and buildings of Ancient Rome with a virtual camera that lets you go inside and see all the architectural details. From the Colosseum to the Ludus Magnus, from the Forum Caesar to the Arch of Septimius Severus, from the Rostra to the Basilica Julia, you can get up close to them all."

To view the new Ancient Rome 3-D layer in Google Earth, open the "Gallery" folder in the "Layers" panel and select "Ancient Rome 3-D."

This marks the first time an ancient city has been incorporated into Google Earth. "Going back in time presented some new challenges, such as how to handle the ancient terrain which was clearly different than modern day," explained Google Earth product manager Bruce Polderman in a blog post. "We needed to ensure that modern day imagery, terrain, and buildings didn't interfere with the ancient Rome model so we opted for a simple overlay."

In conjunction with the debut of the Ancient Rome 3-D layer, Google is sponsoring a curriculum competition for K-12 educators. Teachers interested in participating can sign up, waive assorted rights, and submit a lesson plan and supporting materials in the hope of being among the top six entries. Prizes include an Apple MacBook laptop, a digital classroom projector, a digital camera, a 3-D navigation mouse, $500 in gift cards to Target or Office Depot (NYSE: ODP), and an engraved Google "Top Educator" plaque.

Below is a video demonstration produced by Google:

Step into the Arena: Gladiatus

Yesterday I signed up at yet another online game. This one's called Gladiatus. In this MMO you log into ancient Rome and become a heroic Gladiator.

Gladiatus is a continuously evolving Massively Multiplayer Online Game where you play as one of the many gladiators of Ancient Rome. Although not mandatory, players generally compete in trying to become the highest ranked character in the Arena and/or the specific game server. Gladiatus was released in May 2007, with an online forum being launched at the same time. The forum still exists to serve as a media for in-game discussions, help and etc. [Wikipedia]

The game has two main areas, first of which the city of Rome where you'll find the inn (where you can get quests), training grounds, shops and the Arena where you can challenge other Gladiators in your claim for fame.

The other area in Gladiatus is the great outback where you can fight bandits, thieves, wolves, do mountain expeditions to gain experience and find artefacts.

It's pretty basic when compared to the slick 3D worlds out there right now, but I like the theme. Watch out, it has the potential be a little addictive. There's several thousands of players out there to fight and you can find me here on server 3.

Virtual History

Last week I wrote a lengthy blogpost on IBM's virtual Forbidden city and wondered:

"The first time I walked the city and marvelled at its detail, I thought back to my days at Ancient Sites and wondered how it would be to walk from this city, to say ancient Rome or Athens, to have multiple sites like these exist. "

Fortunately I'm not the only one to think that Virtual Worlds can play an enormous role in our educational system in terms of recreating our cultural heritage. Today I came across Joe Rigby's blog, MellaniuM where he explores how virtual environments can aid in this way. There's a number of blogposts on his site I'd like to point out. Especially in regard to quoting myself above, here's part of a blogpost titled Archaeological Serendipity:

"Just imagine wandering at your leisure through a recreation of Athens or Rome at the height of their power and influence. At MellaniuM our very "raison d'etre" could be distilled as the creation, nay, I should say the actual resurrection at a virtual realistic level of the achaeological remnants of these glorious civilisations. Indeed there are vast assets of 3D models in databanks of acedemic institutions around the world which have been used to provide vistas and fly-through movies of the plethora of cities which flourished in the core of ancient civilizations from Mesopotamia to Egypt and from Athens to Rome. These models can now be used to their full potential to create a vast interactive space available for hundreds of participants from all over the World. What an experience it would be to be immersed with your friends in walking around these cities? To explore the art and decorations of some sumptuous villa in Pompeii or walk through the Parthenon as it was on the first day it was completed by Pericles in 435BC.

It has been stated that it will be another 5 years before this feat of virtual representation can be accomplished"

Read full blogpost here. A second post I'd like to point out is the most recent entry to the MellanniuM blog, titled Industrial Archaeology.

"Could you imagine that MellaniuM virtual realistic environments would ever connect industrial cultural heritage and a massive intrusion of granite under the South-West tip of England?

Well MellaniuM will be participating in the VAST 2008 workshop "Serious Games and Cultural Heritage”. As an example of virtual engineering we have recently finalised the replica of a famous old steam locomotive 0-6-0 “Jinty” 47279 designed originally in the early 20th century and still running at the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway."

Read the full blogpost here.

Now, you might start to wonder if there's an end to my interest, but this is once again a great hobby of mine. Actually, while writing this, I even start wondering how it is possible to find time enough to actually get some work done. Truth is, I like railroads, and especially the early railroads. In real life we just bought a new house which finally has enough room on the attic again to set up a new railroad and in the past months I've done some research on the great first years of Railroads in England and Scotland. As I'm also a Wiskey lover I'd been working on a railroad plan along the Great North of Scotland railroads, with its numerous branches like the Banff - Strathisla railway which provides narrative and scenery for the model railroad I'm designing, but now I'm ranting.

Anyway, in the real world we may visit historic sites, but many of these treasures have been lost, buildings as well as classic trains due to wars, reconstructions or just by rusting away in some trainyard. I'm sure virtual environments can work miracles in education in many ways. One option, like for example Joe's recreation of the Jinty in Second Life is just to provide an image of things lost to real life, but another approach is to exactly recreate the engine, make it larger so you can walk through and use it in a course to explain the history of engineering. This is also a thing we could do with historic structures. In medieval buildings there are various solutions in preventing the roofs to collapse. They didn't have steel or concrete beams strong enough to hold up the roof, so they had to use tricks. In a virtual environment with a proper physics engine you can demonstrate what happens if you take out a keystone for instance, something which you wouldn't do with a real life monument, just to demonstrate your teachings ;).

Historic Worlds - Monastery of Dordrecht

Yesterday I blogged (again) about the beaty of IBM's virtual Forbidden City from a historic and educational point of view, rather than it being technologically advanced. Today, I'd like to take you on a tour to a different historic setting: The Monastery of Dordrecht.

The Monastery of Dordrecht is not a fullgrown virtual world or a game, rather a simulation of one of the key locations in Dutch history.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands started in 1572 in Dordrecht. This historical fact formed the basis for an exposition in late 2007. The city archives organisation, DiEP, inivted Paladin Studios to create an interactive 3D visualisation of the so called ‘Court of Dordrecht’. The goal was to recreate the old monastery at the site, of which the only remains are some of the foundations, and show the changes of the site over the centuries. The result is an interactive visualization which provides historical insight and the experience of “being there” in the late Middle Ages.

The Monastery of Dordrecht has been developed by a Dutch game company, Paladin Studios. Its managing director Dylan Nagel has a backround in Archeology and it shows in the level of detail of this simulation.

Wireframe rendering of the Monastery

The final simulation has excellent graphics and wonderfull lighting, small wonder that it ended up as Quest 3D's Award winner in the 2008 competition.

The application starts with a short intro with singing monks in the background. When the intro is finished the user can navigate trough the monastery and its courtyard with a single click navigation system. The lighting creates subtle accents of sunlight and shadow. The 'gimmick' in this presentation is that the user can travel through time by using buttons that pop up at the bottom of the screen. When the user clicks in the time line the scene changes to different situations in time.

As I said, it's a simulation, not a world. You can't walk through this with an avatar, which is a pity, although it's rather easy to navigate.

Another feature is the bird's eye view that allows the user to have several overhead perspectives of the building. In stead of using the mouse to drag the perspective it uses a fixed camera path which is easily controlled using two buttons on the left and right side of the screen. Without a doubt this presentation would work very well with a touch screen interface, even for users that have little experience with navigating in a 3D environment.

The polished look and feel, the excellent use of lighting and surprisingly simple user interface made the jury decide to make this presentation this year's best entry.

When looking at the graphics, the Monastery of Dordrecht is a winner as a simulation. The next step I would love Paladin Studios to take is to make it a multiuser environment so we for instance could reenact the Dutch declaration of independence (1572) or the synod of Dordrecht (1618/1619), which once again makes you wonder about standards in 3D environments and interoperability. When I'm teaching history, I'd like to take my pupils along with me to the Forbidden City as well as the Monastery of Dordrecht without having to register again and create new avatars.

Quotes and images from the Paladin Studios Portfolio and Quest 3D 2008 Award website.

The Forbidden City - an ancient site

The Forbidden City

Today I strolled around the virtual Forbidden City once more to drink in some of the ancient Chinese history, thinking of great tales of Marco Polo, the Silk Routes or the terracotta army. I must admit, I'm a sucker for history.

Speaking of which, here's a short history of the Forbidden City, which launched october 10th and to which I already devoted two blogposts:

• Entering the Forbidden City (oct 10)
• More views of the Forbidden City (oct. 11)

Exactly one week later, the number of registered users has grown to 128.101 users, which I think is great. This isn't exactly a social world but more like a dedicated virtual environment. Dedicated to one single real life space that spins a thousand tales. Over at the Eightbar blog, IBM's Metaverse evangelist Ian Hughes finally blogged the Forbidden City today in a blogpost in which he gave us a little insight into the history of this build.

John (Tovla) was exploring options for the project that rolled on from his previous one of Eternal Egypt. John specializes in running large innovative projects that use the web for more philanthropic reasons as part of what is called corporate community relations.

So there we were in SL, I had my personal shiny new island Hursley and he and his team were looking at how they might represent the forbidden city in the growing world of the virtual, non game metaverse. So I loaned the team the island, and a massively detailed chinese build started to form in the sky over the next few weeks whilst they procured their own official island. [read full article here]

What I do like to point out is that once again, it clearly names Second Life as the catalyst, the testing grounds for dedicated virtual environments. The other thing that excited me was the mention of Eternal Egypt.

I'd hoped this would be yet another virtual endeavor, which unfortunately it wasn't. It's a great resource website on the ancient Egyptian culture. This however does bring me to my next point.

The first time I walked the city and marvelled at its detail, I thought back to my days at Ancient Sites and wondered how it would be to walk from this city, to say ancient Rome or Athens, to have multiple sites like these exist. Given the current meme one would start talking interoperability right away, but I'd like to turn the other way for now.

Ancient Sites

The Ancient Worlds community started in the early 90's I think , under the name Ancient Sites, as a bulltetin board based community which initially focussed on history, but later developed into a widespread community with a lot of roleplay as well. Initially it was split up into 4 cities, Rome, Athens, Babylon and Thebes if I recall correctly and was later expanded with Machiu Piccu and the Ancient Celts. It grew in the early 90's to about 120K users, which historically speaking in pre-web2.0 times was pretty good. In the late 90's it went bankrupt, but started up again shortly after 2000 under the name Ancient Worlds but in 2005 returned to its former url: http://www.ancientsites.com/. In this second evolution of the community it was no longer strictly focussed on cities but more regionally. It was also extended with the Orient (hence the Forbidden City association) and the early German tribes. It never rekindled this old spark though, and now holds about 35K members.

Inside Ancient Sites I created my first internet handle, Johannes Nestor. It had about the same user format as Second Life has, predefined last names and free first names. These last names were familynames from well known historic people and families from these ancient cities. My initial interest in this site was history. At the time I was writing my senior thesis, titled "The Alternate Word - A comparison between Fantasy Literature, Mythology and Religion" and was looking for resources on various myths, both ancient Roman and Greek as well as Scandinavian and Etruskan. Through the bulletin board system I could easily find the tales I needed and came into contact with experts from around the world to find out more on these topics (who ever said the social web is a post 9/11 thing?)

I got caught up in Roleplay pretty soon though and one of the roleplays I got into was the recreation of the Byzantine Empire in which I tried to set up an economic system which earned me an estate on the isle of Naxos, made me a Patriarch and finally earned me the title of GrandMaster of the Knights Templar.

The plot thickened and we were up for war. So I created my second handle, Uriah Atrahasis, a Hetite named after Bathsheba's husband Uriah, which became one of the leading generals in the Byzantine army. We 'blogged' our travels to Syracuse and waged war on the Moors. It was a sport to do this as historically accurate as possible. So everything was checked against Sun Tzu's Art of War (which wasn't untill much later and on a different continent, but that made me win the wars), I dug up every scrap of information I could about old Roman galleys and other seavessels of that time, got into smithying, Phoenician and Hetite cultures, etc just to get the facts straight. In my roleplaying days at Ancient Sites I learned more about history and culture than I ever learned in school.

My third handle on Ancient Sites was Finn Folcwalding. In the initial plans for the extention of the ancient sites with the Germanic Tribes the creators focussed on the Goths and other tribes like Blatand (Blue-Tooth), Meroving, Habsburg and Scylding I urged them to included the Frysians as they were one of the strongest tribes fighting the Romans. Hence, the Folcwalding family was born. Not that it's a typical Frysian name, but Finn Folcwalding appears in (e.g.) Beowolf as one of the Frysian Kings.

From about the day I signed on to Ancient Sites I've had the believe that this had the potential to change our Educational system in the way which students could globally interact, learn languages, geography, history, art and you name it. Shortly after it's revival I worked shortly with the creators of the site to see if we could find a more 'immersive' way to set up the site and we experimented with flash based maps of the ancient cities. Unfortunately this wasn't sponsored by IBM, as is the Forbidden City, and had to make do with limited funds and knowledge so we never got that makeover work out.

The Eduverse Foundation

A couple of years later, i.e. present day, I still see potential behind this site in order to change education. Last year I encountered a recreation of Ancient Rome in Second Life, and again I wondered how this would work out at Ancient Sites. A short proposal didn't work out, the crowd there isn't into VW's much, but in the end it was one of the reasons I got involved with the startup of the Eduverse Foundation, which tries to chart the educational benefits of virtual worlds for educational purposes.

No doubt you'll find all sorts of arguments of why not to do this. Within the Eduverse Foundation itself I've had a number of discussions on this topic. Quite a number of Metaverse Evangelists are of the opinion that recreating Real Life things in a virtual environment is a bad thing, and shos a lack of understanding 3D-ness. I partly agree, but cannot deny its power to explain present and past as well.

In this regard I'd also like to point out the "Otherland" series by Tad Williams. When speaking of the Metaverse we always name Neil Stephenson and William Gibson, but I think Tad Williams should be mentioned in the same breath as it comes to visionaries on the Metaverse. In the Otherland series he describes a virtual world which has two aspects:

1. A digital city, sort of a mainland area where people spend their time socializing and shopping, somewhat alike Stephenson's "The Street" from Snowcrash
2. A vast realm of simulators, like Second Life Islands, which are connected through a river. Each of these simulators has its own theme. These themes range from scifi to fantasy.

A number of simulators described in the Otherland series are historical sims. We find ancient Egypt and Troy for instance. I would recommend reading this series to get an idea of what could be created in Networked Virtual Environments and what this could do to aid education.

Image from the upcoming Otherland Game

Concluding I'd say: IBM, please go on. Not from an innovative point of view, but from a historical point of view I'd like to see more environments like the Forbidden Citycoming

Entering the Forbidden City

Today I walked the Forbidden City, which reputation has grown to mythic proportions. Though I did walk the streets of the actual Forbidden City in Bejing, but it's virtual representation which can be found at the Beyond Space and Time project page.

"The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the mid-Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the Dongcheng District, in the middle of Beijing, China, and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost five centuries, it served as the home of the Emperor and his household, as well as the ceremonial and political centre of Chinese government.

Built from 1406 to 1420, the complex consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms and covers 720,000 square metres. The palace complex exemplifies traditional Chinese palatial architecture, and has influenced cultural and architectural developments in East Asia and elsewhere. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987, and is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

Since 1924, the Forbidden City has been under the charge of the Palace Museum, whose extensive collection of artwork and artefacts were built upon the imperial collections of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Part of the museum's former collection is now located in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Both museums descend from the same institution, but were split after the Chinese Civil War." [wikipedia]

This Virtual representation of The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time is a partnership between the Palace Museum and IBM. According to the website the goal of the project is to provide the means for a world-wide audience to celebrate and explore aspects of Chinese culture and history. The Virtual Forbidden City is an immersive, 3-dimensional virtual world where you can interact with visitors from around the world and celebrate and explore aspects of Chinese culture and history.

After registering (you'll find me there as VJBURNS) and downloading the 200 MB client I could install the virtual city with a neat MSI installer and after a couple of forced software updates (which I'm not fond of) I immersed myself in the virtual city, which looks fantastic. I've always been a sucker for history (also been a member of the earliest online history communities, Ancient Sites since 1995 or so.)

From the official press release:

“The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time” Recreates Historical Treasure as a Fully Immersive 3D-Internet Experience

BEIJING, Oct 10, 2008 — Today, some 600 years after construction began on the 178-acre site that would become the center of unrivalled imperial power known as China’s Forbidden City, the Palace Museum and IBM will open the walled fortress — and hundreds of years of history and culture — to the world.

Three years in the making, IBM has meticulously built a virtual recreation of the architecture and artifacts of the former palace grounds, enabling online visitors to get a first-hand view into imperial China as embodied in the intricate design, history and storied culture of this newly accessible Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time” is a first-of-a-kind, fully immersive, three-dimensional virtual world that recreates a visceral sense of space and time of this Chinese cultural treasure — as it was centuries ago during the height of the Ming and Qing dynasties — for most anyone with access to the Internet.

Full press release here.

Well, I'm in early, the city just opened it's doors today and we're still under 2K registered users with about 300 online right now. Be prepared to take a few minutes for installing and loading, but then it looks lovely.

In particular two areas are advertised as being highly splendid on the website, being the Meridian Gate,

The Meridian Gate is the front entrance to the Forbidden City. It has five gateways, with the central gateway being reserved for the emperor.

and the Gate of Supreme Harmony

The Gate of Supreme Harmony is the largest gate inside the Forbidden City, and serves as the front entrance to the Outer Court. The gate is located on the central axis and lies just before the Inner Golden River.

More early birds on blogging the Virtual Forbidden City (coverage appearing while I'm doing this extensive download, installing and touring):

• TechCrunch - Real World got you Down
• Virtual World News - IBM and Palace Museum Open Forbidden City Virtual World

UPDATE:

• The Forbidding is becoming quite popular. Registrations see a rise of about 2,000 per hour, barely one day in public mode it's already gotten to 32,000 registered users.