Interview: Media Grid to Take Education Across the Virtual World--and the XO

Media Grid recently announced its plans to roll out a cross-platform, immersive world for education for academics, students, and trainers everywhere. After experimenting with VRML, the Unreal Engine, and other tools since 2001, the organization realized that it needed to begin looking beyond simply one platform. It formed the Immersive Education Initiative and looked for options. "That marked the opening of international standards in the space," said Media Grid Director Aaron Walsh. "It began the platform ecosystem. That says that the technology has reached such a stage and was useful in enough programs that it merited having a set of international standards and best practices built around it. It didn't belong in just one 3D virtual reality environment. It needed to be broadened and any 3D environment should be able to provide a 3D educational perspective."

"The criteria then were, first and foremost, open standards and open access," Walsh explained. "We looked at all the platforms that were available and arrived at the first three systems. Second Life, which is open source on the viewer; Sun Microsystems' Wonderland; and Croquet, an open-source educational environment created by Duke University."

The group is looking at other options as well, but the thrust of the initiative is to get a product out as quickly as possible that is adaptable for ongoing upgrades. That involves establishing not only a user interface that's consistent across the three platforms, but a way to recognize assets for teaching tools, host them, and make them available for use in any environment.

Interoperable Education

"It's a server-side distributed solution for content, for learning oriented objects and spaces or video, lectures, audio, learning games, and other forms of learning materials," said Walsh. "The concept of the media grid as applied to immersive education is not just that it's a 3D environment, but that it's a part of a larger system.  The education grid is a repository for that. Some of it will be pre-made for teachers to just use and some that they can create. It's both a repository and the server-side architecture. It houses the servers that allow students and  teachers and corporate learners to get together."

That's an ambitious project. While interoperability is a hot topic among the industry, the Immersive Education Initiative is taking it head on. Mostly. While the group was invited to participate in the discussions with IBM and Linden Lab about avatar portability and the like, Walsh considers that a side issue--interesting and important, but not critical for education.

"From a practical standpoint, the Education Grid will be populated by file formats that can be read by existing forms," he explained. "We'll have educational grid assets for Second Life and Extensible 3D for Wonderland and then assets for Croquet."

The process won't produce interoperability immediately, though. Walsh aims for three steps, each meant to get educators involved and using the grid as quickly as possible. First Media Grid will simply populate the Education Grid with useful tools in the pre-existing formats. Then a culling process will determine which are most important. Those will be rebuilt or transcoded into the other formats to make it possible for users at least to work in different environments with roughly the same tools. Finally, over the next  few years, Walsh wants to work  on augmenting and publicizing the platforms with a single format.

"Where we really want to be and where we're working towards are single file formats that are open and extensible," said Walsh. "So the content creation side creates something in Maya and exports or saves it in the open format that can be used by all sides. That's the critical part for the long term. There are already some candidate technologies out there. Extensible 3D is a good example. It can be read by all the formats by way of a loader or converter so it technically already exists."

The Education Grid itself is a platform neutral resource. It provides the same  server-side solution across the board. The question, then, is how to get the platforms to use it.  Walsh admits that there's not a compelling business case for many of the platforms to support an education initiative, so the funding and developers are coming, in part, from the program itself.

"What happens with that side is that we put people on the projects and they start to enhance the platforms on the client side so that it uses the Education Grid and that it also starts to use the native education grid file formats," says Walsh. "You can think of it in terms of Second Life so that the viewer will be modified to use the education grid as well as the format. "

One Metaverse for One Laptop Per Child

The Education Grid is certainly one of the most ambitious education initiatives out there right now. The  other biggie, though, is getting a tie-in.  The One Laptop Per Child program aims to provide a low-cost, durable laptop to every student in the world that needs one. There are similar initiatives coming out from Intel and other developers, but the OLPC's XO-1 laptop is likely the most publicized. It didn't make it's $100 mark, but it is shipping for $188 and the group plans to reach the $100 goal some time this year.

Now it might come with a virtual world option.

"We have a project that hasn't been announced," said Walsh. "It's Immersive Education on XO (iEDonXO). I met with [OLPC Founder] Nicholas Negroponte over dinner and talked about getting Immersive Education on those laptops and running in a scaled down form, which is what we're pursuing."

The  XO is a pretty solid machine, but it's not going to compete with  even  mid-level desktops in terms of connectivity and processing power. To address that problem, Walsh wants  to make all of  Immersive Education's assets, which go beyond just 3D environment tools, available in toned down forms.

"The main problem is that the quality of virtual worlds that the average person can experience compared to the XO is much different," he said. "Part of the requirement is a scalable experience so that the same content can be viewed in different versions. You could expect virtual Egypt on a modern desktop to have very high quality textures and meshes with cinematic avatars, but on the XO it has to be pared down considerably. The challenge is to still have enough data to still be meaningful."

It's a question that the makers of Habitat   wrestled with in the '80s. They could have graphical representations that carried alternative information to simply display string descriptions. Users could see a tree or they could read, "There is a tree." The XO doesn't need to go that far, but Walsh wants to look past the XO to even lighter weight devices.

"We've been running several different virtual reality 3D tools on the XO to get there," he said. "It's that whole class of machines that Immersive Education has a mandate to be scalable across. It's something not a lot of people have expressed as much interest in. The content is available for any type of platform and the content gracefully degrades across it. I might not be able to render the graphics on my phone, but I could still extract the audio for lectures. You don't have to be sitting at a desktop or laptop to get access.  As you go up, your experience gets richer, but there's no reason you couldn't just have an iPod and listen to the lecture."

That raises the question of why Immersive Education didn't aim for 2D, Web-based, or otherwise light-weight worlds from the beginning. But while Walsh wants content to degrade gracefully, he wants to upgrade as well. He wants Immersive Education developers to focus on the average client, dream about ideal  devices, and scale for the  lowest end.

A large part of the existing grid isn't even devoted to virtual worlds, but instead hosting 2D education games that are freely available. Those are already used in a pilot program across the US now, ranging from K-12. Many are simply 2D and some are just Flash.

But there's still the virtual world.

"We made a decision to support the interactive 3D environments out of the gate," explained Walsh. "The platforms like Webkinz or Whyville that are 2D can certainly use the assets in the Education Grid, they can integrate video no question, and that's part of the initiative, but we decided to do 3D. That's where we think it's all heading."

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