Multiverse Network is building tools that will allow virtual world developers to access and incorporate elements from Google’s rapidly expanding warehouse of 3D models, based on real objects.
This appears to be trending toward an open standards-based grid, which allows for the rapid development of virtual worlds based on the real world. As society increasingly prefers virtual reality over “real” reality, what can impacts in education, the workplace, and other knowledge-producing environments can we expect from this de-realizing?
Written by John Moravec on Monday, October 1, 2007 at 13:00
Education Futures has been receiving many visitors from Latin America –particularly from Mexico. To help make the site more accessible, I added a Traducir al español link to the sidebar.
Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.
By targeting the higher education social networking crowd (at least initially), can we expect this to take education by storm? Whereas Second Life is based on an invented (and inventable!) world, My World appears grounded in the real world –and more purpose-driven. Would such a grounding help to bridge virtual learning environments with reality?
Written by Brock Dubbels on Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 10:44
To do is to be
To be is to do
So Do We?
It is just good teaching
Games taught me that modeling environments and taking on the roles are powerful ways to teach and learn.
Piaget talked about roles as assimilation. You try on the role and see what part of the character is you.
Gibson talked about environment and context, with affordances and constraints. What the world gives you for advice, warning, limitation, and opportunity.
These ideas are present in embodiment and how we might contextualize our curriculum as an activity system.
One of the big lessons from games is design. Good learning is by design. A teacher, like a game designer creates the environment where we learn.
Written by John Moravec on Friday, June 15, 2007 at 17:49
Echoing the spirit of Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson’s EPIC 2014, Casaleggio Associati has produced a short video on the Future of Media, where Google, Amazon and Second Life dominate the media world through business acquisitions, reality replication in virtual spaces, and reality design.
Does the Eye of Osiris at the end of the video suggest the rise of a New World Order via transformations in media production and consumption?
Written by John Moravec on Wednesday, March 7, 2007 at 20:16
Privacy issues aside, this is pretty darn neat. Apparently, with a little trick, you can sometimes zoom in a bit further than Google Maps suggests you can…
is poised to replace email as the most-used digital thanks to higher-speed connections and the ever-growing mountain of digital data. The company predicts the scope of search, while still based on text-based key words, will expand to include digital data held on devices such as PCs, mobile phones, digital cameras and personal video recorders.
And,
Deloitte also sees significant improvements in the linkage between humans and technology. Natural language speech recognition and voice synthesis will likely be combined with basic artificial intelligence offering a wide range of new services, the company says.
“Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz. And what is that quest? Merely upstaging Microsoft would be almost banal. “We’re not trying to build a better operating system,” says Mr Schmidt (although that will not kill the rumour). Part of the plan is certainly “organising the world’s information”. But some people think they detect an even more grandiose design. Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they’re trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.”
The lawsuit asked the court to block Google from copying the books so the authors would not suffer irreparable harm by being deprived of the right to control reproduction of their works. It sought class-action status on behalf of anyone or any entity with a copyright to a literary work at the University of Michigan library.
How will pre-Internet copyrights hold up in the 21st Century? The New York Public Library and the libraries at Harvard, Stanford, Univ. of Michigan and Oxford all contribute their holdings to Google’s scanning project.
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