The Education Grid

Here are some screenshots from the website : http://theeducationgrid.org/
Click on the bottom link that starts with "Learn more..."

The top of the page, has a flash banner that goes from "Media Grid" to "Ed Grid" as the other letters fade out. I thought that was pretty clever! It has the table of contents and then starts to talk about the history of TEG.

 Skipping ahead to talk about the range of the access of TEG and who can use it and what rights they hold with it.

And finally other options for exploring TEG and services.

inbedleftelbow,Dinkitchen,Mjustgotback,onlybballshae5/8up,ltsoff!

Class 11 - WebGL Chrome Experiments that FAIL IN FIREFOX

Only Tiera, Jamie, and Diana had theirs up at the time I came to this part of the assignment. And like Jamie said, they may all run in Firefox, but the quality and speed are much better in Google Chrome. I believe it is because they were created with the intentions of being run in Chrome, so while they are still compatible with Mozilla Firefox, the preferred browser for optimal results in running these Experiments is to be in their natural habitat made by the all powerful Google!

WebGL Chrome Experiments using Google's Chrome Browser

This is a sculpting tool. It's pretty cool. That rhymed.
I put my initials on the sphere with the bump tool and then spray painted it in green!

 Here is a link to the Experiment: Sculpt Link

 This is not a screenshot here, but it was the picture that was taken and saved onto my computer when I was trying to put a 3d animal head on my body. The Experiment reminded me of some of the iPhone apps my brother gets that does weird things with your image. I pressed all the different icons and buttons but no horse head came! 

Here is this one's link: Umazlizer

 This was a cool Experiment also. It is used to light 3d objects. You can see the difference between the two pictures. The first one does not have my arrow curser (the light) over the images, while the second one I placed it over the Buddha's chest.

 Link for this Experiment: Jonas Wagner

 This one is NOT 3D but I put it up for fun. I took these SS's before I realized it wasn't a 3D thing that I could use. It reminds me of iPhone apps like I said earlier, this one more like the heat sensing one or the lighter that you flick and wave the flame. It reacts to your mouse and how much you move your cursor back and forth. If you do it a lot, or "vigorously" like it suggests, the worm guy goes into a psychadellic freakout and we get a hippie strobe light attack! Pretty cool dude!

Here is his link: This guy is awesome

Final #3: Group 3D Building Project & ROLLCALL CLASS 11

This is our group in the Second Life world Sunamari. We worked on building a home for us in the class. It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc

Sam started a carriage house and then a pool which I worked on as best I could. My computer was lagging like no computer has lagged before. It was horrible.

Here is Jamie and Diana (I think) in the background. There was a lot of 'stuff' in this world which was probably why it was lagging so hard.

More building. Diana put up a funny door.

Here I am trying to build some pool games. That block was my sad attempt at a basketball backboard. I eventually made a rim also and would've made a net. I then would've textured/materialized them to look like what they were supposed to be. Ie. White backboard maybe with a red square, an orange rim and a white meshy net.

Here is the roll call stating what we each worked on. I thought the food on the table that Diana made was a really nice touch!

So I was able to borrow a family computer and Second Life ran much better on it. So here is our 'family portrait' at the picnic table outside our castle! And look! Someone is driving a Delorean behind us! LOL

FINAL 5a: Greenfoot JoC #4 Finally some code!

First I messed around with the Hedgehogs scenario. Not quite SONIC but it'll have to do!

 A little customization!

 COWABUNGA!!

May 9, 2014 8:33 PM
Now working on JoC#6: Adding Random Behaviour (because he's British!!) LOL

Learned how to get the turtle to turn randomly and how to also turn to the left to the left! LOL So we learned how to use a negative number in the limit for the int that it gets to turn with!

8:49/50 PM DK&Drew Paul watching GoT in the LR
Now working on JoC#7: Lettuce is Good for you!

Learned how to make the turtle eat the lettuce by adding a new class. And then how to save the world (haha), except it was a dim option (gray?) and non-clickable, and then when I got it to work it was with nothing in the world, and then once I added the actors and elements, it would let me click and save the world but wouldn't open up the screen it was allowing to open up before... So I can't save the world if there is nothing in the world to save! #SupermanProblems

9:12 PM 33% (54started with) npi (same as above with DK&DP)

Now working on JoC#9: Snakes on a plane!

Learned how to do the same as above again and this time add a snake to chase the turtle. Took me longer because I realized my turtle code wasn't the same as Mike Hollinger's so I had to change it when I added it to the snake's code so that the snake could do everything and it would compile properly!

Also Snakes on a Plane is one of my favorite movies!

Bryce just got here, came in kitchen, followed by K and Drew, talking about NFL Draft and TBridgewater/No blk punters/RAllen's 400K salary, etc. they just left. 9:40PM

Final #4: High Resolution Avatar

We are using a program called MakeHuman. I like it a lot, the only problem is that there are not too many options for full customization. For instance, you cannot use your actual face, which based on the description our professor originally gave, I thought there would be a way to overlay a photo of ones face and maybe map out the points such as eyes and nose under the mesh of the photo, therefor creating a '3D' version of ones face.

There also were very few clothing options which was very disappointing. Although this actually looks like one of my friday night outfits to go to MA's!

There were only five hair options also, and I think one was a female long hair, one was an afro, and one was bald, so I really only had two male options and this was the closest. Also I could only choose between black and blonde. That's silly because there are people in the world who have a different hair color (such as brown!!) and they cannot make a realistic avatar of themselves!

I also made a female. She looks weird in this picture because of the angle I had to move the 'camera' to so that her genitals wouldn't show! It was very strange how it wouldn't put the clothes over her 'baby making part' and it kept putting it OVER the clothes! Finally I had to put the overalls on her and even then, you can see some glitches. Again, NOT a lot of clothing options, which was sad.

Here is me trying to bone the chick. (Get your head out of the gutter! "Boning" is using the bones as pivot points to animate the character or to put them into poses!) It wouldn't let me move any of the bones or body parts, which is whack because it was under the tab 'Pose/Animate' !

So I was going to try to send my feedback to the developers, because they have a great product here, it just needs some tweaking. But then it got too complicated and I don't have a username or anything so I gave up for now!

This is the avatar design software MakeHuman. It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc

Class 10 Game Board and Roll Call for April 3rd

My team was 2 for 2 on the night!

Final #2 (Six Monocular Depth Cues)

Here is Atmospheric Perspective. I circled the sea-green blob on the floor in the distance as you cannot see the details of the scrub-clad medic, but the cop and the main character can be seen in much greater detail. They are therefor closer to 'the camera' then the person in green scrubs.

This is Linear Perspective. You can see the lines clearly from the rows of chairs and how the parallel lines look like they are closing in on each other in the distance. 

42914 last saved 4314
Above pictures from Grand Theft Auto IV

TEXTURE DENSITY

In the game "Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell" here you can see that the texture on the ground gets more densely packed together and harder to differentiate the dark brown from the light brown. This cue makes the texture fuzzier, the farther back you look, making it look like it's in the distance. This is called Texture Density.

LIGHTING AND SHADING
From Fantasy Elves (PS) here we can see the use of the light on the girls' hips and the shadowing on the back wall to show us that these nurse elves are closer than the furniture in the background and the curtain and tile in the back wall!

OCCLUSION

Metal Gear Solid presents us with White Snake talking to Dr. Naomi Hunter here in this cut-scene. We know that the tank is behind them because their bodies are occluding the tank from the foreground of the picture. Therefore we know in this scene that they are in front of the tank.

SIZE DIFFERENCES

Taken from Dead or Alive 5, this fighting game shows different objects in the background of this level. We see that her shoe is about the same size as that bucket in the back middle. But in reality, her feet are probably much smaller and could fit several shoes into the bucket. We know that her foot is in front of these objects. Plus there is some help from the other cues like Occlusion and Atmospheric Perspective.  Ie. her other foot blocking the barrel/vase and the cement on the wall.

This is a selection of six monocular 3D depth cues from video games. They each help see depth and improve it's perception on a monocular level. It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc  

IMMERSIVE LIBRARIES AND MUSEUMS

           I just finished reading the charter for the JiED's Technology Working Group: Libraries and Museums. I am very impressed and think they have some great potential. Basically it is a coalition of individuals who have connections or are scholars of Immersive Education, Video Games, Virtual and Augmented Reality and Research and Librarian work. Museum supervisors and curators are also invited as are professors and educators, all in the name of providing strength and stability to a blossoming 'new' form of academia.
          They use flowcharts and diagrams well as they explain how students will be connected to external servers that will enhance their education. And they give real-life scenarios of how such software and implementation of the system is used. They discuss how in this day in age, technology is fastly and vastly improving. Things are becoming more and more outdated and new innovations are replacing one another by the minute. Although librarians and historians have been on top of these technological advances to increase productivity for the last 30 years or so, it is still a generally new phenomenon. We can imagine that the technology of a library from 1700-1900 saw little changes and 1900-2014 absolutely was a tidal wave of new ways of doing things.
          Another key point that was mentioned was how with a traditional museum or library, you only have a set amount of space to use. Unless of course you buy the land next to you and expand! But for the most part, you are constrained, and as my economic father would call it an opportunity cost. Should we put this exhibit here or that one? Well we can't do both, that's for sure! But, in a virtual world, the sky is the limit!
          It is wonderful how they are aiming this at the right people. For instance, the Smithsonian LVM Amazon safari world that we watched Youtube videos about (in class not too long ago) about a month or so back. That one is aimed at youth who will be drawn in immediately purely by the video-game-esque feel to it and will be more incensed to study that way. It's also aimed at Latino youth entering the workforce, and teaches them important skills and concepts like how to be ecologically friendly.
          Overall I think this is a great initiative that has high expectations that should be met. The industry is certainly budding and there is quite the buzz about it in greater Academia. There are probably many kinks in the armor that need to be dinged back to working shape and that's what this group plans to do when assessing different iED platforms and environments. There is work to be done, but I think it is all going to be worth it, as this can really turn some wayward teens around into studying something productive for themselves, their families and society in general. I used to volunteer at a Boys and Girls club and those kids did not like traditional education. This would be something totally up their alley and I bet they would thrive in it. It's creating more avenues for educational success, so to that I say 'GODSPEED!' (In a thunderous Zeus voice!)

Source:

http://jied.org/1/1/8/

Revised 2013-03-21

Authors: Jerome Yavarkovsky, Melissa Carrillo, H. Nicholas Nagel Affiliations: Immersive Education Initiative, Smithsonian Latino Center, Boston College

Copyright © 2012 Immersive Education Initiative. All Rights Reserved.

http://JiED.org

Class 9, Exploring Second Life

Just starting out.

I was "told" to try to leave the island to achieve my destiny... lol that's some serious LOST sh*t right there! So I took the adventure and traveled.

I found the portal on the mountain and got transported to this place where I could hear peoples audio. To test it I said "nutsack" and someone replied "balllls" LOL!

Then stuff get really interesting as this one guy who is STILL talking, started saying how he is moving to South Dakota to work in an oil field or something and how this other guy he hadn't 'seen' in a while 'looks great.' LOL He meant his new avatar I guess! It was like it was in REAL life and he was saying 'Hey man, long time no see, you look great man!' It was hilarious. Then he started talking about smoking weed and smoking morphine out of foil (??) and then this little kid came on so he dropped the drug talk but it was funny. And now some cartoon voice just said "I oughta break a broom handle off in your @$$!" LOL Sounds like the voice in the Macklemore video for Thrift Shop. I think it is from Duke Nukem actually.

I used the search to try to find an academic location, and fount this Univ. Texas (Austin) place. I think this is what Professor talks about when he means the immersive education symposiums and such. 

It was so cool. They had a 'Free Gifts' station where you could get free costumes so I made my gal a doctah! The stethoscope kept being placed behind her back though, and the male one was up too high on her neck, so I was bummed I couldn't figure that out. Also bummed on why I couldn't make her not fly on this level... maybe something to do with those red dots, and the land's settings??? Also lagging is starting to occur big time for some of these levels with a lot of customization...