Discovering Computer Graphics

Minecraft is becoming very popular with it's new interest in immersive education. Tourist attractions in parts of the world are being added to the program with the help from Colorado University and Stanford. They are making a virtual version of all these different sites in in Minecraft. Restaurants are recognizing their fort like restaurant in the virtual world. It shows how well the virtual worlds are doing in creating real and believable worlds.

Schools will be able to check out for free. I think this is good because immersive education fits the needs of many people who are unable to go to class every week for one reason or another. Meeting in virtual worlds allows more students to interact, and allowing them to try to program for free can give them a taste of the program and how it works without spending money on it.

This is an assignment 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

History and Technology! - La Junta

Technology and history are the two subjects that these students are doing in a virtual world right now. It's still in the early stages which students first thought was a silly club, but they are liking it more than they thought. Being able to see the historical sites through a virtual world is crazy to think about, but all it takes is for someone to take a tour of a site themselves and put it online. In a couple of years the immersive education program will be finished.

The students in the school seem to be enjoying the program. Although it's new, and not a full course load quite yet, they see the class as a game. They use minecraft which I am not too familiar with, but is a program that I've heard used before. I think having other schools involved with immersive education is great, and maybe schools will work together in the future through virtual worlds.

This is an assignment 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

Web Rocket vs VW

I really didn't have such good luck with the VWF website. It was a lot of loading, and it was weird that the demos that warned you that it will take long to load worked the best. I didn't like the movement of the camera either. Web Rocket at least allows you to move in a circle, where as VWF only allowed you movements left, right, moving forward, and backwards. Web Rocket also allows you to see your avatar, where VWF does not. Overall, I found the graphics in VWF to be clearer and way more detailed. In the Command Center screenshots below, each computer had it's own background with a different webpage up, and it looked almost real.

I'm sure that the VWF download has many more features to it. Right now for me, I see potential in the website, but it was not working well when I tried to use it. It was difficult to enter even one of the virtual worlds that they offered in the demo section. I had to opt out on the last virtual world because nothing would load. I tried up to 8 times for each of the top two worlds, and they were giving me errors, both in chrome, and in safari.

These are from bzflag

These are from the Command Center.

I kept waiting to enter these worlds, or I entered but nothing appeared, and gave me error messages.

Midterm 4

This is Midterm 4 - Taking "selfies" in Meshmoon. It is a midterm 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/

I couldn't figure out how to make my avatar sit, so I took a picture of Kristen while we were in the same virtual world. I brought the screenshot into GIMP and wrote my name in paint.