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This discussion has been the most enlightening I've seen in a long
time! <br>
Thank you everyone!<br>
<br>
My experience agrees that faculty don't generally want to learn 3D
content creation.<br>
<br>
Students are an interesting mix, and in high-stress programs also
have very little tolerance or capacity for steep learning curves.<br>
===<br>
<b>On simplicity </b><br>
<br>
In terms of students building things that didn't exist, maybe
there is a game-principle based sweet-spot, because it's clear from
the numbers that tens of millions of people spend tens or hundreds
of hours with Minecraft.<br>
<br>
That suggest to me that students would love to co-create cool stuff,
but the interface for doing so needs to have an extremely extremely
simple <i><b>starter subset</b></i>. I say "starter", because
gaming-principles also show that people who stick around and pay for
worlds like World of Warcraft<b><u> like challenges</u></b>, or
"unnecessary difficulties" as Jane McGonigal's "<i><b>Reality is
Broken</b></i> - why Games make us Better and How they can
Change the World" book explains so well. (Imagine the interest in
golf if the average length from tee to hole was ten feet, in a
straight line, on a flat course, and the hole was ten feet
across.) This is a great book, by the way, and very eye opening
and challenging a lot of misunderstood concepts about "games", the
nature and type of feedback that works, and why so many people
voluntarily spend so much time on them, that is directly applicable
to building any learning environment.<br>
<br>
For experienced builders (or those past their anxiety - resistance
stage), yeah, prefabs in Unity are great!<br>
<br>
What is even better is that in Unity you CAN build<i><b>
hierarchical objects,</b></i> then mix and match the parts. In
OpenSim and Second LIfe, once you put the wheels on the car and
make a link-set, all traces of "wheel" are gone, and it becomes
absurdly difficult to go back and put different wheels on the car if
each wheel has 47 parts like spokes or lugnuts. You can
approximate some of that capacity with "Builder's Buddy" or other
tools that let you rez an entire multiobject scene with one click,
but those are a true pain to load and maintain. <br>
<br>
So, whether it's Unity or OpenSim, I think one thing that is
needed that is very hard to still see for Virtual reality natives is
exactly HOW SIMPLE the INITIAL interface has to be, so that it is
satisfying and rewarding to try to use for a terrified newbie,
peeking though the fingers of the hands over the eyes. So simple
in fact that even a faculty member might say "Oh heck, even I can do
THAT!".<br>
<br>
===<br>
<b>On "weakest links" in collaborative environments</b><br>
<br>
And both faculty and students are greatly upset by technological
failure where they are used to trivial behavior, such as having
voice working. The collaborative environment is much harsher than
individual user environment since for voice (or many other things)
to actually be useful, it has to work for EVERYONE, not just most
people. <br>
<br>
This is a feature of collaborative environments that I didn't
realize till Gary Olsen pointed it out. A collaborative environment
can become a "weakest link" exposer, where everyone's experience is
limited by the least capable user. This is one of the issues with,
say, Electronic Health Records systems that is underappreciated and
distinguishes it from, say, a cloud-based spreadsheet. <br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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