iSocial Prototype Walkthrough

I took a few minutes today to put together a brief introductory video of our prototype iSocial learning environment. We will be conducting trials with this learning environment beginning this Friday. This represents three months of hard work, and we're proud of what we have to show!

Wonderland's World Builder

How did I go from this


to this?


With the Wonderland World Builder of course.

The world builder is a simple browser-based application that makes it possible to create Wonderland worlds. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, one simply drags tiles onto a 2D grid and positions them. After saving the world, it can be easily accessed from the Wonderland client.

The software itself comes with a set of very functional tiles. It is also possible to create tiles using Blender and the Gimp.

The world builder has been discussed at the Wonderblog.

It would be disingenuous to say that it was easy to set everything up on my development machine. However, the Wonderland Community is refreshingly fast at providing solutions when one gets stuck.

Initial Forays into Sun's Wonderland

Due to a number of technical problems that our team has experienced with the Cobalt build of OpenCroquet, it became apparent to us that it may be in our best interests to investigate an alternative software platform for building the iSocial prototype. Although Cobalt would appear to have a more elegant design, we are unfortunately bound by time constraints, limited manpower and deadlines. Cobalt just isn't mature enough at this point for us to continue building on top of it. Sigh.

We have to consider that our project will be used to teach individuals with Autism social skills. A buggy platform that is overly prone to crashing is not facilitative of this goal - especially with our user population.

The only alternative was obvious - Sun's Wonderland.

I began to look into it last week. I began working with it and setting up a development environment this week. I have to admit that I am impressed. Extremely impressed. I was able to get the client and server software running on multiple platforms (WinXP and Ubuntu 8.04) in no time at all. I was able to install and configure a development environment on Ubuntu in an evening and completely build the source myself by midnight.

The developer community appears to be bigger and more active than with the Cobalt/Croquet project. My questions got answered sometimes in a matter of minutes, sometimes in a few hours. But it never took months like some issues I've posted to the Cobalt/Croquet mailing list. And, gasp, Wonderland actually has forums. It's incomprehensible to me that Cobalt/Croquet still relies on a mailing list.

So after building the source from the latest code contributions that I pulled from CVS, I took the software for a spin and was extremely pleased with what I found. Here's a video: