Minutes of April 10, 2009 ScienceSim Senate

In the meeting: Aaron Duffy, Andrew Fitz Gibbon, Charlie Peck, Joel Morrissette, Mic Bowman, Tom Murphy, Wilf Pinfold

Next senate meeting: Apr 17, 2009 in SciSim at Galileo (181, 181, 32)

Inworld transcript from Keplar:

ScienceSim Calendar

• Next Up: Inaugural “Think Parallel” Blogcast Tuesday April 21st at 10:00-10:30 AM PST at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/TeachParallel and in-world
• We have three talks for our lecture series ready to schedule
  • In need of a wrangler, Paul is suggested, he has been polled, but not interrupted
  • In need of advertising to make series successful
    • Encouraging people to opt-in to scisim-discuss@googlegroups.com as a way to hear of news like the weekly user meetings, but also the events within ScienceSim.
    • Idea of contacting Joanne Wombat to advertise withing the Second Life Scilands community
    • We also need to identify other suitable advertising among ourselves

ScienceSim infrastructure

• Mic has upgraded splash screen to list regions of Science Sim, grid statistics and news. One statistic is the number of unique visitors; I like to think we all are unique, luckily, there is not a list of strange visitors.
• Mic has started looking at mini region module scripting.
  • It will require an upgrade to the server software.
  • The huge advantage is that the script can be dropped into an object which can control many objects. This is a huge advantage over having a separate script in each object.
  • You can also code it in C#.
  • Adam Frisby is the creator and is willing to teach it, which is why we now have a third speaker for lecture series
• By having physics plaza on different simulators, able to isolate and fix a bug in mono, a locking bug in it's thread allocation. By fixing it, we can keep the recent server mods allowing the script speedup.

Highlighting Plazas in Science Sim

• Fern Seed *
  • Aaron Duffy has interesting area worth visiting, especially if you like observing sexual life cycles. The information point is at “Fern Seed Info (43, 200, 21).
• Icare
  • Fei Yeh, from Northwestern, is apparently put Extsim to good use

A possible collaborator

• Wilf has started working with Rich Beta of 3Dsolve, which has become 3D Learning Solutions, now a part of Lockheed Martin Simulation, Training & Support
• He is director of virtual education at the K12 level.
• Their America’s Army Game Project is currently based upon the Unreal 2.5 game engine, and will soon be upgraded to version 3.0
• They also work with Icarus Studios who are able to support thousands of simultaneous users

Voice

• Joel reports that Johann was able to duplicate the problem he encountered. It appears possible to fix, if so, it will currently only work with the version 1.19 SL viewer. This would be a great capabiity to mainstream into the OpenSIm code base.
• IBM may have a voice solution coming
• Hidef conferencing
  • the trial is over
  • Wilf will pay for one license out of his 3D Internet funds; Charlie will pay for one out of SC Education funds
  • We will need a mechanism for restricting access to the toll-free number which can incur extra charges.
• Wilf will be renewing the Intel call-in numbers we have been using. We only have two more weeks of call in numbers. Thanks Wilf.

Distance Ed

• Charlie mentioned SC Ed will be having at least two of the summer workshops using distance ed.
• A portion of each will highlight our ScienceSim capabilities

                                             ... Tom Murphy