Glasgow Caledonian Unversity is going OpenSim
Glasgow Caledonian Unversity is planning to use Open Simulator
for (some
of) it's Virtual World needs and is going to provide a Module
about
Virtual Worlds (Second Life and Open Sim) in semester B, starting
early
2010. But there was no simple, straightforward way available to
register
an Avatar in this Open Simulator. You'd need to do this manually,
from a
command prompt, dive into the world of RegAPI (by Linden Lab, with
all
it's disclaimers, Logo's, Trademark issues, Terms of Service and
what
have you not) or hack your way into something called OpenSim
WebInterface (redux).
Or, alternatively, you create one from scratch, which is what
Glasgow
Caledonian University did. It is as of yet very basic and built
in
PHP/MySQL, talking to the same database your OpenSim (grid)
instance
uses. And it works. But it's a start. It's not finished yet.
It's
intended to be a starting point and grow, depending on the
functionality
required by users from UK's educational field. It will, after
some
testing, some debugging, cleaning of code and documentation be
made
available under the GPL so other HE/FE institutions can use it for
user
registration on their own Open Simulator virtual world.
Anybody who is interested in this web user registration can have a
look
at http://opensim.gcal.ac.uk
It is only available to people with an email address that ends
with
.ac.uk but if there
are other domains required this is extremely easy,
just send a request.
The GCU would very much like to get in touch with anybody who
is
interested in ultimately creating (the tools for) an Open
Simulator
based Hypergrid of Virtual Worlds for the UK educational field at
large.
So, if you want to stay informed, help with testing, discuss the
steps
we need to take to achieve such an Hypergrid, send a mail to
opensim@gcal.ac.uk
We won't spam :)
Ferdinand Francino aka Gwynn Gunawan
Project Manager CU There
GCU Web 3D & Virtual Worlds