Video vs. Virtual

Read a fantastic post this morning about videoconferencing and virtual worlds – which is better for education? Seems virtual is. (surprise, surprise)

This blog post from Campus Technology talks about Sun’s Project Wonderland and the Media Grid. I was in Boston in January for a summit about the Media Grid and posted about that initiative at the time.  It’s a great project and certainly has some exciting potential for education in the coming years.

It’s certainly not time for everyone to abandon all other virtual worlds and run to Project Wonderland and the Media Grid, but it’s exciting to think about what changes lie in the future and how virtual worlds will really start to shape how we learn, interact, and build communities.  With Vivaty’s public beta, Google’s “Lively”, and the announcement that avatars were able to move from one virtual world (Second Life) into another (Open Sim), this is a crazy exciting week for people working with virtual worlds.  So glad to be part of it.

Big Day for Virtual Worlds

Today was a big day for virtual worlds.

* IBM and Second Life have managed to figure out how to have an avatar move from Second Life to Open Sim.

* Vivaty announces public beta with Facebook and AIM

* Google announces their own virtual world, Lively.

These are all pretty big things.  Interoperability is something that’s been discussed for a while now and the idea of allowing avatars to move freely from one virtual world to another is a pretty sweet thing.  With as scattered as I feel in the social media realm these days, the ability to have just one avatar, one identity, that’s able to move around .. makes me happy.

Vivaty and Lively are virtual worlds that are web-based and they both allow you to create your own ’scenes’ and interact with others. There’s a lot of customization in both – you can change how your room looks, move furniture around, pick new clothes/hair for your avatar.  Vivaty works with Facebook and AIM and Lively is its own thing that you can embed in your own website.  Both very cool, both with a lot of potential.

I don’t see myself using either Vivaty or Lively much right now for a few reasons. The main reason is that both are PC-only at this point and I spend most of my ‘free time’ on my Mac. I’m sure it’s being worked on and I sure hope so.  The PC only stuff makes me cranky.  If we can get people to move from one virtual world to another, surely we can get these things to work on a Mac.