This blog post gives the information provided as a basis for a blog post by Thirza Ember on the HG Safari Blog. An interview on the OSGrid regions of RuthAndRoth, Black Rock and Space City was held on 21-Aug-2024 to add material.
https://hgsafari.blogspot.com/2024/08/austins-eye.html
Thirza Ember 16-Aug-2024: I am working on a few general interest stories on the HG Safari Blog, and I wondered if you would be willing to do an interview? It would be about your Opensim career principally, how you got into Opensim, what your main interests are etc – obviously with all the appropriate links to your blogs and so on. If you’d be kind enough to provide some bio info in here too, so I get accurate and up to date info.
Ai Austin:
Virtual worlds/OpenSim focused bio…
Austin Tate (avatar: Ai Austin – pronounced “eye”) 16-Aug-2024
In Real Life I am an educator and researcher in artificial intelligence and robotics, with a special interest in distributed collaboration and teamwork. I was Director of the AI Applications Institute (AIAI) at the University of Edinburgh and Coordinator for the Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue). I am a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE, Scotland’s National Academy). I am now retired and Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh and remain an Honorary Staff Member of the University. I am an open source developer and advocate of open educational resources and through that continue to play an active part in developments in my fields of interest.
https://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/
As with many potentially useful educational and collaborative technologies, I had initial explorations with multi-user persistent virtual spaces going right back to the MUD/MOO days of the 1970s. As these environments became more graphically orientated, several groups at the University of Edinburgh, including my group, were using professional and hobby related virtual worlds in the early 2000s such as Forterra OLIVE, There, etc. Second Life was also being explored in its early days, around 2004. Second Life became more useful and more widely publicized in 2006 and several groups came together soon afterwards to form the Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue) to coordinate our efforts in using these environments for teaching, research and outreach.
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2011/10/22/a-brief-history-of-virtual-collaboration/
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2018/04/27/virtual-worlds-technology-for-university-of-edinburgh/
https://vue.ed.ac.uk
I have had a presence in Second Life since then and in OpenSim (as both user and grid manager) since July 2007. We also make use of a wide range of platforms beyond Second Life and OpenSim. I frequently make blog posts about experiments and uses of virtual worlds tools and techniques.
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/
Mirror at https://aiaustin.wordpress.com/
For professional use and meetings, my avatar usually wears a green flight suit which has been with me since I first set up in Second Life. I licenced the use of the textures from the creator back then. When exploring in virtual worlds I usually have an outfit that reminds me of Strider in Lord of the Rings, though the sword is Orcrist from the Hobbit. That reminds me of a visit to Weta Workshop in New Zealand where we handled the original filming prop and I have a nicely crafted replica of that.
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2019/09/02/ai-austin-mk-2/
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2018/04/12/orcrist/
Vue, Openvue and OpenVCE
The Vue regions in Second Life were made available from 28th May 2007. A timeline of events is available at http://vue.ed.ac.uk/ and over the years a number of departments and units as well as externally funded projects have contributed to the server costs for 12 years. An in-house hosted copy of the regions has been provided on OpenSim (Openvue). Security concerns means the in-house version can only be made available within the University firewall, but an openly accessible version is still hosted on OSGrid for continuity.
Other training and simulation related project regions (such as the RGU Oil Rig for immersive training of offshore workers) are also kept on OSGrid. The OARs for the Openvue regions are available as open educational resources. Our Open Virtual Collaboration Environment (OpenVCE) region created on a project funded by the US Army Research Lab's Human Research and Engineering Directorate (HRED) as an open source resource (OAR) also continues to be available as a basis for a facility to support synchronous and asynchronous collaboration in many forms.
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2017/11/30/vue-openvue/
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2021/07/19/open-educational-resources-vue-and-openvce/
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2022/02/27/openvce-for-opensim-2022/
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2017/06/07/virtual-oil-rig-enhancing-higher-education/
I-Room
One of our projects related to virtual worlds collaboration and meeting support is the I-Room – a virtual space for intelligent interaction. We used this on a wide range of projects and for experimentation.
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2011/09/15/i-room-a-virtual-space-for-intelligent-interaction/
AI Planning MOOC
Our virtual world spaces were also used to give briefings and tutorial support for our Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in AI Planning. Over its three runs on the Coursera platform it reached 115,000 students. The resources continue to be available on our media servers, YouTube and as Open Educational Resources. The MOOC materials are also used as the basis for graduate level studies by other Universities.
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2016/06/15/ai-planning-mooc-interview/
Open Source Projects, OAR Converter, Ruth2/Roth2 Mesh Avatars
I am an open source software developer and contribute mostly via testing and the occasional code contribution to a range of projects including OpenSim, the Second Life and Firestorm viewers, I am especially involved with the Firestorm VR Mod variant. I helped Fumi Iseki and his team in Japan create the OAR Converter to take content from OpenSim into Unity and other 3D modellers. I am one of the core team behind the Ruth2 and Roth2 open source mesh avatars.
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/?s=Firestorm+VR+Mod
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2024/06/10/oar-converter/
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2020/08/30/ruth2-v4/
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2020/05/24/roth2-v2/
HG Safari Blog Questions
Thirza Ember:
I know you brought Vue to Second back in about 2007, and then into Opensim about three years later – can you tell me something about how the virtual university concept came about? What do /did you expect the students to get out of it? Can you also talk about the students who participate in Vue – what disciplines they come from, beyond IT and business studies? How other faculty have responded to the concept?
Ai Austin:
We had our first Vue region in Second Life May 2007 and had about 10 regions a year or two later. So a mini-continent. We maintained paid for regions on Second Life through to March 2019. The first OpenSim regions were started in July 2007 so following on quickly.
Timeline at https://vue.ed.ac.uk/ and https://vue.ed.ac.uk/openvue/
There were perhaps a dozen units and departments and many groups inside those that were actively involved in using Second Life and virtual worlds for some aspect of their teaching, research and outreach. Central units like the Library, Alumni, Disability Office and Corporate Services were involved as well as academic departments. Online graduations took place as mixed reality events linked to the main physical graduation hall. A list of those involved and some of the uses is available in a presentation made for University management and handouts linked from https://vue.ed.ac.uk/ e.g.
https://vue.ed.ac.uk/resources/presentations/vue-overview.pdf
Thirza Ember:
The move to Opensim is linked, perhaps I’m right in saying, to the collapse of SL’s support of academic sims. Do you remember the transition as traumatic? Did it involve a big learning curve, or were you already deep into the code, and interested in bringing Vue to a place with less ready-made commercial feel and more options for experimentation? Can you remember the reaction of the students to the change? What have been the advantages and disadvantages of the change in your view, from both the techie side of things, and the end user’s perspective?
Ai Austin:
No, nothing traumatic at all. Though the costs of the Second Life regions always was a funding issue and we had to work hard to maintain interest in putting so much money into the facilities. We were already using multiple virtual worlds like There and Forterra OLIVE (for professional simulation tasks) and we assumed there would be development and potentially some platforms would become unavailable or move in inappropriate directions for a University. We made sure assets could be re-used in multiple contexts. We looked at self hosted Second Life using what was called “Second Life Enterprise” at the time, but that concept was not continued by Linden Lab. In July 2007 we starting experimenting with OpenSim as self-hosted capability as that was attractive in a University context and we had the “Openvue” as a shared facility from 2008. I would say though that Second Life was easier for staff and students than trying to set up on and use OpenSim.
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2017/11/30/vue-openvue/
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2018/04/27/virtual-worlds-technology-for-university-of-edinburgh/
Thirza Ember:
Of course, your work is not just Vue but also open AI. You have a long and really fascinating history of blogging Opensim and SL and I guess ‘the viewers’ to give it a generic name. Your blogging work has proved to be a valuable resource both for getting news, understanding developments, and charting the progress of this platform. Can you talk a bit about how you got started in blogging, what your motivation is to do it, and the rewards and responsibilities, if that’s not too grand a term, are as time had gone by ? Are there other Opensim-related blogs or threads that you read, and can recommend?
Ai Austin:
As for blogging, I got interested in that form of shared communication back in 2009/2010. I was doing an MSc in e-Learning taught via distance education methods with our School of Education. I did that to understand the methods and tools better as I became responsible for the early development of the School of Informatics distance education and later MOOC programmes. The MSc showed a range of platforms and tools and amongst them we used a range of blogging and micro-blogging platforms. So when our School and the University provided the WordPress blog platform for staff and students I took to that right away.
Since then I use it to record many experiments, capture screen shots, describe useful tips and resources, etc. Its another way to share and get feedback and learn from others. I use twitter/X as one way to get pointers top relevant and interesting content. I often use a blog post I have read to go explore some tool or virtual world location. I make “Resources” posts in my blog to point at web sites, download links for tools and recall links to other relevant blog posts.
Back in 2000-2002 I directed a large project involving 30 organisations spread over 4 countries (CoAX) and we shared knowledge and assets between those involved. We created a simple tool to allow for push notification of relevant information to subscribers of certain parts of the content and status information was encoded in the notifications. It was a sort of Twitter system (without the scaling that involved). We switched to using Twitter with structured syntax and URL content in tweets soon after it became available in 2006. I still use twitter/X that way with structed information in some entries.
I have always considered open sharing of educational resources important. Our AI planning systems were right from the start (back in the 1970s) licenced in a way that allowed for re-use and sharing. That’s a way to build a community of interest, get feedback and extend capabilities in a way that can benefit all.