Recently I met another civil engineer who works for a county in the State of Washington. He contacted me through the virtual world of Second Life where he is known as Jered Spitteler. Jered has been building a model in Second Life of one of the rain gardens maintained by his agency. Fortunately I…
Tag: virtual worlds
Business Sim Released by Public Works Group
Over the last year or so I've worked on creating a 3D environment as a representation of the ADA Toolkit for Local Government. Last December I submitted the build in the Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge. The winners were just announced this week, and my entry was not one of the finalists so I began…
Glogging My Virtual Experiences
If you've been reading this blog since its early days, you know I'm a big supporter of the use of virtual worlds and 3D immersive spaces. Although I realize these technologies are not yet mainstream or even well accepted or understood, my experience with them has been tremendously positive. They have quite simply changed my…
Failure: The Key Ingredient to Learning
There's been a lot of talk lately about acceptance of failure. Probably because people are pushing for innovation, and it's difficult to innovate if you're afraid to fail. Thus the numerous posts of encouragement across the Internet assuring all of us that failure is ok. Of course as engineers, failure is not something we want…
MOSES – Ramping up Government Use of Virtual Worlds
We've been fortunate to have a group of federal employees from the US who are dedicated and passionate about government use of virtual worlds. The work accomplished by Eric Hackathorn (NOAA), William May and Lovisa Williams (State Dept), Charles White and Jeanne Holm (NASA), Paulette Robinson (NDU), and Douglas Maxwell and Tami Griffith (US Army)…
Virtual Worlds: The Next Level of Government
In small numbers, people can usually self-govern themselves. But as the number of people in a group grows, better control is needed. So history has shown anytime a large number of people start hanging out in a particular place, a government structure is formed. In our world today, we have nations which then have further…
A Brave New Grid – Post 2: The Virtual Plan
In the first post of this series, I explained my decision about moving my efforts related to building government/public works/engineering sites in virtual worlds from Second Life to OpenSim. And I invited anyone interested to read along or visit as I make this move. From here on out, I will continue to write about the…
A Brave New Grid – The Decision
Last month I decided to close down the Public Works Group island in Second Life. Over the last 2 1/2 years, the island allowed many people the opportunity to see and explore how virtual worlds could enhance the public works industry. The site also provided a place for people to meet and experience virtual worlds…
Measuring Success of Virtual Spaces
In order to reach a valid conclusion about the success of a virtual space, we need to understand the reason that space was created. If someone knew nothing about baseball and visited the large barren, snow-covered baseball complex near me that no one has entered for the last 7 months because it has barricades across…
Virtual Cemetery Update
While exploring the virtual grid for government-related sites, I stumbled across a virtual graveyard on the Prince Edward County (Ontario) island in Second Life. And while Second Life has several interesting cemeteries this one caught my attention because the builders had loaded some of the stones with historic narratives from the Prince Edward County area….