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Using 3D Internet Technology for High Performance Computing Education, Outreach and Training

Jessica Puls, University of Northern Iowa, pulsj@uni.edu Charlie Peck, Earlham College, charliep@cs.earlham.edu

Our work with 3D Internet technology is in the context of high performance computing (HPC) based education, outreach, and training (EOT). We work as instructors with the National Computational Science Institute/SC Education Program. This group designs and delivers a variety of workshops, outreach efforts, and support for primarily undergraduate science faculty. Recently we have begun to work with faculty from the humanities, arts, and social sciences as the use of HPC-based tools has become more common in those disciplines. Those interactions helped to motivate us to consider how 3D Internet technologies could be effectively employed for HPC based EOT activities and science education and outreach more generally.

The terminology associated with this area is not yet well established. For our purposes the label 3D Internet encompasses all of the immersive technologies enabled by broadband communications, Google Earth and Second Life are examples of tools that fit well here. Neal Stephensen described the prototypical immersive on-line environment in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. The metaverse, a label coined by Stephensen in that book, has served as a model of sorts for the designers of Second Life and as an inspiration to many a geek working in this space.

Our primary purpose in exploring 3D Internet technologies is their ability to enhance learning through a few different avenues. First as a model for online learning. A virtual world can provide an environment that more closely resembles a classroom than existing solutions such as Web CT or Blackboard. The ideal solution is always to be able to work one on one with a student, but it's not always a realistic solution. While online chat and message boards may provide an adequate means of communication in some cases you lose the ability to have a conversation as you would in a classroom where an instructor can demonstrate a subject while they talk about it, and the students are given the opportunity to participate and ask questions as they come-up. In a virtual classroom this ability is restored.

A second option is as a supplement to an actual classroom. Carrying out experiments as a three dimensional simulation gives students the ability to test theories, and see first hand what the results would be. Students can be given exposure to things that would be exceptionally difficult to experiment with in real life, such as controlling various factors during a natural disaster, and observing how simulations proceed as a result of those changing factors. Visualizing the folding of a protein in-world with the ability to pause, rewind, and edit the structure on-the-fly, i.e. steer the simulation, would give geographically dispersed students and faculty the ability to collaborate in fundamentally richer ways.

A view of a Qwaq forum, on the wall to the right are live applications such as a shell, web browser, Open Office, and media content.

Currently the most well known, and widely used 3D Internet space is Second Life (SL). SL is an environment which anyone is free to participate in. SL does what it can to emulate real life in many ways. You can purchase land, and build just about anything you want on it. The land in SL comes in the form of islands which are dispersed throughout their virtual world. The types things you can find in SL are limited only by the imagination of the creators. There are places for businesses to talk about their history and current work, socializing, learning, museums displaying art work, and even virtual gambling. There is currency within SL, and you even have the ability to translate your virtual dollars into the real thing.

With SL you do have the ability to restrict access to your entire island, or areas within it to specific users, but one of the benefits with SL is that just as with the web people can come upon your space by chance and get drawn into it. This is a good place for what we'll refer to as the attractor model. If you are looking to draw people in to a group, such as we are with HPC EOT, SL is probably the place to do it because it is where the people are, at least for the time being. A good example of this phenomenon are the rock concerts periodically held in SL. They regularly draw large crowds with a minimum of advertising.

Another choice is Qwaq. Qwaq is primarily aimed toward those who want to be able to present information with a fairly easy to use interface, but aren't necessarily looking to draw in unsolicited visitors. Within Qwaq you are given the ability to create many different virtual spaces, and import your materials into it. This is where Qwaq really excels. Qwaq has the ability to display many different formats of media you might want to present in a classroom setting. You could, for instance, give a virtual lecture to a classroom of students by simply dragging and dropping a Open Office presentation that would be used in a normal classroom, then the students would be able to view your slide show as you lecture and participate in class through voice or text chat. Throughout the presentation you are given the ability to show demonstrations to the class, and they are even able to participate along with you by simultaneously interacting with anything you've imported into the virtual classroom. Any students not interacting along with you can see the work other students are doing just like in a classroom. This gives students the chance to present to their classmates, and share their solutions with the class in a way that current online classrooms lack. In another space students could be performing experiments manipulating molecules in a three dimensional space. Rather than drawing bonds on a piece of paper they could be creating them, and actually seeing the atoms come together to form a molecule.

Croquet is an open source project designed for creating 3D Internet collaborative environments. There is a basic client/server setup, but the server has to do a lot of work to make sure that all of the clients are seeing the same thing. A croquet server is set up, and stores your virtual space. Clients connect to the server, and the server is responsible for replicating the data for the space clients are in at the time.

Developers are given the ability to create croquet objects that their users will interact with. Since the server takes care of the replication of data for you, the developer doesn't need to concern themselves with any of the details of how multiple users interact, or how objects are presented to multiple viewers. This makes the croquet environment relatively simple to develop for in that it isn't necessary to understand the inner-workings of the client server communication to create useful objects. Croquet also has the ability to be used with many types of devices such as smart boards and virtual reality goggles, sensor gloves, and your traditional computer. Even all at once so one client can connect from their PC at home, while a classroom is interacting through a smart board at the other end.

Each of these environments has it's own strengths and weaknesses. Second Life (SL) is a great place to get new people interested in your work, but once you have them the amount of distraction could impede your ability to educate them. SL does allow for scripting to create objects that people can interact with, but the Linden Scripting language that is used by them isn't as robust as it is for Croquet. There is also a problem in that SL emulates real life to such an extent sometimes that there are many things that would be inappropriate for a younger crowd, so you'd need to be comfortable restricting your audience to a certain age group.

While Croquet definitely provides you with the most flexibility, it is also the solution that requires you to have the most resources at your disposal. In order to support a virtual environment you'd need not only the computational power to run the server, but also the bandwidth to support the number of connections you'd like to have available. This could become a relatively pricey endeavor, not to mention the time that would need to be allotted to maintaining the server(s) and software stacks.

Qwaq seems to be the happy medium between SL and Croquet. Qwaq is built on Croquet, so you have the ability to create and use Croquet objects within your world, but as was mentioned earlier right off the bat you have the ability to create virtual meeting spaces and add a fairly wide range of supported media types by simply dragging and dropping it into the world. It is also a commercial piece of software, which means that there is technical support available. Qwaq is committed to continue working with the Croquet project to ensure that it's technical capabilities keep pace with the their products.

As with anything else there are limitations to using 3D Internet as an educational tool. Networks within each institution are different, and in some cases firewalls can make it difficult to get connected to the servers if they are outside of your institution's local network. There are also problems in connecting in low bandwidth situations, especially when trying to view video, or use voice chat both of which enhance the experience significantly.

With so many different options it would be nice if things were able to be moved from one world to the next easily. If you could have the same identity between Second Life and Qwaq for instance, or take three dimensional models that had been created for one world and use them in another. Since it makes sense to have a presence in more than one place it would be nice to if there was a fluid way to transition between them. There is active work in the area of avatar interoperability which we hope to leverage in the future.

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the SC, the supercomputing conference, Intel Corporation, and our co-instructors in the National Computational Science Institute/SC Education Program workshop series.