Please do not hesitate to contact Deep Semaphore for custom builds or changes required regarding permissions of objects.

To rent out space to run your exercises, contact Dr Rameshsharma Ramloll at ramlrame@isu.edu

For the Federalvirtualworld challenge evaluators only:

I am available for the following time slots from January 31st through February 20th.

Feb 2010

Week1 Wed or Frid 3 to 4 MDT

Week2 Wed or Frid 3 to 4 MDT

Week3 Wed or Frid 3 to 4 MDT

Evaluators are requested to provide me (Email ramlrame@isu.edu) with their avatar names so that I can provide access to the Play2Train islands.

The SLURL to the first orientation station is

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Asterix/184/7/36

We are considering setting up a support area on Google’s Lively. This will be fun.

The following slides-shows illustrate the content that our community has generated so far to support various learning experiences of interest.

slide-show 1: Look and feel of our infrastructure

slide-show 2: Meeting and collaborating in Play2Train™

slide-show 3: Uniforms from our supply store, we also have the complete range of Incident Command System vests

slide-show 4: The construction of  the virtual replica of a real world hospital

The following video clips present some of our training efforts and  illustrate our foray into educational machinima productions.

Seton Hall University Exercise

Virtual Elks Rehabilition Hospital

Introducing Play2Train (2006)

Closing the seams-Pricewaterhouse Coopers.pdf

Closing the seams (connected thinking)
Developing an integrated approach to health system disaster preparedness, PricewaterhouseCoopers white paper (2007)

2. Using Virtual Learning Envrionments to Support our next three years of change

Transcribed audio files from MasterS of Virtual Health
Judi Smith, MSIR Manager – Electronic Learning Clinical and Organizational Development Children’s Memorial Medical Center 2300 Children’s Plaza Chicago, Illinois 606014-3394 extension 53429 external (773) 880-3172
csmith@childrensmemorial.org

Virtual_learning_coference_audio_file_transcript.pdf

3. The Power of Play: Real-life experts meet in a virtual world to prepare for disaster
Ramesh Ramloll, Research Assistant Professor, Institute of Rural Health, Idaho State University

The Power of Play.pdf

4. Attending medical school in virtual reality
Daniel Stott, Student British Medical Journal, page 431

Attending medical school in virtual reality.pdf

5. Idaho State Simulates Emergency Response in Second Life

Linda Briggs,

Campus Technology News

http://campustechnology.com/articles/61150/

6. Medical Marketing and Media June 2008
Craig DeLarge
"Second Coming? Applications and opportunities for pharma"
http://www.mmm-online.com /Second-Coming/article/110736/
In my research of healthcare uses of virtual worlds, the most
compelling and unique applications were in the areas of education &
training and research.When you consider the immersive nature of this
medium, you can see how it would be particularly applicable to devices
and equipment where demonstration and tactile use is inherent to the
product.
You can just touch the possibilities for situations
like surgeons’ preceptorships, salesforce training, product or process
demonstrations, virtual environments which mimic the real world. The
best examples of this were Play2Train (Institute of Rural Health, Idaho State Univ), Ann Myers Medical Center and
Second Health London."

7. Play2Train on MSNBC 

Bring up the Statistics window

It is helpful to bring up the statistics window so that you get some sense of the impact of the various tweaks you are going to perform to speed up your client. Press CTRL, SHIFT and 1 together. You should only be concerned with the FPS (Frames per second, the number of times the screen is drawn per second). The higher that number, the faster your environment will appear to respond when you navigate or click on interactive stuff. To hide this window, press CTRL, SHIFT and 1 again.

The statistics window

After logging into your Second Life client, pull up the ‘preferences’ window. It’s good to know where it is in the menu but I advise you to learn the short cut (CTRL-P, meaning hold CTRL and hit P) because you will need it often.

Looking for the ‘preferences’ menu item

The ‘preferences’ window- simple tweaking

If your preference window does not look like the one below, don’t worry. Just click on the graphics tap on the left and you will see exactly what you see here. If the window still looks different, uncheck the custom check box (indicated by circle 1). I suggest that you start with max performance (Faster, circle 2), ie make sure the slider is on the low end. After doing this check out the FPS in your statistics window, it should have moved up quite a bit. If your FPS is under 5 FPS I strongly suggest to consider other more radical options, such as getting a new machine with better specifications.The little tweaks in here, advanced or simple won’t really help.

The ‘preferences’ window- advanced tweaking

Now, if you find your Second Life environment looks too ugly for you taste, you can try to improve its looks a little of course at the expense of performance. But before doing that let’s look at the advanced settings. Click on the custom check box to reveal the more advanced parameters that can be tweaked. Generally speaking, having all the sliders to the left and unchecking ‘Basic shaders’ (Circle 3) will boost your performance. You can try each one of them and see its impact on how your virtual environment looks and responds. If you find that there are lots of particles (lots of shiny things flying about) slowing you down or obscuring your view, set max. particle count to very low or zero (Circle 1). If you are mostly indoors, I would just slide the trees and terrain slider completely to the left. You would think that the system would be intelligent enough to make these decisions on its own but am not too sure those optimizations are coded in. Your best judge of course is always the statistics window (the little thingy that pops up when you hit CTRL SHIFT 1). Checking the ‘Bump Mapping and Shiny’ (Circle 2) does not have a huge impact for machines with relatively recent cards. But make sure you have basic shaders off, this has a very high foot print (this is almost the Windlight engine ON and OFF switch). Lastly, make sure your avatar imposters checkbox (circle 4) is checked especially in crowded spaces, this basically tell your Secoond Life client to render avatars which are far away in a way that does not consume too many resources. They will of course not look good but they are far away anyway.