I’ve been looking over the new Multiverse client and server to see if it might possibly do better for our purposes at PSTCC.

My initial short answer is: no.

Let me take that apart a bit.

Our virtual worlds project really has two prongs: 1) to support the development of the new gaming curriculum, and 2) to explore the potential of virtual worlds for enhancing education. I think the Multiverse platform has a lot of potential, and eventually will be of great interest to the new gaming curriculum at PSTCC. For the foreseeable future, I don’t see it as very useful for the college in general.

It’s going to be great for the gaming curriculum as it matures, because the graphics are much better already than SL, and it seems like the platform developers provide enough tools to enable a world developer to create just about anything s/he desires. Unlike SL (or at least, unlike SL without a lot of under-the-hood messing around), Multiverse developers can create objects in, for instance, Maya and import it into whatever world is being built.

Why doesn’t this work for the average college student, then?

1. If you haven’t checked, Maya is a pretty expensive program. I’m sure open source projects are or have already been developed, but if you’ve ever messed with open source (and I have–a lot), you know this isn’t a simple, free alternative. To put it bluntly, to create objects in Multiverse you’re going to either have to have quite a bit more money than you would for SL, or you’re going to have to know a lot more about code in general and be comfortable not having a lot of documentation/hand-holding for your object-creation software. Gaming students will probably go there anyway; the average college student will not. Awkward as it can be, the built-in object creation software in SL mean that the average student can be creating stuff within minutes of figuring out those basic movements like walking and sitting.
2. Speaking of walking–it also became clear as I tried to walk around Multiverse’s demo world that you have to have a really high-end computer for it to run smoothly… or much at all. My laptop has only ever choked on two things: trying to record video (which requires at least three tons of memory and hard drive space), and trying to move around in the Multiverse demo. It choked harder on the video recording; nevertheless, moving around in Multiverse on my laptop reminded me of the last time I had a serious dental procedure that involved happy gas. I should mention my laptop was state of the art, but a couple of years ago. That’s the point. Again, the gaming folks are likely to have the bleeding edge computers needed to deal with the crisp graphics and smooth movements. The average student is less likely.
3. It’s still not clear to me if it is or will be possible to move from one world to another, if, for instance, the world developers allow it. If they do, then that would be great. I can foresee a time when virtual space will become more like Web space in that regard, where you can seamlessly move from one Web server to another without even being aware you have made a change. Today’s virtual space is much like the Internet prior to the Web, when Compuserve users couldn’t necessarily talk to GEnie users, who couldn’t necessarily talk to AmericaOnline users. If it will not be possible to move from world to world, then we will truly have planetary isolation and lose much of the advantages of virtual space education, in my opinion, i.e., the ease with which students can interact with people of different cultures.

My experience with my own students suggests that many of them do not have computers capable even of running SL. Since my laptop has never had a problem with any of SL’s stuff (except when every other resident had a problem), and yet it won’t run Multiverse well enough to actually use it, it suggests we will continue to use SL for most of our virtual world education for at least awhile.

In the meantime, we’re learning the best practices for education in a virtual environment. I’m quite sure we’ll want to develop our own virtual space eventually. Whether that will be built on a future version of Multiverse, or whether Linden Lab will successfully open source their server software first…. Stayed tuned!