I've been working for a while with colleagues from Flying Island to integrate virtual world meeting spaces and tools with their wonderful easy to use community content management system. The result is Roobaab, a truly collaborative platform for sharing and meeting. The video was one continuous take showing the end to end process of viewing the public side of the CMS, logging in to see additional community content, editing the content, then on seeing the original author online, launching an immersive meeting with him. The immersive platform used in this case was Second Life, with the standard Second Life client viewer.
Roobaab Browser
The shared browser that you see in the video is currently unique to Roobaab. It is a fully clickable, scrollable shared browser for use in Second Life or OpenSim. Since it is based on the HTML-as-texture feature, it has the same limitations (inability to show flash for example) and complex javascript menus can't be clicked. However, the ability to simply click on links and scroll the page suddenly makes browsing in the shared space useful and fun.Roobaab Noteboard
The notecard board is a very useful interactive tool, designed to replicate the kind of project wall that is very common in agile software projects. Simply type the text you want added and a new card is created and added to the board. Cards can be moved by clicking or dragging and easily deleted. Control of card colour and font is possible. Although shown as a project tool, the potential uses are limitless. For example, in a learning environment, the board could be used for a group activity of sorting words into categories.Chat Logging
Initially, chat logging is turned off. When you are ready to start, simply touching the chat logger results in all general chat in the meeting space being sent back to the content management system. When the meeting begins a page is automatically created in the meetings section of the CMS, and as the chat is logged it is also dynamically added to that page. This means that community members with rights to view that page will be able to follow the meeting even if they can't launch the 3D client for some reason. They can also type messages into that page which are sent in real time into the immersive meeting space. When the last attendee leaves the meeting space, the chat logger automatically stamps the minutes with the end time, and prevents additional chat being added. However, as with all content in the Focus CMS, community members can use the 'Add Comments' feature at any time if they have something to add.We see Roobaab being useful for communities, project teams and educators - let us know what you think here on the blog, or contact neil at knowsense.co.uk