The Vesuvius Group

Katrina Relief – Big Easy sim

Armath — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:00:19 +0000

As part of the community grassroots fundraising relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina victims in 2005, Frans Charming was involved as the overall project manager and along with Rhiannon Chatnoir and other volunteer builders, recreated part of the French Quarter of New Orleans in Second Life.

You can find more pictures in this set.
Experience the recreation in Second Life.

Obama’s Speech in Ghana to be Broadcast in Metaplace and Second Life

Katherine — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:39:29 +0000

The Vesuvius Group is proud to participate – with the Center for Public Diplomacy and Metaplace (Raph Koster, the founder of Metaplace, as usual, writes a very smart blogpost about the future of virtual worlds and how we can take our place alongside other social media in getting the news out) – in presenting the live stream of Obama’s speech about the future of citizen democracy streaming live from Ghana. Please come join us in this historic moment as social media, virtual worlds, and civic participation come together. We are deeply excited to be participating in this grand experiment to facilitate conversation and community and civic participation! Check out the coverage of the virtual version on CBS News.

Please join us for an event featuring Obama’s speech streaming from Ghana along with leaders speaking: Kenton Keith, Tim Burke and Derrick Ashong.

On Saturday, July 11, a global conversation will push definitions of citizenship by demonstrating how new technologies enable global civic participation. Citizens from numerous countries will meet together in virtual worlds to collectively watch a speech from President Obama, view Twitter feedback on his talk, and join in discussion with musician and activist D.N.A. (Derrick Ashong), Ambassador Kenton Keith and African historian Professor Tim Burke.

President Obama will speak to a live audience in Ghana, Africa. His speech will recognize Ghana’s stable democracy and leadership in the region. It is expected that Africans from all over the continent will converge for this momentous speech. The White House is using a Twitter feed which will enable individuals from around the world to participate in the conversation and share their thoughts with President Obama.

This event provides a public sphere for people to come together as citizens sharing independent views which in turn shape the political institutions of society. These conversations, literally hosted in a virtual physical space, are essential for the marketplace of ideas in our globalizing society. Following the event will be music from D.N.A. Please join us for this historic event.

Saturday, July 11, 2009
8:00 AM Eastern / 5:00 AM Pacific
Twitter Hashtag – #obamaghana

Join us online:

for more info:

State Department Webpage

More press from:

Vesuvius at VWBPE 09

Frans — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:57:05 +0000

We were a vendor this past weekend at the Virtual World Best Practices in Education 09, and had a great time meeting people and going to presentations. Lots of insightful stuff, which we hope have been blogged about around the web.

For now we have these textures we made for our vendor spot.

The Justice Commons

Armath — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:03:32 +0000

Built for Global Kids, NYC as part of their MacArthur Foundation funded initiative to create a International Justice Center within Second Life that would focus on issues of justice and human rights law throughout the world. Still in progress (in second phase of dev) and also involved event management during opening events.

View more images of the build.

Articles about the project:

Holy Meatbals [Article 1]

Holy Meatballs [Article 2]

48HFP-SL – Time For Coffee

Armath — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:53:29 +0000

Machinima created for the 48 hour film festival that took place within Second Life. The screenplay, storyboards, build stage sets, props, filming and editing done by The Vesuvius Group.

Other entries can be viewed here.

Google Island

Armath — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:48:53 +0000

Created a reproduction of part of Google’s Mountain View, CA campus for the 2007 Google Zeitgeist event. It included 3D representations of Google technologies, a networking lounge area, a speakers hall with information on all speakers and the ability to message them and creation of an interactive HUD that contained this info, a map and other event tools for attendees.

This was an event specific project and unfortunately is not still available to view. You can view images of the build here and here.

Articles about the project (multilingual):
Kzero
Ambling
Mindblizzard
Metaverse.lePressing
MaxFear

RFL-SL 2007

Armath — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:40:35 +0000

Created the official starting point sim for the 2007 Relay for Life. The them for 2007 was “The Quest (For the Cure)” and we created a Tolkien inspired themed sim that included a hobbit village, the elven city of Rivendell, a scaled down model of Minas Tirath, the Argonath sentinel statues, the Black Riders racing up to Weathertop and Mordor which included Shalob’s cave, the smoking volcano of Mount Doom and the fortress tower of Mordor.

This build was up only during the Relay for Life event. You can see more images of the build here and here.

Google Lively

Frans — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:11:42 +0000

Google dropped a bomb on the virtual world market today by releasing a new virtual world called Lively. I’m not writing a deep review yet, my first impression is that it feels like IMVU. It is better then IMVU though, you can at least move your avatar around a room, but the best part is that it runs in a browser(via a plugin). Sadly there are no content creation tools yet, or the ability to upload models, I heard those are coming.

What I really am hoping for is some sort of scripting tools to make interactive objects. That would really open up the possibility space.

I’m excited though, some people see it as yet another dress up virtual world. But I think with Google backing it has a lot more potential by the simple fact alone of the amount attention this will get. Add to that possibilities of Google earth and Sketchup mashups.

The Vesuvius Room in Lively:

Virtual Web Symposium

Frans — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:24:32 +0000

There will be a Virtual Web Symposium Wed. Feb. 27th, 15:00 – 22:00(GMT +1) at De Balie (Leidseplein) in Amsterdam. The event will include Scientists, Educators, Web Specialists, 3D Designers and Technicians. There will be demonstrations, lectures and discussions (both live and virtual) about Education and the Future of the Virtual Web For a list of participants and more detailed info see www.eduverse.org.

The entrance is free but there is limited availability. To guarantee access please RSVP ASAP to: EdSymp@eduverse.org (as of Thurs. 21.2.08, there is still space available). Dinner is not included. Also please note that the Symposium will be in English only

If you have a specific question which you would like to have answered, please include it in your response.

The event will be streamed on the web at: http://streams.live.nu (UK) http://www.debalie.nl/live (NL) and will be viewable afterwards from De Balie archives

Should you wish to stream it yourself, then it is possible using this url:
rtsp://82.94.217.140:80/balieh264-320×240.mov.sdp

It will also be streamed live simultaneously with the following codecs for low speed internet connections:
http://live.nu/1.ram ( RealVideo)
http://live.nu/1.m3u (Mp3 audio mono)
http://live.nu/1.jpg > http://cam.live.nu ( image refresh ‘webcam’)

Other Platforms: MetaPlace Stress Test

Frans — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:48:52 +0000

Metaplace is the in development virtual worlds platform, that will let you make your own virtual world for any platform. They are still in Alpha but slowly ramping up to a Beta.
2 weeks ago they had a Public developer chat, which they held in world via a web client. Next Friday 5pm PST they will be doing a stress test to see how well it can handle many users and instances.

Their Announcement:

Weâ€™d like to invite you for a public test of a puzzle game that weâ€™ve created called Wheelwright! This test is not to focus test the game itself (it is not in a complete or polished state) but to test our platform technology. We will be testing our platformâ€™s ability to create and maintain a large number of singleplayer game instances. Additionally, we will be testing chat between instances and persistence.

The link to visit will be:
http://www.metaplace.com

We hope to see a large number of participants help us with this stress test. Please join us on Friday, February 15 at 5pm PST for a brief chat before playing the game, then followed up by a short wrap-up chat. See you there!

Should be cool to see how well it performs.