ALIVE Classmate V0.4 Released

ALIVE Classmate is a 3D Multiuser Virtual Classroom created for delivering e-Learning content via the web and to bring distance education students in closer contact with on-campus students and teachers.

Features

• User represented in 3D world environment as a humanoid character.
• Real time voice over the internet (VoIP) conferencing.
• Real time text chat.
• Avatar Editor for personalising your character.
• Broadcast Slide Project for giving real time, multi-user slide presentations.
• Multi-user synchronous whiteboard.
• Streaming and broadcast video.
• Live web cam displaying.
• Auto gesticulation of avatar when talking; this means your avatar moves and gestures with its hands automatically when it detects you are talking into the microphone while using VoIP.

It can be downloaded from the ALIVE website at http://www.alivex3d.org/

The ALIVE team are off to another great year with Penny’s winning of the 2007 USQ Excellence in Teaching Award and a collaborate USQ Teaching and Learning Fellowship with Helen Ison (in USQ Biology Department). The teaching award follows Penny’s success in 2007 winning the Qld Smart State – Women in ICT award and the Faculty of Sciences Excellence in Teaching award.

The fellowship activities with Helen will be to develop a virtual dissection application to teach anatomy and physiology to external students who don’t need hands on experience in the laboratory. This virtual application will allow students to study anatomy and physiology at a distance so they can follow study paths that have historically been available to on-campus students only.

Once again some hacker has destroyed the server hosting the ALIVE website. So now I have decided to use a bunch of free tools to host our various services. Obviously, we have WordPress as our blog and now have a new gmail email account: alivex3d@gmail.com. Also, thanks to my wonderful husband we also have a nice flat HTML website generated with ICE (http:ice.usq.edu.au) which sits on the university web servers, hopefully impervious to hackers (this time)!!