Sestri Levante (IT), May 2009 - Leading-edge research under the 36-month, 12.9m euro project awarded by the European Commission to a consortium of thirteen leading European organisations is close to being able to use grid and cloud computing to provide the computing resources to bring learners together in both the real and virtual worlds.
Known as the Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service-Oriented Infrastructures (IRMOS) Project, the endeavor recently passed its first twelve-month review in a plenary meeting held in Brussels, where European Commission representatives and an international panel of experts reviewed first results.
Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of the learning and mobile-content-management-solution provider, Giunti Labs - one of the thirteen companies involved in IRMOS, revealed the preliminary results at the #Immersive Education Summit', held at the London School of Economics in London 23-24 April.
The project is developing 'real-time' interaction between people and applications over a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) where processing, storage, and networking need to be combined and delivered with guaranteed levels of service.
Cardinali explained further that Giunti Labs is also working on 'learner positioning' in virtual worlds as well as in the real world. Indeed, the aim of the project is to combine the two, enabling learners' avatars to be synchronised with their movements in the real world. Cardinali added, "... and of course, the learning content produced can be reused and distributed via various delivery media such as text books, Web-based learning materials, mobile learning, digital boards, and so on".
"Using the IRMOS-empowered setup, learners will be able to meet in specific real- world learning hubs, such as museums, tourist attractions, schools, and industrial locations, and receive location-based learning materials and community services that are geo-located and based on relevance and context awareness, and simultaneously, the real-time system will 'synch' the user interactions and information within a virtual reconstruction of the visited premises", explained Cardinali. "This will empower learners to meet a community of mobile and virtual visitors, providing wider performance support and a richer learning experience."
In the context of the IRMOS Project, Giunti Labs studied both open source and proprietary systems and is now developing a user scenario for interactive real-time location-based learning integrating its HarvestRoad Hive Digital Repository and learn eXact mobile-learning technologies with the Wonderland and Darkstar Virtual Worlds and collaboration platforms by SUN. The latter will run on top of the IRMOS service- oriented infrastructure (SOI) infrastructure.
Blending open source learning platforms, such as Sakai or Moodle, with Giunti Labs' mobile-learning technologies, the solution constitutes a real-time 'extended' location-based learning experience to learners who are active in both real and virtual learning worlds.
Cardinali said, "This has meant extending the HarvestRoad Hive digital repository into mobile and virtual worlds' content editors to create content delivered via BlackBerries, PDAs, and so on."
"Once the data is in the digital repository, Hive can determine who is attempting to download data along with what device they are using and where they are. In other words, Hive will give each learner the right information for the right device in the right location, creating a community of learners following the same studies, regardless of where they are."
