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Uses

Open Cobalt is being developed to make it easy for people and organizations to create secure virtual world spaces. By leveraging OpenGL-based 3D graphics, Open Cobalt supports highly scalable collaborative data visualization, virtual learning and problem solving environments, 3D wikis, online gaming environments (MMORPGs), as well as privately and securely maintained multiuser virtual environments that facilitate group communication and help people organize project work. Through Open Cobalt's VNC capability, you can even bring all of your web resources (learning management systems, course management systems, wikis, etc.) into your virtual spaces - interactively.  By making Open Cobalt available, we seek to stimulate the development and dissemination of shared cyber-environments for the staging, observation and evaluation of collaborative decision-making, problem finding, and problem solving among members of distributed virtual organizations and educational communities.

Research

With Open Cobalt, researchers at different locations to benefit from a sense of shared presence, voice-over-IP telecommunication, integrated text chat, a capacity for 3D model and media sharing, an ability to collaboratively share and edit documents, and an ability to simultaneously access and interact with third party services via virtual network computing (VNC).

The technology also provides a robust platform for modular interface development and a usable basis for further exploration in the area of scalable distributed collaboration.  The technology also provides a basis for future research on: (1) optimal methods of supporting the ad hoc synchronous communication and collaboration needs of large numbers of researchers, educators, and students; and (2) ways of achieving large-scale, cost efficient proliferation of new interconnected and deeply capable virtual workspaces.  

Education/Training

Open Cobalt provides the basis for a common, open cyberlearning platform that supports a full range of teaching and learning activities, including assessment and analysis.  Its unique technical architecture allows schools to host richly collaborative MUVE-based experiences “behind the firewall” using the school’s own local area network. 

The technology also allows teachers to develop entire MUVE-based curricula (e.g. the virtual environment, embedded scenario and content, etc.), put that curriculum on a thumb drive and pop it into the school’s local network for instant distribution to networked computers throughout the school.  Teachers can create new versions of their curriculum, restore old versions, and share the curriculum with other teachers through web-based repositories.  

Examples

In Education

Because Open Cobalt is still an experimental and early stage platform technology, there are not yet many production-level uses in educational settings.  However, The EduSim 3D Smartboard Application being developed by Rich White of the Greenbush Southeast Kansas Educational Service Center provides a nice glimpse of how this technology can be used.  The EduSim prototype is designed to provide educators and students with a way of linking 3D activities across multiple white boards. Greenbush is working to ensure that The Edusim application is being developed with resource packs for the K-12 classroom. This is a great example of the type of low-to-no-cost educational application that Open Cobalt is being designed to make possible. Kudos to Rich for so effectively bringing this early stage technology into the classroom. The following videos say it all:


Below is a video of kids making Martians with a Croquet-based interactive whiteboard application prototype. This video illustrates how, through the power of this technology, children can become engaged in deeply creative, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative activity that involves art, science, and technology. These types of environments could be quite valuable as tools for engaging students in science and technology - especially when problems of engagement are among the core challenges of K-12 education.


In Research

Below is a video of a Lorenz Attractor GPGPU object being calculated using a pre-release version of an Open Cobalt virtual workspace. GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) techniques leverage a computer's graphics processor (GPU) to perform calculations that in most applications are traditionally handled by the computer's main processor (CPU). User interface elements within the Open Cobalt world can be used to dynamically color, rotate and translate the object. Flexibility of the Open Cobalt software platform, and its accessibility to researchers, makes this type of visualization possible within a navigable multi-user collaborative environment.  Open Cobalt can therefore be used as a way of communicating advanced visualizations within the context of a research workspace that can also support a variety of communication needs among distributed research team members.



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