The OpenSimulator-based OpenVCE region has been reactivated on the MOSES Military Metaverse (http://militarymetaverse.org – no longer active) OpenSim grid to make this example of a virtual collaboration environment accessible for demonstrations to US federal and other agencies. The region contains a range of meeting facilities from a large lecture style amphitheatre, breakout spaces, exhibition pavilions, a brainstorming or operations centre style I-Room for the “core plus modules” OODA loop supporting original, a cut down minimalistic DICE I-Room, project and group rooms and several fun and informal gathering spaces (cavern campfire and beach side apartment).
OpenVCE was available on MOSES (https://redmine.militarymetaverse.org/projects/moses/wiki/OpenVCE – no longer active) for some years. The OpenSim Archive (OAR) file for the OpenVCE region is openly available under the Lesser GNU (very flexible) license or similar open source licenses (e.g. Creative Commons By Attribution CC-BY-SA).
The current content of the OpenVCE OAR is deployed on the “OpenVCE” region on our own Openvue grid and on OSGrid (which is the largest free to use publicly accessible OpenSimulator grid).
The original work to create the OpenVCE region was done on the US Army ARL HRED funded Virtual Collaboration Environment project by AIAI using Clever Zebra as a contractor/3D modelling group. Having the region available to visitors lets people see if it would be helpful as a basis for their own projects.
OpenVCE OAR Availability
The militarymetaverse.org links are no longer operational, but the OpenVCE content is available via http://openvce.net/downloads and an updated OpenSim OSAR file is available at http://openvce.net/downloads/2022/
OpenSim users can visit the OpenVCE on the OSGrid and Openvue grids… both accessible from any Hypergrid enabled OpenSimulator grid using a map tool search for this “http://hg.osgrid.org:80 OpenVCE” or one of these “hops” in viewers which support that (e.g. Firestorm):
hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/OpenVCE/128/128/20 hop://virtual.aiai.ed.ac.uk:8002/OpenVCE/128/128/20
Reference
Tate, A., Hansberger, J.T., Potter, S. and Wickler, G. (2014) Virtual Collaboration Spaces: Bringing Presence to Distributed Collaboration, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Assembled Issue 2014, Volume 7, Number 2, May 2014 [PDF Format].
The domain name openvce.net has been renewed for a further 10 years to preserve all the material there and the stable URLs… though all content is also mapped into a University of Edinburgh web area.
http://openvce.net web root is equivalent to http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/openvce/
The militarymetaverse.org links are no longer operational, but the OpenVCE content is available via http://openvce.net/downloads.