Open Simulator Web Registration at GCal

Glasgow Caledonian Unversity is planning to use Open Simulator for (some of) it’s Virtual World needs and is going to provide a Module about Virtual Worlds (Second Life and Open Sim) in semester B, starting early 2010. But there was no simple, straightforward way available to register an Avatar in this Open Simulator. You’d need to do this manually, from a command prompt, dive into the world of RegAPI (by Linden Lab, with all it’s disclaimers, Logo’s, Trademark issues, Terms of Service and what have you not) or hack your way into something called OpenSim WebInterface (redux).

Or, alternatively, you create one from scratch, which is what Glasgow Caledonian University did. It is as of yet very basic and built in PHP/MySQL, talking to the same database your OpenSim (grid) instance uses. And it works. But it’s a start. It’s not finished yet. It’s intended to be a starting point and grow, depending on the functionality required by users from UK’s educational field. It will, after some testing, some debugging, cleaning of code and documentation be made available under the GPL so other HE/FE institutions can use it for user registration on their own Open Simulator virtual world.

Anybody who is interested in this web user registration can have a look at http://opensim.gcal.ac.uk It is only available to people with an email address that ends with .ac.uk but if there are other domains required this is extremely easy, just send a request.

The GCU would very much like to get in touch with anybody who is interested in ultimately creating (the tools for) an Open Simulator based Hypergrid of Virtual Worlds for the UK educational field at large. So, if you want to stay informed, help with testing, discuss the steps we need to take to achieve such an Hypergrid, send a mail to opensim@gcal.ac.uk We won’t spam

Ferdinand Francino aka Gwynn Gunawan
Project Manager CU There
Glasgow Caledonian University Web 3D & Virtual Worlds