Fabrizio Cardinali, the CEO of Giunti Labs, will reveal the preliminary results of the Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service Oriented Infrastructures (IRMOS) Project at the ‘Immersive Education Summit’ - being held at the London School of Economics in London on 23rd and 24th April.
In particular, Cardinali will discuss: ‘Adding new generation mobile and virtual worlds content repositories to your existing e-learning platforms towards personal ambient learning.’
The IRMOS Project is a 36 month, 12.9m Euro project awarded by the European Commission to a Consortium of 13 leading European organisations. The project aims to develop ‘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.
Within the scope of the IRMOS Project, Giunti Labs is developing one of the user scenarios 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, running on top of the IRMOS 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 active both in real and virtual learning worlds.
“Using the IRMOS-empowered set-up, learners will be able to meet in specific real world learning hubs, such as museums, tourist attractions, schools and/or industrial locations, and receive location-based learning materials and community services, geo-located on a matter of relevance and context awareness, while the real time system will 'synch' 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, for a wider performance support and learning experience.”
The IRMOS Project has just passed its first successful review in a plenary meeting, held in Brussels, where the European Commission and an international panel of experts reviewed the results of the first 12 months of the project. Mr Cardinali will be summarising some of these results at the Immersive Education Summit in London on 24th April.
According to Cardinali: "The issue with virtual worlds and mobile learning systems today is that very few have gone beyond the piloting phase and none have really tackled the scalability issue of real life large and massive deployments. We need real time technologies and SOIs that are able to deliver the right power on demand - when needed. Moreover, they must be able to support the thousands of virtual and mobile learners that real deployments will need to accommodate. Today, you can achieve massive virtual worlds deployments, such as Second Life, only by setting up thousands of concurrent CPUs. Yet this is something not many can afford. Thankfully, new architectural solutions, such as grid or cloud computing, can make real time SOI architectures much more affordable,” he said.
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