Fabrizio Cardinali, Giunti Labs’ CEO, reveals the preliminary results of the Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service Oriented Infrastructures (IRMOS) Project at the ‘Immersive Education Summit’ at the London School of Economics in London on 24^th April. 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.

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.

Using the IRMOS-empowered set-up, learners can 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. This will empower learners to meet a community of mobile and virtual visitors, for a wider performance support and learning experience.

Comment: So far, very few virtual worlds and mobile learning systems 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. Hopefully, the advent of new architectural solutions, such as grid or cloud computing, will make real time SOI architectures more affordable.