Engine for Collaborative Science Education MMOG?

plisdku asks: "My research advisor wants to create an online, collaborative science education game for middle- to high-school students; we need a 3D engine! A pioneer in internet-assisted laboratories (iLabs), he has developed real experiments that students can operate remotely over the internet. We envision a game where students wander a campus, solving Caltech-style 'stacks,' and learning collaboratively as they perform the great experiments of the history of science in simulated and real laboratories. What we need is a 3D engine and content creation system with which our team of artists and bright student developers can produce a prototype within a year. Requirements: customizable avatars, flexible integration with other technology (iLabs, CompEdu, etc.), and reasonable licensing fees (open source would be great). Our last project used SGI tools -- what are our modern-day options?"

Comments

Croquet

[Usquebaugh]

This would appear to mesh exactly with your aims :-

http://www.opencroquet.org/

Two psossible downsides SmallTalk and Alan Kay. Both are positives for me but I understand some peoples aversion.

Second Life

[eggstasy]

Second Life is ideal for this sort of thing.
They even have a special program for universities.
It's not just a graphics engine, it's a whole 3D world where you can collaboratively build and script stuff... it has very customizable humanoid avatars and is extremely user friendly.
It's got physics too - based on the "industry standard" Havok engine.

Soya

[Chilltowner]

I've found Soya to be a very friendly Python-based 3D engine. It also has ODE physics built in, so that might be useful, too. It also works closely with Blender models. In addition, the developers are very responsive, and they've produced a number of tutorials to get people up to speed quickly. Not sure if the software you'd like to integrate with has Python bindings, but this is a good option if it does.

AgentFX and jMonkeyEngine

[GameNutz]

2 AMAZING 3D game engines developed in Java. this makes any environment that is built cross platform on Win32, OSX and Linux straight away!

http://www.agency9.com/
http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/

Quake 2/3, Ogre, cube, and many others

[obi]

Quake2 is GPL'ed
Quake3 will probably be in the near future, and has a very active community of modders/tools/information/...

Cube (and nextgen Sauerbraten) are zlib licensed:
http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
fun for its realtime ingame editor iirc

Ogre is LGPL'ed and also very active community
http://www.ogre3d.org/ ... well you get the idea. With a bit of searching
I think you must be able to find some decent open source stuff.

Might not work

[pbaer]

I'm not sure creating an MMOG to teach students will actually teach them science. What will most likely happen is 1 student will figure everything out and then post it online and everyone else will copy-paste his directions and not learn anything, just like it is with most quests in MMORPGs. Also how would you pull them away from games like: WoW, GWs, CS:S, Halo 2 etc. and get them to play an educational game? The only way I could see getting them to play it would be to have teachers integrate it into their curriculum but there's still the 1st probelm

Tell me more

[Peristarkawan]

This sounds very, very similar to a project idea that I've had boiling in the back of my mind, and I would very much love to be a part of this. Can you let me know what school you're at, and who your research advisor is?

MASSIVE

[el_womble]

The University of Nottingham has been working for years on MASSIVE which is designed explicitly for this purpose. Prof. Benton and Dr. Greenhal have been working on this for years. Last time I experienced it the graphics were more 1980s VR than Doom 3, but you were able to manipulate the environment collaborativly (I built a house with 10 other people) in real time, use it as a meeting space with full audio and very low lag. Not sure about the licensing, you would have to ask them.