Play2Train Open Content Alliance
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History
The Play2Train environment is currently under the purview of the Idaho Bioterrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program (IBAPP)and the Institute of Rural Health at Idaho State University. The Play2Train Open Content Alliance (POCA), which is evolving from the Play2Train activities, represents collaborative efforts to build a permanent self-sustaining archive of open source virtual worlds, including their content and applications, to support public domain emergency preparedness training and exercises. The virtual content is implemented in the Second Life</http> ™ platform. The powerful user content generation system of Second Life ™ has allowed us to build a sizeable set of virtual environments for emergency preparedness exercises in a fairly short time. We will consider competing platforms as their functionalities begin to match those currently supported by the chosen platform. We hope that this resource will significantly lower the barrier for accessing such virtual environments for emergency preparedness training.
Mission
The POCA community will revolutionize access to robust virtual training environments by dramatically reducing the time and financial costs needed for the creation and maintenance of such environments. We will demonstrate that this is achievable through the sharing of virtual real estate and reuse of content under open content community standards. This effort will open up virtual environment training research to a larger audience who were previously barred from using massive multiplayer virtual worlds for training purposes because of high costs and technical challenges. By lowering barriers to access virtual environments for training, better opportunities for the evaluation of learning in such spaces will become available. This in turn will help establish a solid evidence based foundation that is necessary to support any scientific enterprise.
NEWS
We got a lot of requests for permission to visit the construction site of the Elk's Rehab Hospital. We are not able to provide access at this time and we thought that the next best thing would be an online Elk's Rehabilitation Hospital Construction slideshow. If the pictures of the slide show is squashed on the side, try refreshing the page. This is a known issue for pictures on picasaweb.
Getting started
Who can participate and how?
Current activities
Do you have emergency products to showcase?
POCA Team
Services
Sponsors
Video tutorials
What others are saying about Play2Train?
Relevant articles
Blog
FAQ
Contact: Rameshsharma Ramloll PhD, ramlrame_at_isu.edu (replace at by @)
Play2Train collaborators/events
Click here for list on separate page
Play2Train is developed, in part, using funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services's Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR</http>). The Play2Train Open Content Alliance is an offshoot of the Play2Train effort. However, the contents on this site do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and you should not infer endorsement by the Federal government. The statements contained herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government, the State of Idaho, Idaho State University or the Institute of Rural Health (August 2007). Click for driving directions to the Institute of Rural Health.
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