Thursday, October 16, 2008
Final presentation: Creative and Educational Possibilities of Virtual Worlds.
Doug Anderson -- Seventh Grade art teacher. Notes that these are the college students of tomorrow.
Never another big thing, just lots of little things. Second Life won't replace another medium like TV replaced radio
SL has a 90% churn rate -- lots of folks try, few stay. High cost of entry vis-a-vis time, ramp-up.
Hmm. If this is an intro to SL session, it probably should have come before Evan Leek's session. Still, it's a good thing to have.
How SL works:
Client-server model. As in many MMO games, etc. Client software is the "viewer." Server generates virtual world.
Avatars -- characters. Ability to customize, run 'em as bots, etc.
Content creation -- can build, etc (sorry for going light on this, but this is what I consider basic SL -- or even MMORPG -- knowledge).
Navigation -- Walking for short distances or indoors, flying for outdoors. Teleportation eliminates the idea of "distance," and SLURLS (Second-life urls) allow links.
Economy -- Linden Dollar (L$). About 250L$ per US$. Can be bought and sold. Some people make full-time living creating and selling virtual goods.
Prim Economy -- given selection of land can support only so many polygons.
Accounts are free, but owning land costs money.
Communication -- text-chat local public, or IM. Voice chat - spatial, direct line. Avatar gestures can apply.
Land can be owned by multiple folks, thus there can be shared spaces.
History -- Ars Memoriae -- the art of memory. Ancient idea of creating a house in the mind with mnemonic ideas.
Piranei -- imagines spaces.
Dungeons and Dragons -- shared imagined spaces. Needed a system for resolving actions. Led into MUDS, MUSHs, etc.
Killer Apps (what is SL good for)? Remote Collaboration, serial design, water cooler.
Visualization -- fast sketching in 3d. Creating and saving multiple iterations of objects (I'm taking his word for it; all I've ever created are random and ugly polygons).
Art -- can create art piece, allows for almost every concept. "Where SL shines." "Purely conceptual realm."
Identity, Culture, and Ethics lab. "Like being on the Vegas strip." Frontier-town feeling. Identity is freed from appearance (really? I'd say it's more that you choose the appearance, but it's an essential part of the identity). "Chat room with a view."
What do you do on the second day? Major reason people get bored.
Pitfalls: First hour experience. Too much, too soon for most folks. Bus Station Approach to new folks. Institutions need to manage the avatar creation process.
Corporate America's attempts to us SL: AMerican Apparal, The Gap, etc set up areas. Hanging out a shingle isn't enough to impress me (why go to the American Apparel SL site instead of the American Apparel website). Store concept just doesn't work. Geograhy metaphor doesn't work in SL.
SL isn't a city, but a movie studio backlot. Lots of empty places.
Internal audience fallacy. Not many users.
Changing rooms in a fake store -- simulation over utility. Places can be beautiful, but not useful.
Proprietary environment. Zoning laws being adopted. Intellectual Property issues.
What does work? Sandbox -- public area where folks can build, and other folks help them.
Need an event-driven model (not a place-driven one). Scheduled meetings, etc.
Contents from external sources.
Sloodle -- import content from Moodle page into Second Life.
Trends
Sculpted objects (better than polygons), faster scripting, voice chat, more internationalizaion (75% from outside the US). Tech issues -- concurrency (major lag!), interoperability (avatars moving system to system), reliability (stuff gets lost).
Competition -- open source version being made, browser-based worlds (Lively, Wonderland, there.com).
Small group of core believers, but too much churn amongst casual users. Concern that there's no long tail of SL.
SL Username: Blackthorn Hare
Now we're visiting virtual Princeton. Three full sims, not a single person currently on. Example of a great site, but pointless.
"If you like to wait, then you'll really love Second Life."
Showing a giant egg sculpture. Created by making one block, which in turn scripted its own duplicates.
Finishes with showing his own piece, a little floating island with an orbiting moon and pool. And one last piece -- a giant star with stuff orbiting it, that can be modified and folded in to create a giant throne. As an artist, the ability to bring any concept into virtual reality is appealing (understandably) to him.
Time to head home!
Doug Anderson -- Seventh Grade art teacher. Notes that these are the college students of tomorrow.
Never another big thing, just lots of little things. Second Life won't replace another medium like TV replaced radio
SL has a 90% churn rate -- lots of folks try, few stay. High cost of entry vis-a-vis time, ramp-up.
Hmm. If this is an intro to SL session, it probably should have come before Evan Leek's session. Still, it's a good thing to have.
How SL works:
Client-server model. As in many MMO games, etc. Client software is the "viewer." Server generates virtual world.
Avatars -- characters. Ability to customize, run 'em as bots, etc.
Content creation -- can build, etc (sorry for going light on this, but this is what I consider basic SL -- or even MMORPG -- knowledge).
Navigation -- Walking for short distances or indoors, flying for outdoors. Teleportation eliminates the idea of "distance," and SLURLS (Second-life urls) allow links.
Economy -- Linden Dollar (L$). About 250L$ per US$. Can be bought and sold. Some people make full-time living creating and selling virtual goods.
Prim Economy -- given selection of land can support only so many polygons.
Accounts are free, but owning land costs money.
Communication -- text-chat local public, or IM. Voice chat - spatial, direct line. Avatar gestures can apply.
Land can be owned by multiple folks, thus there can be shared spaces.
History -- Ars Memoriae -- the art of memory. Ancient idea of creating a house in the mind with mnemonic ideas.
Piranei -- imagines spaces.
Dungeons and Dragons -- shared imagined spaces. Needed a system for resolving actions. Led into MUDS, MUSHs, etc.
Killer Apps (what is SL good for)? Remote Collaboration, serial design, water cooler.
Visualization -- fast sketching in 3d. Creating and saving multiple iterations of objects (I'm taking his word for it; all I've ever created are random and ugly polygons).
Art -- can create art piece, allows for almost every concept. "Where SL shines." "Purely conceptual realm."
Identity, Culture, and Ethics lab. "Like being on the Vegas strip." Frontier-town feeling. Identity is freed from appearance (really? I'd say it's more that you choose the appearance, but it's an essential part of the identity). "Chat room with a view."
What do you do on the second day? Major reason people get bored.
Pitfalls: First hour experience. Too much, too soon for most folks. Bus Station Approach to new folks. Institutions need to manage the avatar creation process.
Corporate America's attempts to us SL: AMerican Apparal, The Gap, etc set up areas. Hanging out a shingle isn't enough to impress me (why go to the American Apparel SL site instead of the American Apparel website). Store concept just doesn't work. Geograhy metaphor doesn't work in SL.
SL isn't a city, but a movie studio backlot. Lots of empty places.
Internal audience fallacy. Not many users.
Changing rooms in a fake store -- simulation over utility. Places can be beautiful, but not useful.
Proprietary environment. Zoning laws being adopted. Intellectual Property issues.
What does work? Sandbox -- public area where folks can build, and other folks help them.
Need an event-driven model (not a place-driven one). Scheduled meetings, etc.
Contents from external sources.
Sloodle -- import content from Moodle page into Second Life.
Trends
Sculpted objects (better than polygons), faster scripting, voice chat, more internationalizaion (75% from outside the US). Tech issues -- concurrency (major lag!), interoperability (avatars moving system to system), reliability (stuff gets lost).
Competition -- open source version being made, browser-based worlds (Lively, Wonderland, there.com).
Small group of core believers, but too much churn amongst casual users. Concern that there's no long tail of SL.
SL Username: Blackthorn Hare
Now we're visiting virtual Princeton. Three full sims, not a single person currently on. Example of a great site, but pointless.
"If you like to wait, then you'll really love Second Life."
Showing a giant egg sculpture. Created by making one block, which in turn scripted its own duplicates.
Finishes with showing his own piece, a little floating island with an orbiting moon and pool. And one last piece -- a giant star with stuff orbiting it, that can be modified and folded in to create a giant throne. As an artist, the ability to bring any concept into virtual reality is appealing (understandably) to him.
Time to head home!
Labels: Nercomp
# posted by Adam Smith @ 11:09 AM 
