A Bunch of Links

It's Friday and I don't want to work at work, nor at blogging; so, I'm giving you all a bunch of links to enjoy. Hopefully this will help you pass the time and you'll be yelling "whoo hoo I'm done" soon.

Lainy Voom Machinima

I love Lainy's stuff as you can tell by my posts. Enjoy them yourself.

Social Research Foundation

The group has been researching users of SL (whoop did I just use a trademark to promote a product! TOO BAD!) since 2003, and they have a GREAT report analyzing users of Second Life.

Gwyn’s Home » Second Life® Bloggers Require Clarification

Gwyn says, "Tell us that you won't sue us for promoting YOU product and we won't be pissy. " Well she says it lots better. *grin*

Second Life Library Project » Blog Archive » Infoisland Universe

Video! I loves video.

inSL Reactions (What Is This Crap?)

A link to links re: inSL trademark issue. :-P

Modeling Real Life in Virtual Worlds « The ARCH

Another video, but this one's on architecture in virual worlds.

R TM (What Is This Crap?)

Get one! Wear one!

Well that's it for now. *sigh* I guess I should try to find lunch and then organize my staples.

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Wanna get Lindens for answering questions about your SL relationship?

I just got this email from a resident who's doing an educational project in SL. If you are interested in helping out, let him know:

"I am an undergraduate psychology student at Minnesota State University of Moorhead and am having trouble recruiting people who are in a current relationship on SL. Can anyone give me any advice on where or how to recruit around 250 participants to take a survey. The participants will even get paid in Linden. Thank you so much

Benjamin Erie (Benjamen Leakey - inWorld))
Minnesota State University of Moorhead"

Robbie Dingo's New Machinama

"Don't look at me little puppet!"

So which is it? Is the avi my puppet or am I the puppet of my avi? Second (Real) Audience vs. Real (Second) Audience

The quote in the title is from a movie. I'll give you a prize in-world if you know what movie it's from. Email, IM, call, or comment to give me your answer.

ReLIVE08 Conference

I'm excited to read about the upcoming conference regarding Researching Learning in Virtual Environments (ReLIVE08). Too bad it's in England. The keynote speaker is Dr Edward Castronova the author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality. The subjects for the conference are:

• Crossing boundaries and making connections

• Opportunities and challenges of virtual worlds for learning and teaching

• Approaches to research

• Implementing and sustaining innovation

Virtual Worlds and Collaborative Work: Survey Results

SRI Consulting Business Consortium's research program on virtual worlds has just published a report on VW work. The results are interesting and I'm sure VRWorkplace would agree with them: that VW will be a role in certain types of collaborative work, research and development should embrace this medium, and that ease of use will be important for the future success of ANY VW platform. Knowing this I wonder, "How does SL manage to continue to prevail?" LOL!

Virtual Worlds and Cultural Differences

I just finished reading a great article on cultural differences when using email. It seems that in East Asian countries workers avoid using email to communicate with their superiors because it seems disrespectful. They fax them. I would say that Second Life would allow people to work while respecting cultural differences. East Asian workers could bow, wear business attire, or whatever makes them more comfortable when addressing their superior.

And finally, my workforce can feel comfortable working with me by wearing wings and falling to their knees when I enter a room. *grin*

Social Workers in Social Worlds

For those of you who are interested in social work in SL *cough NICKI cough*, then this site is for you. It's a couple who have put together a group and some resources for exploring SL from a social work perspective.

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AI in SL (God I love Acronyms)

I had posted about research on bots creating an envrionment where people feel they are not alone. Now it seems Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is experimenting with Artificial Intelligence in Second Life: Child-like intelligence created in Second Life Does anyone have a SLURL for where we can check this out or isn't it public?

Architecture in the Metaverse

It seems that I missed this great event for SL achitects, but at least we have the web page. http://archidemo.blogspot.com/

Rezzable: How Dinos Became Extinct

The scientists were only partly right: it was a meteor shower and volcano, but it was brought on by an alien rave gone wrong. I bet that alien got grounded when it got home.

Dharma Talk

I went to a Dharma talk by kusaladharma Demar, a RL Buddhist monk in SL, whose studied for 11 years and came to SL simply to teach the Dharma.

kusaladharm speaking:




A shot of him with the group in the background.

Parcel Media Video Tutorials

I love the new parcel media feature on the Release Client.

Here are the links to Torley's vid-tuts on the subject:
YouTube - PARCEL MEDIA: Play webpages, movies, & more - Second ...
YouTube - PARCEL MEDIA: Make your own media screen - Second Life ...
YouTube - PARCEL MEDIA: Click actions - Second Life Video TuTORial

I hope you get to enjoy them as much as I do.

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Exploring

Nicki and I explored two builds. The first one is called Tunnel of Light from Rezzable. This build requires the Windlight Release Candidate viewer to enjoy the effects and textures. This was my first time using the Windlight viewer and I spent A LOT of time being dazzled by the pretty lights and water before I realized I should take snapshots. Here are a few from the experience. I HIGHLY recommend giving it a try even if you've never used SL's test software before.









It was an amazing experience. I'm hoping to get better at taking snapshots to capture the great stuff in SL.

Then we moved to Loscusolus (130, 170, 22). This was a build that made me think of greifer attacks as an artform. I won't ruin some of the fun stuff, but know that you'll prolly have to relog a few times.

Here are some shot of what happens when you click on some poseballs:

Nicki Shooting Me Like an Arrow



Um ah...no comment



You too can be a part of an art piece:








I hope you enjoy them both.

Scripts for Reflexive Architecture

I love enchanting a build. Scripts are the magic of our time; so, to that end, I include this link from « The ARCH to a script that will allow a prim to change color based on an avatars position. Enjoy!

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Blog Readers are Like Cats with Lasers?

So the reason why I should stop allowing comments on my blog is that you all would be powerless to read them. All 2 of them. Yes, you are in my power. LOL! "Why We're Powerless To Resist Grazing on Endless Web Data - WSJ.com

Second Life Scripts for Doors

So, in a prior post I wondered aloud why we would need doors with hinges. I was posting this because I was building my skybox and not totally satisfied with my options for scripts. I'm an okay scripter, but since I'm self-taugh, I often don't know WHY something doesn't work. So, I broke down and used a script with a rotating door on hinges. This script is the best, open-source, script I could find that EASILY allows one to create a door like RL. You need to follow the directions exactly as they are on the webpage and in the script. Make sure you type "/door closed" and "/door opened" because any other spelling won't work. In all other ways, this script is the easiest way to make a door.

Thank Timeless Prototype for making this script available and donate to him via paypal, if you find it useful.

Once I have time, I'm hoping to combine Timeless' script with some sort of locking mechanism. I found one, but I can't find it again. LOL! OH! You might want to check out Bob Sutor's blog for other ways to make doors. He's got a section on building by example that's very useful.

Terra Nova: Virtual Worlds 101: Draft Syllabus

I've been reading a lot of articles on virtual worlds and feel like I'm beginning to be competent in this area. Edward Catronova, the author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality, knows a lot about the subject. Yet, he's asking us to help him with his syllabus for class. If you have any comments, please check it out.

View Original Article

Ma.gnolia tags: Virtual_Worlds, Education

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Conversations with 3D Visual Support in SL

World Cafe combines facilitated conversation and visual thinking to promote new ideas, links, and understanding. Often their work shows a visual pattern of living relationships: conversations, relationships, and mental processes and paradigms. Now they are taking this process and way of thinking into Second Life. They had an event recently that used their process:

"There have been other brief World Café forays into Second Life, but this was the first I know of that used a process so close to the ‘real’ World Café format."

Yet is wasn't really SL centric because the recorder created a graphic offline in 2D. I would say that SL is a great envrionment for a 3D version of visual pattern creation. You could create the map in-world using the building tools in SL. You would need to have an amazing builder, but it could be done.

I once played primtionary, which is pictionary but you create the pictures with 3D objects. I was surprised at how thought provoking it was and how it made one think of things in different ways. Spatial thinking was one new way because you could "feel" a spatial difference. I used colored boxes, and set-up in a hierarchy to give a sense of familial relationships with the addition of a blinking color script - everyone in the room knew that the blinking box was grama. I think this could work in SL as well.

Virtual Workplaces

I believe that one of the more common office workplaces will be through virtual worlds. Yet, this has implication on how to manage people in these environments. Electric Sheep has a post about the advantages of virtual worlds and research. Talking about people, he said:

"By far the most interesting things we’re learning are about people, how they interact with each other and their environment, and how they adapt to new technologies."

What I find interesting is how people's behavior changes based on this new technology and what that means for collaborative work. How they adapt is more important to me than what they actually do there.

Dave Elchoness, VRWorkplace, and the Association of Virtual Worlds

Once I started doing research on virtual worlds, I felt there weren't a lot of people who GOT what I was talking about. Then through Twitter I met VRWorkplace. He's actually developing a business around what I'm reading. I've had a lot of esteem for him, but now he's gone and made something pretty amazing: Association of Virtual Worlds. It's a social networking site for people doing business in virtual worlds. It has a rich group of people already (various experience and perspectives) with only 326 people connected and growing. I would recommend keeping an eye on this one. 

Visit Association of Virtual Worlds