|
May 2008
The Archives
-
05.31.08Students in Second Life: Suffern Middle School Case StudyKevin Jarrett recently moderated a discussion surrounding a middle school's successful integration into SL that was based on a podcast by Peggy Sheehy. Suffern Middle School serves around 1,200 students in Suffern, NY. But it is also the first middle school in the nation to have a learning presence in SL, called "Ramapo Islands," with an associated blog. Jarrett writes about the high quality of the SL experience for the students in SL: "What's amazing though is that you can hear the kids themselves talk about the things Peggy mentions in her podcast, the power of the medium to captivate them, to utterly ...
-
05.31.08Lock Up Your Kids, Tie Up Your Kajira, It’s Time to CelebrateSecond Life will celebrate 5 years of "Your World, Your Imagination" by excluding three of the most active communities on the Grid by holding a celebration (SL5B) that excludes kids, Gor, and BDSM in a "fit for prime time" celebration which, I assume, will be dominated by squeaky-clean examples of business collaboration, education, and maybe a bunch of Greenie floats. The Lab announced the 5 year celebration with that kind of rousing libertarian call to action for which it's renowned, following up with the kind of community relation fiasco which is the hallmark of its execution on the great dream of ...
-
05.29.08Lessons in Community Relations from Within the LabAll Hail M Linden who blogged about his first week, brown bag lunches, and sitting beside a rabbit at the staff town hall. As M said, "As I start my second week, I can happily say I have a sense of what makes Linden Lab and indeed Second Life such a magical place. It’s people with passion for the virtual world. And, it all starts with the Resident community. Thank you for a wondrous first week!" And how wonderful to see that one the same day as his in-world staff meeting that the coders in the Lab were upholding their high standards ...
-
05.29.08
-
05.28.08Interface Design Should Do What You Need It ToI poked at the Sacred Cow of the interface design for the Second Life client but the following sums up the whole discussion far more clearly. (A picture is worth a 1,000 words, a world a billion of them). The sum of the argument: sometimes you need an interface to be very simple and accomplish key tasks. And sometimes you WANT an interface to be a whole lot more. Neither is right or wrong, maybe, and in fact by adding features you can forget your core objective and need a manual to use it, but you can also elevate the mundane ...
-
05.28.08Forget Virtual Worlds - I Want PongIn school, we used to play some kind of complicated game with pennies on the cafeteria tables. Sort of a hockey thing - dunno why the rules were so complicated, really you needed to score a goal by sliding a penny across towards your opponent's goal (his hand splayed out to represent the posts). Who needs complicated and virtual. The best games are easy to understand and portable. If only you could attach the following to a keychain and take it with you, I'd take Pong-to-go over a virtual world on an iPhone any day. :) via Moma
-
05.28.08Papervision Tag Galaxy - Mapping Meaning in 3DForgotten in the debate about avatars and identity is the idea of 3D space as an intuitive way to conceptualize information. Papervision is increasingly being used to organize concepts, as seen in the now famous White Void application - sure, it's just a spinny looking file folder system, but there's something that just feels right about it - concepts nested in concepts, 3D space, hierarchy of data. Others are pushing the limits as well. Tag Galaxy takes tags from Flickr and maps them as a galaxy of terms. Each planet is a tag - and if you click each planet it ...
-
05.28.08Cathay Pacific: Avatars, 3D Tour, PapervisionCathay Pacific is showing off it's new airplane cabins on a Web site that combines selecting a stand-in for yourself - male or female, the ability to tour the cabin in 3D, and artful use of Papervision in the interface. The site is remarkably fast to load, immerses you in the environment of the aircraft, and gets down to the level of allowing you to test how the seats maneuver and lights adjust. A flight simulator and an in-board movie allows you to watch trailers for what will be shown on board. Of course - also has you dreaming of first class travel, ...
-
05.28.08MMO Population Woes: Metaplace, Culture and the End of the Big Game?The Guardian is at it again - covering virtual worlds, games, MMOs as if this stuff is a real business. While other media either have a sort of "gosh, we'd better explain what an MMO is, and isn't it cute how dwarves run around with giant axes" kind of pie-eyed sensibility (and usually get it all wrong), and others are either deeply cynical or cynically shallow, the Guardian has been a source of good MMO coverage. Now, they've picked up the Raph Koster "metaMeme" about how the era of the mega-MMO is coming to a close. It's too expensive to compete ...
-
05.28.08Resource: Non-Profits in SLRik at The Click Heard Round The World has put together a list of groupings of non-profit organizations with a presence in SL. Rik notes that non-profit activity in SL is ever-evolving, as one-off events are always occurring and orgs just catching onto SL begin to set up islands to outreach to the metaverse. He also links to umbrellas such as Commonwealth Sim, the New Media Consortium, and others.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.