Creatively Distracted
Creatively Distracted
Bristol Bay 180,105,25 – SLurlBlogger is a HUD made available from Ordinal Malprop that captures your coordinates in SL (SLurl) and allows you to post text to your blog or email address. This could be used for taking notes on…
So lately there’s been a lot of hype about Google’s upcoming product, Wave. I won’t deny that the features in the demo seem very productive/handy/slick, but its the name I can’t get over. Surely I can’t be the only person…
Building in Second Life. Looking for an LSL script that can give an object, change a texture, play a sound, or similarly simple action? It seems easy enough to look these things up in the LSL wiki, even for those…
Avi Bar-Zeev from Reality Prime has written an insightful summary of how and why primatives work the way they do in Second Life. The explanations are from the developer's perspective and include backfill on early decisions made when SL was still young. If you've ever wondered "Why?" while you were trying to build something, you'll get something from the article.
Philip Rosedale speaks at TED about virtual worlds, creativity, and possibility. Video below:
Below are the presentation and links mentioned in my visit to John Bailey's GEO 493 class...
Yesterday I gave a couple of small presentations about Second Life to small groups using Stixy instead of PowerPoint.There wasn’t a lot of time to prepare for these, so I collected images, some were mine and some I found on…
|| This post is updated regularly. || I’ve been gathering a list of resources on the conversion process for bringing existing 3D models on to the Second Life platform. I’m dumping them here so I have a way to get…
Virtual worlds like Second Life make it easy to create our own content, but not all of us have the time or talent to create our own textures. As educators we often find our budgets rather limited too. In addition…
Finally, the SpaceNavigator works in Second Life with the SL Viewer Joystick Flycam function. Huh? What does this mean? Well, it’s possible to use the SpaceNavigator for more smooth camera control than using a mouse while filming machinima. Note that…
There are links on Bob Sutor’s blog to the webcasts from the Virtual Worlds: Where Business, Society, Technology & Policy Converge Conference, presented by IBM and the MIT Media Lab in June of this year. There are some interesting thoughts…
Thank goodness meatspace doesn’t suffer from the same buggy afflictions often encountered on the Second Life grid. If it did it would certainly be as humorous as this video spotted on YouTube: [youtube]flkgNn50k14[/youtube]
The Voicemap is available now at secondlife.com and allows you to see which areas have the voice feature enabled. There are a number of locations already and more are added each day. One thing that caught my attention about this…
Looks like a Drupal Second Life Framework will be released in the near future. The release is dependent on the release of the web site (and web app) of the company which sponsored the development. Framework by 2bits.
LanguageLab.com is now open for beta testing. Students will be able to sign up for language classes that meet entirely in Second Life. Classes are small, generally 6 to 8 students, and run for 50 minutes. Events are larger scale…
On 30 November 2006 Philip Rosedale spoke to The Long Now Foundation about Second Life. As a talk given by the CEO of the growing virtual world it is an interesting to hear his overview of what has and is…
The Art Institute Online has announced that they will be offering a Business Communication class in Second Life for the Fall 2007 semester. Their in-world island, AI Pittsburgh, will be open to the public soon. More here, and on YouTube…
There is a Twitter HUD available for Second Life. Ordinal Malaprop developed it and is making it available for free in-world. You can read more about the HUD at the web site. If you have never Twittered before or have…
CoolCat blogger Vicki Davis posted a few of her thoughts on SL and education and the implications for learning with the advent of a 3D web that is getting attention here and here. While she builds a heroic argument for…
I received a tip the other day via my last.fm account about an album titled My Second Life, by Niko Donburi. Reminiscent of the stylings of Weird Al Yankovic, Donburi parodies the highs and lows of life on the SL…
Linden lab has announced its plans to restrict the grid to premium customers only during peak traffic time. This plan gets a thumbs up from comment-contributing residents on the LL blog, and seems to be the general consensus of residents…
New! With more productivity packed in every byte. The new laptop is making the once painful tasks of building/texturing much easier. I’ll post more about the specs later, but right now am just amazed at all the things I wasn’t…
While surfing the grid today I came across and island named Pulveria. I half expected to land in the middle of some intense game world, but instead I found myself in front of a few Vivox booths (they should have…
Linden Lab has announced that they plan on having a Vista-friendly client ready in a few weeks. Though a few people claim to be able to run SL on Vista it certainly still a crap shoot. The first efforts have…
Although I couldn't make it to the NMC Teachers' Buzz this morning, I did log in to see just how much the NMC area has grown. So many islands - and a lot of talent too. While exploring I came across an amazing velociraptor built by Ravenelle Zugzwang located on Service. I didn't even know prims could do things like that!
There have been quite a few people I have talked to who claim to have simply lots interest in SL at some point. “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Second Life. I logged in and looked around a bit, but there…
Archinect recently posted a great article on Second Life from an architect's perspective. Like many other architectural commentaries about SL, it laments the lack of inspiration and vision characteristic of many structures found around SL, but continues past that into an interesting exploration into possibilities and then into some details about LOL Architects and a classes being taught at the Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm and another in Rotterdam. Definitely worth the read if you're looking for some "off the beaten path" sorts of things.
Back to the suburban look of SL - while it is true that not all structures found on the grid are devoid of creativity and thoughtfulness toward purpose, location, and environment - many are just replicas of RL neighborhoods. I don't believe this is the fault of the SL platform at all, but an affliction suffered by a segment of the resident population who have been brainwashed by RL fascist cookie cutter companies like Toll Brothers into their ideal of the perfect home. Ideals aside, I have tried to walk through my fair share of hairpin staircases and run into walls and ceilings due to lack of consideration for the viewpoint of the trailing camera. [...]
There are quite a number of RL and virtual architects creating work in SL. There was a link today on the SLED listserv from Pathfinder Linden to a YouTube video of what could be considered collaborative virtual architecture. There are more videos posted by Keystone1111 on YouTube that are equally as interesting. They are wonderful examples of process and technique for building in SL - something that one normally doesn't get to see while logged into SL unless you happen to stumble upon someone. Thanks to Keystone1111 for posting these and sharing this work.
News is circulating that eBay is no longer allowing the action of virtual booty from MMORPGs such as WoW. More amazing are the estimates C|NET uses for the size of the real money trade market – I had no idea…
The University of Kansas is offering a graduate-level film class this semester that leans heavily into cyber culture. Students explore production of machinima and the rapidly changing issues of producing in cyberspace. The article in the Kansan goes into more…