I attended the NECC ISTE Conference on Second Life IN Second Life. It was pretty overwhelming. Some folks used voice, some chat....but look at the numbers of us attending!
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
Making prims
We learned to make objects during the June 13th class.
You can see that I made a cube and inserted a photograph of a class we had on the sides. It was easy to do right from within the second life interface. Then came:
Most of my classmates seemed to get how to make a gift box, but I was lost.Second Life video tutorials
I was not going to let the gift box get me down so I spent several hours in Second Life looking for a house and furniture. I found the house and had a grand time getting it in place. I could not figure out how to make the door slide in....aaargh. What is Esme my teacher doing in Second Life at 11 pm at night? Oh this is addicting...
Finally it is done as the sun sets. And I go in and relax...
I wanted to learn to make clothes so I used creating your world to help me design a CCV shirt and load it to Second Life. It was harder than I thought and actually has no shading...It was made with Photoshop. I got the template and instructions here.
Prims comes from the word primitive which are the building block shapes that all second life objects are made from.
INTERSECTION: science fiction & reality
The idea of virtual reality first appeared in a science fiction novel called Simulacron-3 published by Daniel Galouye, in 1964. It is the story of a virtual world complete with simulacrum that eventually began to experience consciousness.
In 1984 William Gibson coined the word cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer, a story about a down and out computer hacker hired by a unexplained boss. He defined cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions." This was considered an early cyber punk book.
One of the later cyber punk books, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (1992), is where we first hear the word avatar used to describe a person’s representation in virtual reality. "..when the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a 'snow crash.'"
The science fiction series Otherland (Williams, 1996), speaks of a future where Internet accessibility to virtual worlds is common place and its publication coincided with the public release of Activeworlds on the actual Internet.
Now fiction and reality were one! Activeworlds is system where the user enters a 3-dimensional space via their computer browser and interacts with it using an avatar. What one’s avatar encounters in Activeworlds are surroundings and objects that have been created by other avatars as well as themselves. This environment differs from gaming because you are not locked in a scenario built into a video or role-playing game. You are actually in a multi-user visual environment (MUVE) collaborating with other users, sometimes observing, sometimes interacting, and sometimes creating.
Linden Lab’s virtual world called Second Life just celebrated its fifth birthday on June 23, 2008.
OPEN SOURCE code for MUVEs
"Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices."
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