reported by NMC Virtual Worlds September 5th, 2008
One of our NMC Virtual Worlds projects this year was construction of the virtual campus for the University of the Pacific which included a mixture of replication of campus structures, such as Burns Tower, and creation of new spaces which only exist on the virtual campus.
Since the ribbons were cut May 7, 2008, faculty and staff at the University have been busy using the space and developing new applications for therr virtual learning space.
They are inviting you to learn more about their Second Life campus and how it has already been put to use in this new machinima video:
Some things of interest include their learning spaces high above Burns Tower, the “Sky Labs” where faculty and classes meet in flexible designed spaces, a space for sharing “freebies” a gallery of student created content, and a lab where faculty are developing custom learning applications.
In the video, we learn from Volleychick Boa about how Second Life is being used for Speech Critique where students stream their webcam into Second Life for review by their faculty, how the debate teams are conducting activities in world, a nifty survival experience (a crashed plane! snow!) for a management class, and the development of a student club area, just to name a few examples.
As a sneak preview, Gary has published his own video interpretation of The Wall V-2, and ironically, has placed it to a soundtrack of a live Pink Floyd performance of Comfortable Numb, a song not used in the show!
The Virtual Worlds in Education Conference
Real Education in a Virtual World:
Using Online Virtual Environments for Teaching and Learning
Hosted and sponsored by East Carolina University
November 10 and 11, 2008: This event is held entirely in Second Life on the East Carolina University virtual campus (http://slurl.com/secondlife/ECU%20II/112/107/26)
The conference will be over a 48 -hour period. The schedule [...]
Imagine flying over a pyramid shaped boat as a variety of tones from the engine combine to create a melody. That is just what visitors will get when they interact with the new virtual art collection created by Ball State University faculty in Second Life.
John Fillwalk, Ball State associate professor of art, and director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts and Animation (IDIAA), is the lead artist on a project that will be showcased in Second Life beginning Sunday, Aug. 24 2008, and run through September.
The NMC offered Fillwalk and the IDIAA the chance to transform an entire Second Life island with interactive virtual art. The collection, which will be up for a month, is part of a series of installations hosted by NMC throughout the year.
Fillwalk (SL Name: Mencius Watts) and Jesse Allison, Ball State faculty fellow and research specialist (SL Name: Taggert Alsop ), worked for three months with help from SL resident Media Hax to create a series of interactive exhibits that will be featured on the NMC’s special Second Life arts showcase island, Ars Simulacra http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ars%20Simulacra/46/88/37/
“The experience is compelling. And while the background technology is complex, visitors to the exhibit can easily engage with the art,” Fillwalk said.
Visitors to the island can interact with exhibits, which incorporate video, sound and still photos, via their avatars. One exhibit features a live connection to Flickr, a photo sharing Web site. Individual visitors can choose the subject matter and customize their viewing experience.
On entering the exhibit, the panels are blank, but throb with some pulsating ambient sounds.
By touching the device in the middle, your avatar is prompted to enter a ketword via chat that is used to search flickr for images. Is there any surprise that I tried a search on “dog”- the images are fetched and begin to appear on the panes surrounding you, and they alternate without a clear pattern, creating a search result you are immersed in.
Fillwalk says this collection of interactive virtual art showcases and expands upon IDIAA’s expertise in building virtual reality applications for simulation, and visualization environments.
“We’re positioning the business profile of IDIAA to work with external clients to build significant research, well as showcase Ball State’s emerging media prowess,” he said.
Where does that link come from? I pondered. Obviously, the last part is some sort of asset ID, like each avatar has the equivalent of a texture’s database ID. I poked around URLs at world.secondlife.com many of which return XML data, and my hunch is the search engine that you use in world is XML based.
So I went in to Second Life, poked around my profile, all of the bizarre advanced settings looking for this magical string that might identify CDB Barkley via URL.
I found it! If you use the general search tool in the Second Life client for your avatar, you get a list of results:
Clicking the second link, yields a screen that looks pretty much like the web link for Debbie’s profile:
But how do you get its URL? I went back to the search results, and could find no right/ctrl combination that a web browser yields to copy the URL for a link. Then I went back to me in world profile display, and way at the bottom is “Link to this page: http://world.secondlife.com/resident/fef1d79b-4162-476d-b8e2-45ab8662d3e8″
That’s it!
But what a minute. No amount of mouse selection, keyboard commands allows me to copy that long URL! WTF??
The only way I could get the URL for my profile was to write it down on a piece of paper! That is not even Web 1.0, that is Web -1.0!
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) August 21st, 2008
If you have not caught the summer performances of the CARP’s (Cybernetic Art Research Project) production of The Wall V-2 (Second Life performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall), this is your last chance to catch the show. Playing for the last few weeks at NMC Campus West, the show has been performed 28 times to more than 2000 avatars.
The LAST-EVER presentations of this unique, groundbreaking and immensely popular SL show will be this week; Friday August 22 and Sunday August 24, both shows at at 2:00 PM SLT/PDT. Access to the venue is via: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Campus%20West/127/47/612/
Interest is high, so please arrive early! Arriving early will also allow the Texture Pre-Loaders to send all the data to your cache before the show starts. This is a live artistic performance by a team of SL/RL artists, using the very best and sophisticated of SL’s technology to bring you a unique interpretation and vision of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’.
The CARP Wall Team:
Creative Director: Debbie Trilling (UK)
Producer: Velazquez Bonetto (Germany)
Wall Design: Elfod Nemeth (UK)
Animated Puppets: Duggy Bing (US)
Animations: Caravaggio Bonetto (Austria)
Original Music: Junivers Stockholm (Sweden) & Josina Burgess (Holland)
and, of course, Pink Floyd’s incredible album ‘The Wall’.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
Please note that facelights and all other prim lighting are strictly prohibited from the venue. Please detach all such prim lighting systems before arriving. If you are unsure, please use ‘Advanced | Rendering | Info Displays | Light’ to check. This will cause all sources of prim lighting in your vicinity to be surrounded by a yellow bounding box. Please be aware that facelights and other sources of prim lighting will not only ruin the show for the wearer, but also for everybody else within up to 20 meters of the wearer.
Please enable ‘Nearby Local Lights’, particles to a minimum of 4096 (but preferably to 8192), sun to midnight, turn volume to HIGH!
For press release photographs or any further information, please IM Debbie Trilling
Image Metrics, a company that specializes in realistic facial animations (they also do the animations in Grand Theft Auto), have notched up the realism of computer generated characters. Emily started with a video of an employee just talking:
then recreated the gestures, movement by movement, in a model. The aim was to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical.
“Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real,” Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer of Image Metrics, said.
“The subtlety of the timing of eye movements is a big one. People also have a natural asymmetry - for instance, in the muscles in the side of their face. Those types of imperfections aren’t that significant but they are what makes people look real.”
Watch Emily- is she real? She’s even got attitude The last frames peel away the valley. This is pretty amazing!
I was in San Francisco this past weekend for WordCamp and for a Sunday stroll just wandered aimlessly along the Embarcadero and then back down Battery Street. I passed this almost non-descript brick building and almost missed the familiar hand logo, rather strange to see it on a real building.
No one was around, the lights were off, but yes, here is the real Linden Lab. The have real real estate!
Greetings students, faculty and friends!
On August 19th, 2008 the Academic Outreach department will be hosting our first Second Life Open House from 9:00am – 4:00pm! Come join us on our virtual campus where you can experience East Carolina University in a new way.
For the educators, now is your chance to meet [...]
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) August 12th, 2008
Yesterday we took the massive audio equipment for NMC Studio One (that is a joke, we just use voice chat and WireTap Studio Pro) over to NMC Orientation to talk to Robins Hermano, who we learned is akin to the circus daredevils, by planning this fall to bring 700 of his accounting students into Second Life.
What caught our attentions was when he mentioned he was planning to bring more than 700 students through the registrations system for his upcoming fall semester accounting course — this is a basic required course in the UCF Business College.
In our recorded conversation (see below), Robins describes the ranges of ways he uses Second Life, with basic content like access to class content/recorded lectures and onto some custom interactive activities where students must manipulate a data modeler. He also shares some of his strategies for using Second Life with a large number of students (revolving around asynchronous design).
The last frames peel away the valley. This is pretty amazing!
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