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Eloise Pasteur

Comments On Proving the Potential of Virtual Worlds ~ Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes - 0 views

www.downes.ca/...page.cgi

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 04 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Eloise Pasteur on 04 Jul 08
     
    Comments
Eloise Pasteur

Second Life offers healing, therapeutic options for users - 0 views

www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi

healing second life support therapy

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 13 Jul 08 - Cached
  • poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I'd created to engage here - I was participating in an "anxiety support group" in the free, virtual world of Second Life.
  • As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!
  • No wonder analysts at Gartner, a leading technology research company, predict that three years from now 8 in 10 Internet users will work or play in virtual spaces.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • more attention to elaborate hairdos than Cher in her heyday
  • It has, in short, all the trauma and pain of real life, and some cautions are in order when it comes to seeking psychological support.
  • But maybe because it's a dream realm, hopefulness abounds. Nowhere is that truer than in Second Life's support groups, which help people cope with everything from cancer, depression, bipolar disorder and autism, to caretaker stress. There are more than 70 such groups, according to Second Life's Health Support Coalition. Most are secular. While a few groups are facilitated by associations such as the American Cancer Society, peers run most.
  • As expressed on the Web site, www.supportforhealing.com, associated with Second Life's Support for Healing Island, "we are NOT and never will replace the help of professionals ... but purely hold a safe place for people to come when they need a shoulder."
  • A year ago, before I had explored Second Life, I would have laughed at the idea of virtual shoulders. How can a person possibly be "real" via an avatar anyway - much less have a meaningful conversation with a puppy dog, barmaid, elf, or wilder avatar appearance such as a blob or a tree? It's hard enough to trust someone in real life, much less "second life." Then again, what better place to connect our yearning selves with other yearning selves than in a space of mutual creation - a place where those very selves can be one's unconscious made manifest? Indeed, avatar, in its original Sanskrit, refers to the descent of the soul in human form. Click, clack: When I rose from my hourlong anxiety group meeting, I felt seen and heard in the deepest part of me - more so, in fact, than in some "real life" interactions, where we often put up fronts.
  • The anonymity of Second Life can make all the difference in opening up to share within a support group. Somewhere in small-town America, a wife and mother of about 40 - she could be your neighbor or relative - suffers from serious depression. She loves animals, so within Second Life, as Fionella Flanagan, she's a big gray dog with a shaggy white mane. She attends the depression support group. Why does she do it? "I don't have to worry about what I say in the group coming back to bite me in my home town."
  • She also suffers from fibromyalgia, one of those crippling, invisible diseases that some doctors say is "all in your head." In Second Life, Fionella doesn't "have to overcome real life prejudice when I say I'm sick. There's none of that, 'but you look so good' junk."
  • When anxiety support group avatars were asked whether they were more honest as avatars than in real life, a wild-haired blonde, Galvana Gustafson (in real life an American, dancer and bassoonist with a master's degree in psychotherapy), put it this way: "My avatar is more honest than myself because the rejection won't hurt as much."
  • "All of Second Life is my support group," she reported.
  • Morgana later discovered the Support for Healing Island "because I was going through a major relapse with my bipolar and needed help from people who understood. I personally like to be in groups that are survivors, sufferers, and caretakers and loved ones, supporting one another. The best help and advice I have ever gotten are from people who have experienced firsthand."
  • People with autism or Asperger's especially seem to appreciate Second Life.
  • Researchers of autism use Second Life as a laboratory and tool. At the in-world SL-Labs and Teaching and Research facility, at the University of Derby in England, Simon Bignell, a lecturer in psychology, studies how Second Life can "enhance first life social-communication skills in people" with autistic spectrum disorders. The Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas, Dallas, offers a therapy in Second Life for people with Asperger's that helps them practice interviewing for jobs.
  • Second Life's Health Support Coalition (a collaboration between Soj, the avatar Gentle Heron and Carolina Keats, who in real life is a medical librarian) has won a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to create an Ability Commons, for 40-plus smaller health and support groups. "Imagine a paralyzed 23-year-old lying in his family's back bedroom," the coalition wrote, "yearning for contact with age peers in similar situations. Second Life offers people with serious physical and cognitive disabilities opportunities to socialize and get information."
  • opens each meeting with disclaimers: "Please do not let these meetings take the place of professional help," he typed to us.
  • One in-world psychologist, Dr. Craig Kerley from Georgia, who was profiled on CBS's "Early Show," has hung his shingle for "cybertherapy" at $90 per hour. This work, he says, "can be valuable for those who have limited choices in their geographical region, have limited time to drive to regular in-person appointments, have limited mobility, and have limitations in their lifestyle that make traveling to a brick and mortar office difficult."
  • Still, Dr. Peter Yellowlees, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UC Davis and a specialist in virtual worlds, cautions about therapy in Second Life, even with professionals. He advises using it only as "a potential adjunct to face-to-face therapy," and to "use passwords or other cues in Second Life to make sure you're talking to the right person" - the real therapist, not scammers posing as one.
  • Yellowlees uses Second Life as a teaching tool, not for therapy. His Virtual Hallucinations sim gives "the lived experience of schizophrenia - to hear voices and see visions" so his students (and the rest of us) can "get inside the head, just a bit, of someone who's psychotic." It certainly sparked empathy in me, much more richly than a mere clinical description of the disorder would have done.
  • Empathy: There's that word again, an odd one to associate with impersonal bytes and modems, but the right one. Second Life is a hot, humming thing of wire and light, a "server" - spiritual teachers would like the metaphor - that can carry community and genuine human sympathy.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 13 Jul 08
     
    Personal anecdote of seeking support in Second Life. It is written by a journalist and addresses a lot of the issues from several sides - including advice from various mental health practitioners and comments from volunteers as well as some real insight into the world of SL and relating it to the public.
Eloise Pasteur

Students vs Second Life : The Metaverse Journal - Australia's Virtual World News Service - 0 views

www.metaversejournal.com/...students-vs-second-life

education generation generation-x life second y

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 23 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Eloise Pasteur on 23 Aug 08
     
    Article suggesting Gen X has made SL unwelcoming for Gen Y and this might be a problem for students. I've commented to say I don't think the analysis holds water mind.
Nergiz Kern

YouTube - Introducing a new Google Docs - 2 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Googeldocs realtime collaboration secondlife

shared by Nergiz Kern on 13 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Nergiz Kern on 13 Apr 10
     
    YouTube - Introducing a new Google Docs Real-time editing of documents including drawings; comment function
Eloise Pasteur

SL Bloggers Mix and Match - Making 'em stay - 0 views

www.brandaluna.net/...s-mix-and-match-making-em-stay

Second Life new-user-experience male

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 17 Nov 08 - Cached
  • this post is her detailed look at keeping new male residents engaged in SL
  • Right, where was I? Oh yeah, the learning curve. I’m supposed to be telling you about “The lack of encouragement for new male residents to stay in Second Life”, but since I’m, err, female — does a quick check, right, okay, definitely female — I decided to conduct an Extremely Unscientific Survey among male residents to see what they had to say. 16 male residents responded, and the general consensus is that… [drum roll] … friends are generally the greatest form of encouragement for new male residents to stay in SL. “I came and went my first year. I hung around when I finally started making some friends and started going places and doing things with them,” says Dyami Jameson.
  • “I think men in Second Life are more motivated by ‘goals’ and scoring systems, which makes SL less attractive to them than women, who are more attracted to the social aspect of the metaverse,” comments Prad Prathivi. “Guys are naturally competitive and aim to lead the pack, which is harder and less obvious to achieve in SL.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Peter Stindberg explains it this way: “Males want challenges, tasks and goals — all this is not apparent in SL. You need to find your own purpose in SL, make your own goals, find your own tasks. This makes SL less attractive compared to a kill-all-enemies-grab-all-gold type of game.” He suggests converting orientation stations into games which might offer a reward, perhaps a small amount of L$ or some sort of avatar clothing or equipment. “It’s a stereotype, but give each new male resident a fishing rod and a shotgun, fill the Linden seas with fish and the forests with deer, reward each trophy with L$1 or status points or gadgets, and the crucial first days and weeks will pass more easily,” adds Peter.
  • Male fashion blogs have blossomed, among them Winter Jefferson’s blog, In Cold Blood; Lawless McBride’s blog, Half Arsed; Takeshi Ugajin’s blog, Shop with Takeshi; Lustinian Tomsen’s blog, Second Life Male Style and Fashion; Monta Horan’s blog, Monta; and Oscar Page’s blog, Oscaresque. Of course, one can’t leave out the collaborative blogs Men’s Second Style and SL Men, and now there are even two blogs covering male-related freebies: Free Finds for Men and Free for Men.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 17 Nov 08
     
    Thoughts on keeping men in SL
Eloise Pasteur

It's Lively in the virtual sea » VTOR - Virtual TO Reality - 0 views

www.vtoreality.com/...1731

comment lively opinion second life

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Update 11:11am PST: Lestat figured this out and shared. You just double-click on the seat cushion to sit in the chairs
  • In its current state, Lively is like IRC in 3D. You can meet your friends in a room and chat with bubbles over your head. I’ve seen many attempts to do this type of thing over the years but the only one that comes to mind as being a big success is Habbo Hotel.
  • When there is an ability to actually create something original objects (can’t do yet), stream audio and video (can’t do yet), interact with objects (how can you do this?),
  • Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
     
    Yet more on Lively
Eloise Pasteur

Look Lively! - Massively - 0 views

www.massively.com/...look-lively

comment lively massively opinion second life tateru nino

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08 - Cached
  • The Massively crew has spent a little more time hammering away at Google's new virtual artifice, Lively. By now, you've probably seen all sorts of news reports calling it a rival and competitor to Linden Lab's virtual world, Second Life. Technically, that's what we call bollocks
  • Describing Lively as a rival to Second Life is like calling a conference center a rival to a library. They're just not servicing the same needs, and the comparison is fundamentally nonsensical. Lively is tightly focused, and fails to intrude on the bulk of virtual worlds space.
  • Movement is accomplished by double-clicking on a spot to teleport your avatar there, or clicking and dragging the avatar with the left mouse button to walk your avatar. Don't try to drag your avatar past the border of the camera view without repositioning your camera first, or you will get unsettling jumps and find your avatar in strange places.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Lively keeps things simple and does those simple things well. The television in our sample room is playing the trailer for Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. A few clicks is all that is required to link a YouTube video to a television object -- but as far as we know, no other embedded video formats are supported.
  • All content that is currently in Lively is made by Google-approved developers, and is presently free -- though it looks very much like the majority of content in Lively will be pay-for before long.
  • If you want to interact with an object (sitting down, for example), single left click on the object. If you want to play an animation, single left click on your avatar, and select an item from the animations tab (different lists of animations are available depending on whether you are sitting or standing). And ... that's actually about it. Lively is simple, and straightforward, and focuses on doing one thing well: The furnishable 3D chatroom. It can be embedded on a webpage and your avatar can be in multiple rooms at once via different browser windows or tabs. If you've got a group of up to 20 people (who all have Google accounts and are running Windows), and want to share a Youtube video or sit around and shoot the breeze in a lightweight space, and having your own content isn't for you, then Lively is for you.
  • But a rival to Second Life? No more so than corn syrup is a rival for sea salt.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
     
    More on Lively, from the Massively crew
Eloise Pasteur

Gwyn's Home » Not So Lively: Chronicles of Day One on Google's Virtual World - 0 views

gwynethllewelyn.net/...y-one-on-googles-virtual-world

analysis comment gwyneth llewlyn lively second life

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08 - Cached
  • (no new virtual world supports the Mac these days, in spite of the “promises” done to “support it soon” — with “only” 8% of market share and growing, the Mac is simply not interesting for developers to focus on)
    • Eloise Pasteur
      Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
       
      Not true, Small Worlds does
  • Being — like all Google products! — a Beta version, there are perhaps 40 or 50 available options (not the “millions” announced by Google reps) and they can be somewhat configured, but the choices are confusing and very, very limited.
  • “Linden Lab” room a close second. Figuring out that here I would already find a few familiar faces from Second Life®, I went for that one. The choice was certainly correct — Dusan Writer, Grace McDunnough, Jurin Juran, and likely a few others (sometimes it’s not easy to figure out who’s who!) were around in the room, testing the cumbersome interface. And cumbersome it is!
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Then again, it looked like most of the crowd was complaining about the excruciatingly painful lag.
  • Combine that with a confusing little interface and it was clearly anything but a “fun” experience. And remember that we were all cheating. Everybody on the “Linden Lab” room at that time was a veteran Second Life resident; we’re not exactly newbies with virtual worlds. We have tried several, and in some cases, use different VWs regularly and every day. We’re used to lag, to semi-functional software, to application crashes (several people crashed during the few hours I was online), to things not loading, to silly mistakes that everybody does. We’re also used to the insanely complex (but virtually rich) interface of Second Life, and use computers and their complex applications to accomplish tasks every day. And, of course, we all are very open minded and eager to try new things out.
  • Lively was anything but Lively — except for the fact that you were in a visually unappealing chatroom with a lot of friends or at least acquaintances from one’s journey across the Metaverse. Like I usually say, most virtual worlds I’ve tried only capture my attention for about 15 minutes, and it’s up to the developers to make sure that I enjoy the first 15 minutes
  • The “cartoonish” look (which is so great for rendering things quickly) is also something that baffles me. I can’t believe that Google is targeting the teen population.
  • After all, Mike Elgan from ComputerWorld claims: What that means is that companies will be able to re-create their office and meeting space, and events companies can create or re-create entire conferencing facilities. Your avatar can wander around, see the “booths,” check out the conferences or interface with other “attendees” — all in virtual space.  Really, Mike?… They might do that, but definitely not on Lively.
  • Even a MoU representative (who, as said, did create a room for a client in Lively already) considers that opinion an “interesting hypothesis”. Put into other words, not even MoU seriously believes that article, and it’s just one of a series — which, if I didn’t know the reputation of the magazines writing them, I’d just believe they were infodumps straight out of Google’s marketing department. The claims are just ludicrous.
  • If Google has more plans for Lively, they’re not telling — and instead are offering a terrible product, way below their usual offerings.
  • So why are people so enthusiastic about Google Lively? I have only one explanation: it has the brand “Google” behind it.
  • As a 3D-chatroom-embedded-on-the-web, it falls behind almost every other product and application I have tried in the past 4 years, no matter where you wish to find something good. The animations are goofy and cartoonish, to the point of extreme irritability.
  • The interface is not obvious, but then again, SL suffers from the same problem, and it’s just a question of getting used to it.
  • There is no content creation at all; no way to integrate it with anything; no programming/scripting; no chat tools (even GTalk, known to have the least features just after SL’s chat system, has far more!).
  • And, more important: no support, a terrible forum system (I can’t answer on half the threads), no helpful people around… if you bump into a Google Developer, they’re very likely very friendly (or so everybody who met them claims), but that’s all you get.
  • Google’s webpage for Lively is even more minimalistic than anything else they’ve launched before
  • And there is nothing on the Google developers’ sites either.
  • Searching for the “most popular” rooms leads to the inevitable: the most rated one was a dance club (since you can stream music) and on the top ten list you had a lot of sex-related rooms as well.
  • This was a terrible disappointment. I admit to being very naive. I was expecting something with at least the quality of Vivaty which at least has pretty decent avatars
  • but using SketchUp to import at least crude models. Even importing plywood cubes would be nice! Instead, we have to rely on the “Catalog”, created by a limited group of Google developers.
  • Some SL residents managed to talk to the Google Developers, and these said that there was a 3D Max plugin to allow the creation of content into Lively. The plugin works 90% of the time but it can only improve. There is no idea or plan or announcement on if that plugin will be released to the public.
  • Google is known to be “the company that does no evil”. But looking from my point of view — an enthusiast of the 3D Social Web — I feel cheated. We were doing great in opening the minds to millions of users to look at the Metaverse as Second Life defines it as the next human-machine interface for all our tasks. Granted, we all know it’ll take ages — another decade at least — but we all are here for the long term. Instead, what we get from one of the industry giants is that “3D is bad, embedding cartoons on Web pages is good”. Why? Well, it should be obvious. Google is the market leader in (2D) web search content — both text and images (and soon video). While there is an HTML-based World-Wide Web, Google will be a major player in it — always.
  • I don’t think there are coincidences. In about 24 hours (not in the same day for the timezone-impaired), Sun’s Wonderland gets slashdotted, Linden Lab announces the massive growth of Second Life and demonstrates the interoperability between their main grid and IBM’s OpenSim-based grid, and Google launches their own virtual world, Lively. July 8th was definitely the Day of the Metaverse!
  • So, like probably billions of people around the world, I tried to join in to Lively and see what’s all about. Not to be turned down by the lack of Mac support
  • Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
     
    More on Lively. Google is missing the mark
Eloise Pasteur

Reuters/Second Life » Google launches virtual experience web-site - 0 views

secondlife.reuters.com/...es-virtual-experience-web-site

comment lively second life

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Google on Tuesday launched a three-dimensional virtual experience website, similar to the popular virtual world Second Life.
    • Eloise Pasteur
      Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
       
      Really?!
  • “If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator’s interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose,” Niniane Wang, engineering manager, who oversaw Lively’s creation, said on Google’s official blog. Lively also allows for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside the rooms, Wang said.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
     
    Reuters take on Lively
Eloise Pasteur

Google Launches Virtual World Called Lively - 0 views

www.techcrunch.com/...es-virtual-world-called-lively

comment lively opinion second life

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
     
    A really short bit on Lively, and one of the few positives I've read
Eloise Pasteur

Proving the Potential of Virtual Worlds ~ Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes - 0 views

www.downes.ca/...page.cgi

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 04 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Eloise Pasteur on 04 Jul 08
     
    A rather one-sided view of the "evils" of Second Life, with some rather strong comments (I'm one of the anonymice).
  • Eloise Pasteur on 04 Jul 08
     
    A one-sided view of SL
Dr. Fridemar Pache

SLEDucating » SecondLife Blogging Script - 0 views

www.sleducating.com/...secondlife-blogging-script

blogging opensource script sl

shared by Dr. Fridemar Pache on 20 Mar 07 - Cached
  • Dr. Fridemar Pache on 20 Mar 07
     
    SecondLife Blogging Script Writing by admin on Tuesday, 20 of March , 2007 at 1:42 pm Lots of people have been asking for a blogging solution, a way of being able to blog from "in-world" either a text or notecard directly to their personal blog. The following two scripts when placed in a prim will do exactly that. You can change the subject title, the blog address, the email, and choose between blogging the text chat, or a notecard. You call this script "blogger". The basic premise is that the script sends an e-mail, so you need your blog software set up to process an email, which is fairly simple on most blog apps. // This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    // it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    // the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.
    //
    // This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    // but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    // MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
    // GNU General Public License for more details. // Written by Gypsy Paz
    // Version Beta 0.3 string blog_email;
    string blog_url = "http://blogger.com";
    string blog_msg = "Visit my Blog";
    string blog_subj = "Post from SecondLife";
    integer isadmin;
    integer on = FALSE; string dcapt;
    list dbutt;
    integer dchan;
    key duser = NULL_KEY; integer i; integer dlistener;
    bluemenu(){
    llDialog(duser,dcapt,dbutt,dchan);
    dlistener = llListen(dchan,"",duser,"");
    llSetTimerEvent(60);
    } integer clistener;
    string listenfor; unlisten(){
    llListenRemove(dlistener);
    llListenRemove(clistener);
    listenfor = "";<
  • Dr. Fridemar Pache on 20 Mar 07
     
    The reason for copying this freeware is:

     for commenting it inside the diigo annotation system, because the Blog-Page might change , so that this valuable code might be buried inside the blog.

Noreen Strehlow

Exploring Diigo Secondlife Mashup - 73 views

I just have to agree that creating a 3D model of a cell is a great idea and have been working on other types of building assignments along those same lines. If anyone remembers the Edible Cell Cont...

diigo education mashups secondlife

started by Ole C Brudvik on 22 Apr 07 1 follow-up, last by Noreen Strehlow on 07 May 08
Dr. Fridemar Pache

Technology - Mash into SL - 58 views

Welcome Abbath, I am interested too, how to bridge the two systems. From the Web into SL there is an easy way to make connections. Leave in some wiki or other page, where you have write access, ...

mash technology

started by Ole C Brudvik on 20 Apr 07 6 follow-ups, last by Dr. Fridemar Pache on 24 May 07
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