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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.

(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)

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!

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming.

Now fully operational, the NMC Campus has been carefully constructed to provide researchers and students dozens of prebuilt settings for experiments in social interaction in 3-D space. Expressly designed to encourage explorations both formal and informal, traditional and nontraditional, real and surreal, and serious and playlike, the spaces are flexible and will lend themselves to additional uses, yet to be defined. The campus has a variety of places for these interactions, from the serious to the fanciful, each designed to support an optimal group size; these range from 2 to more than 75. The campus also supports a wide variety of traditional media, including posters, PowerPoint slides, photographs, charts/graphs, videos, and weblinks, and these resources continue to be added on a regular basis as a core component of the project. All of these resources are available to NMC members who may wish to bring classes to the campus for a visit, as part of a research project, or for a full term. Complete details on using the campus are available on the NMC Campus wiki. Also available is the complete Second Life toolset of sophisticated building tools and the LSL scripting language, with which all of the NMC Campus and Second Life has been created. These allow the creation of virtually any simulated situation, process, or environment, and the incorporation of sophisticated interactivity. For the latest information on the project, see the main pages in this blog,

[SLED] Grad Colony - Demo Sloodle Web interfaceParticipantsBlogs Page:  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  (Next)Add a new entryBlog from the top of the libraryby Grant Potter - Friday, 20 April 2007, 11:40 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: SJSU SLIS Hello again. Live from the top of the San Jose Library...by Grant Potter - Friday, 20 April 2007, 11:06 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: SJSU SLIS Sitting on the edge of the prim... Top of the world!by Grant Potter - Friday, 20 April 2007, 10:46 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: SJSU SLIS Sitting on a prim on the top of the library. Blog Post #1 - Posting from SLby Grant Potter - Friday, 20 April 2007, 10:44 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: SJSU SLIS Here I am on top of the San Jose Library sitting on a prim. Posting with the 2 in 1 Toolbar...very handy!by Grant Potter - Thursday, 19 April 2007, 10:26 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: Campus I dropped the HUD to the ground and resized it. I put it back in my inventory and attached it to the center of my HUD. Works (and looks) great now that is it larger. Testingby Kip Yellowjacket - Monday, 16 April 2007, 08:28 AM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: Hyperborea asfdjasldjlasjdlajsdlasldjasldjlasdjlaösjdlöasjdlas Greetings from Sloodlevilleby Clark Shah-Nelson - Thursday, 29 March 2007, 07:14 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: Hyperborea Testing the Sloodle Toolbar from Hyperborea, 56, 179, 22 Sloodleville! 12 Sloodle Toolbars have been served. I can't quite figure out what to do with the Sloodle Box... Clark Sakai signing out. Blog 2by Clark Shah-Nelson - Thursday, 29 March 2007, 07:08 PM Anyone on this sitePosted from Second Life: Hyperborea

Are you or someone you know looking for a low-cost way to get started in virtual worlds — or Second Life in particular? As of today, the New Media Consortium (NMC) is offering land parcels in Second Life that are part of three unique custom-designed educational communities. These parcels are available now for lease exclusively to bona fide faculty, educational departments, or learning-focused institutions. The new sim NMC Campus, “Teaching”

The land is full-permissions, and can be used for almost any purpose consistent with research or teaching in Second Life. The parcels come in sizes from 1024 sq m to 8192 sq m. Costs are roughly 10 US cents per sq meter per year. This works out to $100 US per year for the smallest plot (32 x 32; 1024 sq m; 235 prims) and $800 per year for the largest (64 x 128; 8192 sq m; 1875 prims). There are no hidden or additional costs. Common area on the new sim NMC Campus, “Teaching 2″

Each educational community has a beautiful central area which has a number of spaces that all the residents on the island can share — these include a multi-media amphitheater, a conference room, a large classroom or other meeting space, a gallery suitable for exhibiting student work, and a resource center that has been stocked by the folks who run the highly regarded ICT Library in Second Life. Scene on NMC new sim available for lease, “Teaching 3″

n January 2007, Eslteacherlink.com constructed English Village,  an immersive 3D simulation for language learners and teachers across the globe!  At English Village teachers meet students in REAL TIME, using an avatar, Virtual white boards, VOICE, 3D objects, and role playable holodecks to provide 21st century learning.

Futuristic, yet Practical Instead of keeping our island flat, and having the majority of our buildings  on the ground level, we have situated 13 glass classrooms along a 120 meter high, horse-shoe shaped mountain ridge. Below the steep mountain ridges, lies a welcoming sandy beach that reaches out into a c resent moon shaped bay area. This large open space is used frequently by our teachers for special learning activities, such as market place and carnival role play scenarios.

The Onion Our meeting area is in the shape of an Onion, and is constructed of 100% virtual pink stained glass.  We actually never planned to use a giant onion as our central meeting area... but it actually does a great job of representing  the organic nature of our island ~ We build. We make mistakes. We learn.... and sometimes we cry!  So.. an onion - is perfect. Everyone begins in the onion. When an avatar teleports to our island for the first time, thats where they land - smack dab in the center beautiful pink wonder.  Around the edges of the onion are several multi colored hamster tubes sprouting out - connecting to each holodeck classroom. Inside the hamster tubes are convenient People Movers - you know, the ones you see at the airport.  Here, avatars just click on the red loading ball, and they are instantly moved along the pathway 100 meters to their destination.  This saves virtual transport time.

Collective Tagging of Places in the Multi-user Virtual Environment of Second Life

Life is a multi-user virtual environment, i.e., a world made up of virtual places and avatars that move among and interact in those places. Thirty-one users of Second Life were surveyed about one place in which they are members: Terra’s Nude Heaven, a virtual nude beach. The purpose of the survey was to determine what types of terms users would select if they could tag a particular place and how these terms correspond to the tags actually assigned by the owners of the place. The questionnaire data was also analyzed for difference in tag selection by gender, educational level, age, and country of residence. The data indicate that keywords rated as most important by the users of a place differ considerably from the keywords selected by the owner of a place. The data, moreover, demonstrate that the choices of the study population remain consistent across groupings by gender, educational level,age or country of residence.

How do I add a mark to a trail? Create a new mark and give it the name of an existing trail, and it will automatically be added to the end of the trail.

How do I create a trail? Create two marks with the same trail name, and they'll automatically be linked together.

Who can see my trails? When you first get install the browser extension trails you create will be visible to all users.

The autoplay system that I produce has just been upgraded in the light of some feedback. To the existing system I have added two features: Access control - determine who can touch the player and start it running. It defaults to all, but can be set to group only or owner only Pause controls - you can either pause indefinitely or for a fixed time. Either pause can be overridden by an authorised person touching the display

Because the old system is copy, no transfer I can only upgrade if you catch me online at a convenient time (i.e. not when I'm teaching or otherwise occupied) and I can come and see your system. Once I've seen that, I will happily replace it with the new system. If you want to buy this new, it is for sale in all the usual places (in my picks), and via XStreetSL and Apez - you can find links at my products index page.

My contention is simple - when we're in Second Life to work, we can use the same techniques we use in first life to focus on the task at hand rather than that gorgeous avatar. If we want, later, to consensually jump that avatar's virtual bones (to be deliberately somewhat crude) and they are interested too, then just like flirting in the office, we can run off together and do this. However, if we're in a space that forbids this - Lively I'm remembering you here, but not only you - there is that allure of the forbidden, the censored, the naughty. People can, and will, work around the limitations in some quite amazingly inventive ways. Knowing it's not forbidden lets us (as a group) apply that energy and creativity to the task at hand when we're working, and apply it to the avatar at hand when we're not - in much the same way we learn how to do as adults.

The obvious corollary to this: if we ban sex from Second Life (which isn't the same as the current proposals about the adult continent) we switch back to a situation more like Lively where the allure of the forbidden becomes stronger. Creativity, learning and the like go down, and how long would it be until Second Life follows Lively into closure?

There are a range of other things too. The sex market in Second Life contains a huge amount of innovation - if people want to do sex, people will find ways to let them and support them. Whilst not every tool to support avatar sex turns into a tool to support education or business in Second Life, quite a lot (not all, but quite a lot) of the tools that you find used in education and business settings in Second Life, have their origins in the sex industry. Even when they're duplicating tools that are used in RL education/business settings, the code in Second Life is often explored and refined in the sex industry in Second Life first.