When I first arrived in Second Life I was immediately thrown off by the physical world elements in the Metaverse such as gravity, wind, land, water, and TREES! When designing the IML Island one of the first ideas was to avoid such physical world elements and to explore the possibilities of a Virtual World. One Island though has created a very interesting space with all of these physical elements.
Converseon's Second Chance Trees Reforestation Project
This space lets you buy a Virtual Tree (you even have a selection to choose from) that represents one real life tree in the RainForest for only 300$L (about $1.50). Not only that but they have a space on the Island where you can plant them too. However, this is not actually representative of where the tree will be planted. For Urban and Virtual settings that have few plants this is a great way of being able to participate in helping the Environment.
Shopping in Second Life for Real Trees
My Tree
Prim Roots Planted
This overhead shot shows the success that this Sim has had
I had my first meeting with the 'Real Life Educators in SL' group and it was a great experience. The meeting filled up quickly and there was no real agenda. Various threads in conversation opened up and one topic that caught most of the avatars attention was 'what is appropriate dress?' for both RLstudents and for their avatars. Most agreed that naked is inappropriate, but everything else is creative and up for discussion.
During this meeting I revealed the project titled THE CONCH. One of the things I find hinders most people from using SL, aside from the name, is the interface. Even most people I know who navigate Web 2.0 tools with ease are still confused once you add depth and flying into their World. My original idea was sparked by recent obsession with the Harry Potter books and how I had been programming a wand to react to voice commands. I wondered if some things that educators do (blog, teleporting, email, etc) could benefit from a device that also works on voice commands. The object could be anything you want it's just the code attached to it that matters. A prototype is being developed that hopefully will have several functions and will be available on IML Island. This is an object that will be like any other open source project out there and will be FREE and a system in place for version updates and distribution.
bzzzzrp... Readers of Gibson and Stephenson took the idea of seeing Data in 3D environments and ran with it in Second Life. I am fascinated with being able to see information from different perspectives. Best to let the examples show.
Even something as simple as changing my usual normal view of the SL experience to wireframe helps me find lost prims or invisible objects.
This doesn't pull information from a Database, but is very handing in looking at how an entire building is organized. Each of the areas can be clicked to pull up more information about each floor.
ChatBots. Data with a human face. This was also on the Data Visualization Island. It is connected to a database that controls and avatars responses. Second Life has been called "avatarcentric"... does this change that statement now that it cannot be assumed any longer that avatars are controlled by a person?
One of the projects that has recently been started by the IML is an open source educators tools. The visualization below shows how another piece of open source software has been contributed to over time. It's quite stunning.
