Showtime!

Object-Name: Blogger Tool
Region: IML (292864, 296448)
Local-Position: (118, 115, 53)

ShowTime!!

This was an exciting semester for the IML. The Honors Program had it's first round of students graduate and the buzz around the building has never been higher and the IML Second Life Island has also seen a lot of activity as well. Two Honors Students, Matt Lee and Cameron Parkins, created their projects in Second Life. Matt Lee has made a recreation of the Tempest and Cameron Parkins discusses Digital Utopianism and Cultural Imperialism in Second Life. Please come check them out on IML Island:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/IML/128/128/52

The Tempest



Digital Utopianism and Cultural Imperialism in Second Life

sending links from Second Life Blogger tool

Object-Name: Blogger Tool
Region: IML (292864, 296448)
Local-Position: (118, 115, 53)

http://slurl.com/secondlife/EdTech/109/135/24

kawaiietlyplease Yohkoh

This is Test for sending a blog post within Second Life.

Object-Name: Blogger Tool
Region: IML (292864, 296448)
Local-Position: (119, 115, 51)

This only allows for 60 seconds of type time. But I found this tool on the EdTech Island for Free. It allows me to type from within Second Life straight to Blogger. Fantastic.

kawaiietlyplease Yohkoh

This is Test for sending a blog post within Second Life.

Object-Name: Blogger Tool
Region: IML (292864, 296448)
Local-Position: (119, 115, 51)

test test test!!!

Virtual Shop Class - This is not a Chair

The IML 104 class is exploring Virtual Worlds this Semester and the past two weeks we've been exploring Second Life. The last class was dedicated to introducing the Honors students to building in Second Life which is unique compared to most Virtual Worlds where the environment is rigidly controlled by the Organizations that run them. Second Life has many places to Learn to build the most popular being the Ivory Tower of Primitive, which leads you through the many steps of learning to build, but these areas can be overwhelming to the new Avatar so I decided to make an extremely condensed crash course introduction to 3D modeling in SL. And as it turns out making a chair puts all of the basic skills into one neat little usable object. The Class learned how to create an object, copy, modify, Link, Texture, and add the Sit Script to it. At the end of the class we all Sat near each other and repositioned them to 500 meters above (something you can't do usually) and looked at the region below. Students were than asked to Share this 3D object with each other and to modify them over the weekend. In 90 minutes students with very little experience in SL and most having never created a 3D object before were able to create make not only a useful virtual item, but one that was personalized as well.

Color by Numbers

There are many different ways to navigate spaces in SL from walking to flying to teleporting and with all of these large spaces sometimes it can get overwhelming and disorientating. Some people like to use maps, but I personally do not want to have an extra window open as I find the SL interface cramped as it is, so I (described in an earlier post) put all of the text/ures on the IML region facing one direction. Unfortunately this led to issues when trying to fly quickly across the campus as most can't read and fly very well. What I wanted was the SPACE itself to communicate to the user WHERE they were located. All of the regions in SL have coordinates Zero to 255 for coordinates X, Y, Z.. just like the color code Zero to 255 for R,G,B...SO... I jumped into the Linden Scripting Language to write my first piece of code and so far it seems to have worked very well. It takes the objects coordinates and translates it into RGB code and now you can say oh I must be near the gallery space because it's yellow...... bzzzrp

Envisioning Information

New Projects on IML Island:

The Tufte Tunnel - Tufte's book 'Envisioning Information' has been wonderful to absorb in it's paper and ink format, but is now put into virtual book form thanks to Thinc Book 2.0. Textures or Snapshots can be loaded into this blank book and creates easily flippable pages. However, we now have a large 3d space in which to navigate and Professor Steve Anderson has requested a tunnel that can be flown through to be made.

the fly through
audio scripting explaining the Tufte Tunnel Concepts will be added later.