Great Wall of China

I did not get my hopes up after seeing the Alamo. The Great Wall of China didn't disappoint. Once you teleport to the wall, the designers give you a notecard about the process of designing. It was interesting that they took actual photographs of the real life wall and used those to create the actual textures for the Second Life Great Wall. If there is any way of making something more realistic, then that's it. The wall actually took a long time to walk, like I'm sure it would in real life (obviously it wasn't as long though).

The Alamo

After visiting the Holocaust Museum, the Alamo seemed like a sore disappointment. The actual design is very aesthetically pleasing but it lacks any kind of medium for visitors to interact with. Some of the flags come off looking unrealistic and unnecessary. The best part about the place is the historical markers out front.

United States Holocaust Museum

Right away the coolest museum I've seen already is the Kristallnacht exhibit that was actually put together by the United States Holocaust Museum. This is something that I can definitely see people interacting with and learning something from. The design is actually drawn according to accounts from survivors of the pogroms in the 1930s. The attention to detail is something that anybody could appreciate and the way the museum actually has a flow to it is nice. As a history buff, I definitely thought the digitized real life artifacts and sound bites were really cool. Here's some pics.

The full article touches upon some of the same topics as the previous article and these guys did extensive research into museums in Second Life. Here's a brief about their paper.

http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html

Abstract

The paper gives an overview of some of the museum-like activities currently being undertaken in Second Life. Current development is mainly in the hands of pioneers, often interested amateurs engaging in serious leisure to create spaces enabling them to share their interests with others. These efforts are explored in this paper through a systematic analysis of museum visits and a qualitative analysis of interviews with designers and developers of museums in Second Life. Findings identified include the impact of the current technology on what is created, and the importance of interaction-centric designs.

1. Introduction

Museums have been exploring the use of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) for more than a decade, often in the form of proprietary, non-persistent virtual worlds designed and developed for select audiences such as teachers and students. Since launching in 2003, the on-line virtual community of Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com/) has attracted over 900,000 dedicated ‘residents’ who are laying the foundations for widespread adoption of MUVEs by museums, libraries, archives, and other information organizations.

Already there is a range of museum-like activities occurring in Second Life (SL). There are many parallels with the early development of the Web, including how resident-developed museum spaces currently outnumber those created by real-life museums (see Taylor, 1995). These experiments in a new medium can tell us a lot about what ‘real-life’ museums should consider, as well as how we might want to inform and re-merge with our physical resources. SL museums can be about historical re-enactment, such as dressing up and walking around Ancient Rome with other residents acting in character – a variant on real life (RL) re-enactments. There are SL museums containing digitized RL artifacts. There are other collections of 'born digital' artifacts created in SL that are collected, curated and preserved by in-world museums. There are outdoor sculpture parks, places that are more like art galleries, and venues to support Warhol-like art happenings. There are labels, lectures, tours, audio guides, docents, even museum shops. Some of the museums created in Second Life are now seeking affiliations with real-life artists, or museums, and others are actively establishing themselves as 501(c)3 non-profit organizations.

This paper presents a selection of the results from our work that attempts to understand the nature, diversity and evolution of current museum and museum-like activities in Second Life. Drawing on the experience and lessons learned from past museum virtual environments, non-museum collaborative spaces, and recent research on learning in multiplayer on-line games, this research can serve as a guide for museums interested in establishing a virtual presence in Second Life.

Second Life currently has many parallels with the early days of the Web. It is an exciting place that participants are co-creating while simultaneously trying to understand what it is, what it might be, and what it is good for. It has many potential contexts of use, but as in the early days of the Web, cultural heritage applications are part of that pioneering exploration. The preliminary results of this research do more than indicate the opportunities and challenges of using Second Lifeas a platform for museums; they suggest that it is equally important to understand how museums may become collaborative partners in an already evolving community. Even more so than the Web, SL is not just about providing information and artifacts. It is about facilitating interaction. Because SL residents have already decided that museum-like activities need to be an important part of their second lives, a study of how they construct these activities may provide museums with important clues about how they might engage virtual audiences in ways that they have not been able to in the past.

First things, I found an article by these guys that are working on creating museum content in Second Life. They offer a list of some benefits that museums in virtual worlds have compared to the real world.

http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/rothfarb/rothfarb.html

You Can Change A Visitor’s Visual And Positional Frames Of Reference.

Consider walking into a real-world room that has a chair attached to the ceiling and a chandelier rising straight up from the center of the floor. A visitor to this odd room might have some problems figuring out how to sit in that upside-down, ceiling-mounted chair. But in the 'Splo, it’s no problem. Fly up and sit in the chair and your avatar flips upside-down. The view flips upside-down as well. Suddenly, the room is right-side-up with the chandelier hanging from the ceiling. But what are the consequences of having these kinds of ‘abilities’?

In the 'Splo, we have a trampoline mounted on a wall in an exhibit called 90 Degrees From Normal. At this virtual exhibit, visitors can jump on the trampoline and do tricks. While they’re jumping, their view of the rest of the museum is sideways. Interestingly, many visitors have reported a sense of real-world disorientation after making these sideways jumps. Some even report dizziness and stomach discomfort. This effect, known as simulation sickness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulator_sickness), has been studied in the motion simulator field and is not well understood. Since you don’t know how each participant will react, it’s an important design consideration for virtual worlds where a participant will move rapidly or have their orientation rapidly changed. It’s amazing that viewing an illusion through the eyes of an avatar in a virtual world can change how we feel in the real world.

Changing frames of reference is important to physicists when they analyze the universe. In future Second Life experiments, we plan to use this ability to allow people to ‘experience’ relativistic effects.

You Can Change The Scales Of Objects.

Unlike experimentation in the real world, it’s easy to change the scale of natural phenomena in the virtual world. Consider an exhibit we built in the 'Splo that was designed to help visitors understand eclipses. It was simply a scale model of the earth/moon system. We made a 1-meter-diameter model of the earth and hung it in space. (It’s so much easier to hang a model in a virtual world!) At this scale, we hung the moon model – a sphere ¼-meter in diameter – 30 meters (nearly 100 feet!) away from the earth model.

This turns out to be a powerful model when an avatar takes the long walk from the earth to the moon. Visitors to the exhibit – including real-world astronomers – have noted that they’d had no true appreciation for the scale of the earth to the moon before encountering this experience. The resulting level of understanding is better than what can be obtained from any real-world textbook, photograph, or 2D illustration on a Web page.

In the virtual world, well-made objects and scenery with good levels of geometric detail and high-resolution texture maps (images wrapped on 3D objects) provide important information to the participant and add to the virtual experience. Collaborator Aimee Weber created a realistic model of the sun by using two different texture layers, both with rendered solar surface patterns. The outer layer, mostly transparent, is animated and rotates over an inner opaque layer. But even a virtual world cannot accommodate the sun at this scale. It would be a sphere 100 meters in diameter placed 12,000 meters away. This is an impossible scale to achieve in most 3D simulations, including virtual worlds like Second Life.

Besides affording access to the really big, a virtual world can also offer access to the very small: change scale in the other direction and avatars can visit the atomic world. The Science Library in Second Life, for example (Science Center: secondlife://Info Island II/97/206/24), contains a model of both a carbon nanotube and a molecule of buckminsterfullerene that an avatar can fly into. These models give a great sense of the placement of carbon atoms in three-dimensional space.

An avatar inspired by his visit to the 'Splo built a model of the Brownian motion phenomenon, which describes the random motion of particles. Four cubes that in the real world would be just a few nanometers across tumble and spin inside a transparent cube 10 meters on a side. With a touch of a button, small red atoms appear, striking the cubes and giving them their random motion. This illustrates, in three dimensions, the behavior of small particles undergoing the Brownian motion effect, first mathematically formulated by Einstein in his miraculous year of 1905. When we saw this exhibit, we immediately suggested that avatars be allowed to ride the cubes, taking advantage of what we’ve previously learned about the virtual-visitor scale-of-reference experience. The view from a particle undergoing Brownian motion and rotation in three dimensions is an amazing wild ride!

You Can Create Hyper-Linked Information On Exhibits And Easily Give Copies To Visitors

Museums in the real world often struggle with issues of presenting interpretive text and images that accompany exhibits. If you offer all the information one interested visitor could want, then you might drive another visitor away. We’ve found that in a virtual museum, different techniques for presenting exhibit graphics can offer solutions to this problem. For example, you can create rich textures adjacent to or on exhibit objects that contain visual or textual information, or you can attach notecard objects.

Here’s how it works: When a visitor scrolls the mouse pointer over an exhibit, a roll-over event is triggered and the name of the exhibit is displayed. Clicking the object (or a mapped area on the object) triggers an event that offers the visitor a notecard. Text on the notecard might offer basic instructions about what “To Do and Notice” in the exhibit, or it can contain the name of the exhibit and a link back to it and to the museum location. It can either be read on-screen or saved to the visitor’s inventory of personal objects for review later. The visitor might also give a copy of the notecard to another avatar.

Notecards can be linked to other notecards or to Web pages, offering deeper levels of detail, further examples, and references (for basic notecards, though, we suggest keeping things brief). Both notecards and objects can also be scripted to offer the visitor an object or script. For example, you could give someone something related to the exhibit, a t-shirt or hat customized with museum or exhibit graphics, a talking book, almost anything. This flexibility in presenting multiple layers of exhibit information along with mementos or artifacts of exhibits is a compelling element of virtual world design in Second Life.

You Can Let Visitors Experience Dangerous Situations, Or Take Them To Remote Locations.

If you’d like to explore the inside of a nuclear reactor core in real life, you’d better study up on radiation safety. Avatars in Second Life, though, can have no fear flying around inside a three-dimensional model of a working nuclear reactor to see how it works and how it is controlled. We’ve met one resident who is a real-life nuclear scientist and is planning to build a reactor model in Second Life.

For those of us with childhood dreams of growing up to be an astronaut, the International Spaceflight Museum (http://slispaceflightmuseum.org) has created a planetarium experience in Second Life (Spaceport Alpha) in which visitors actually fly into space to observe scale models of the planets and their moons. For example, a visitor can walk on the surface of Mars to observe the Viking Spacecraft and see a panoramic view constructed of real images of the Martian surface.

On March 29, 2006, the Exploratorium created a science education program as part of our live Webcast coverage of a total solar eclipse from Side, Turkey (Total Solar Eclipse: Live from Turkey, http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/2006/index.html). Created in collaboration with NASA’s Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum, telescopic views of the rare sun-moon-earth alignment were broadcast with scientific commentary via satellite, television, and Internet streaming to hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide. In addition to these presentations, we also offered an all-night live program at our museum location in San Francisco. We wanted to extend this public programming into Second Life by sharing the live remote event with residents there (Rothfarb, R. J., Doherty, P., Higdon, R., and A. Weber, 2006). This practice of bringing real-world elements such as Webcast video into a virtual world is called augmented reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality). It offers a unique way to extend aspects of a museum’s physical place and practice into a shared context across geographic boundaries.

Especially on this last note, it reminds me of one of the group projects from my summer "Working in Virtual Worlds" class. The group created a history of the atom bomb exhibit which included a simulation of what an atom bomb would be like. Of course you don't get to feel the exact physical effects but it was pretty amazing nonetheless.

Museums in Second Life

It's been awhile since I posted and it's come time for me to switch gears a little bit. I was initially going to continue blogging about the VLCI project that UT is doing but alas there are simply not enough people online to talk to. It is more of a "do it in your free time" type thing so I dropped that idea. I have decided though to go with something a little more along the lines of what I want to do in the future and that is to work in museums or preservation/conservation. I do not have any coursework or background knowledge about presentation of information in museums (curating) or about preserving documents and information so my views presented here will be completely subjective, in the sense that I am an outsider. Thus, I am going to search around Second Life for museums (real life and original creations) and traditional (and non-traditional) tourist spots. It's gonna be a fun ride!

Happy Days...

I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. At least a small one. We've completed almost everything under our basic design and only have a few kinks to work out pregame. Since last time, the final product, the field, looks polished and nice and clean. We've decorated the tree house, put down cutouts of the Sandlot characters, figured out the pitching machine situation, and bought baseball uniforms. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're in Second Life everything seems to take much longer and so you eventually just lose yourself for hours in world. The only thing we have left to do is to put in some text with pictures that we took in Second Life of us batting. We don't need anything but some extremely basic concepts to go along with the pictures. Thus, we're meeting in world before our project is due to complete those pictures and lay them down in the field. Today, I ran into something that was kind of a hassle. Me and another member of the group were in charge of creating the cutouts of the characters and then scripting them to say things when you touched them. It became a problem when I started trying to script my teammate's character and I couldn't due to lack of permissions. Luckily I was able to sign in under his avatar and make any changes as needed but it made me realize what a hassle it can become. All in all I feel like I did my part, albeit somewhat last minute, to help my group in this design. It was rough going at first with some minor scuffles about what we were going to do but I think we're better off from it. We were able to have fun, getting to shoot a video, and most of all produce a technology that will allow middle schoolers to become more interactive and interested in science. I know that if I had had something like this growing up, that I probably would've been far more active in pursuing something related to science, or at least would've taken a more general interest in the field. I sincerely hope that with this program and this event tomorrow that we can make a difference in a few people's lives. Now it's a matter of some luck and skill to go along with tomorrow's big presentation.

In the end...

This blog is way past due, but I'll use the excuse that I didn't have internet at the lake over July fourth weekend lol (even though it's true). Just looking at my new snapshot from Second Life, I think it's easy to tell just how far we've come along since we started this final project. Almost all of the landscaping is done, so we're more or less working out some technical issues over the batting cage. This isn't the first time I've encountered somebody who has abandoned or retreated from Second Life. Last time was when I bought a ridable tiger, but the lady who owned it was on vacation :(. This time though it seems that the owner of the pitching machine that we need doesn't get on Second Life anymore. Apparently Warrant is going to take care of the scripting with some outside help. We also still have to do our physics of hitting video. We came up with the idea, albeit only when North said we'd get an A if we did it ;), to film ourselves and stream that video in world. So later today we are getting together to film us creaming balls and showing off lol. This may be a bit problematic since I haven't hit or thrown a ball in forever. But if we're getting A's then who am I to complain lol. Plus all three of us who aren't that great in Second Life, can do our part outside of it. It's our way of contributing to the project instead of building crappy looking ladders for the treehouse lol. Since we are streaming our final video into Second Life, I hope it works because we encountered problems with other videos. But, North got us set straight, I think, by buying a big TV that you can stream Youtube videos from. I guess we'll find that out when we try the video out in world tomorrow. Update tomorrow then... :).

Let It Rain

We've started the beginnings of our final project. It's hard to believe that it's all finally coming to a close. A beginning of the end. I feel a bit in a panic because I don't feel like my group is as organized as we could be. I know our ideas are sound, I guess it's just a matter of implementation for me. I'm a stickler for doing things on time and being organized is a key part. For the time being though, I have the job of terraforming the baseball field and then throwing in the bits and pieces of things we'll need to buy as "accessories." I hope we can finish the field for tomorrow or Friday because I won't have internet access this weekend. After we finish the field we need to get together some good videos about the physics of a home run and learn how to get those into Second Life. Somehow I have a feeling that they will merely have to be links to videos which I think is ok as long as the visitor can access them. We also need to script some objects or hire a scriptor for our animations of swinging a bat, throwing a ball, and various other things. I wish I could say I know what else we needed, but I think the boys in our group are taking better care of that than me. I hate saying it, but I didn't realize just how hard this would be. Meeting in a virtual world seems to make things more difficult because it's harder to come up with a group management sheet when there's no verbal or physical communication. Of course this is merely just me, but I do wonder if this project would be easier if we weren't meeting in Second Life and instead meeting in the classroom. I guess we'll find out tomorrow...in class. lol.

This is gonna be a few busy weeks. We’re finally starting our final projects, which we’re being allowed almost two weeks to work on. We have the main premise down, a fantasy baseball field exhibiting the physics of a homerun. It’s been tough within just these first few days due to some group conflict, but I’m just hoping that will all flesh out ok. I have the best of expectations because I think once we all get on the same page and have it laid out in more detail we’ll be able to capitalize on each group members’ skills. In the meantime, I’ve been doing some more exploring, and a couple of days ago I met one of the educators on the island in the adjacent educators coop. He had a small plot of land that he was using to build a model for his pharmacy students. It was a whole play off the CSI show, which I thought was really cool. He had it set up so that there were things that when you clicked on them they gave you clues to the mystery, which in this case was a baby with indigestion problems. He followed me through the whole scene ad helped me out along the way. Of course me not being a pharmacy student and not knowing a thing about toxins, besides what I see on the actual CSI show, didn’t really help me solve the mystery. Needless to say it would’ve been perfect for his students. Which is why I thought it was so awesome. If his students get to learn through Second Life like this, I think it will be more engaging, fun, and interactive. And doing a new mystery each week will keep students interested. This only makes me wish that we were getting around to this kind of technology use within my major, history. In most of my history classes it’s the same old, lecture/power point deal. Although the information is different, the presentation is not. I think it’s about time to start investing time and effort into new information mediums if possible in each school. Oh the fun. ..lol.

Builds

How many times can you say that you've been in a WWII war zone, a private lagoon, and a downtown bar scene all in less than a couple of hours? I can now officially say I have done that today. Each of these scenes was the site of a build exercise. And after experiencing it all, one of the reoccurring problems that I've noticed is how accommodating and accounting for so many people in a single space is a lot harder when they’re actually there. This happened a few times as in the teleporting problem after dying in the battle zone, or just the high volume of people in small spaces like the gazebo at the lagoon or the club downtown. But, for my organization sake, I’m going to walk through what I liked and didn’t like about the two builds that I was not involved in designing, since I have already blogged about my experience in building our lagoon. First up was the WWII themed build complete with bunkers, exploding tanks, and planes circling overhead. I was particularly impressed with the boat ride over to the actually battle zone and the attention to detail concerning the buildings. I loved the whole capture the flag idea, which brought back numerous childhood memories and was very reminiscent of playing a James Bond game. I already mentioned one problem, which was when you died you were teleported all the way back to our home condos and thus had to fly back to the designated area. Another thing I disliked was the fact that there was no tutorial on how to use the guns, so I almost felt like I was a Russian soldier headed straight into Leningrad without the slightest clue as to what I was getting in to. Since this was the case, I think they should have taken us to the shooting range first or handed out a note card just so we could have been somewhat prepared. Lastly, the sixth street look alike was impressive for just the vast amount of things to do, such as the hookah bar and rooftop dance scene, and also for how easy it was to navigate. The way things were set up, with the street in the middle and buildings on the side, made it simple to pick where you wanted to go and get in and out. On the downside for me, I felt like there was a lack of continuity and an overall randomness involving certain things. But, I should probably keep in mind that that is almost the equivalent of a downtown scene lol. Until next time.

Where Can I Find This?

This week we got the assignment to create a place on our island to present to our classmates. The tour would have to last about twenty minutes long, which in Second Life, is a good while. So my group, only me and one person at the time, decided to build a lagoon. We basically began with the terrain to build a large cliff with the hope of having people cliff dive off of it and then a slide going down another part of it. To be honest, I didn't think that editing the terrain would be so time consuming when in reality it took up most of our time the first day. It was difficult to get the land to look just like you wanted it to with parts going up in spikes instead of flat and even harder to carve out a place for a slide within the cliff/mountain. The day after that all of our group was there and we split up to go and buy the stuff that we needed and I was in charge of the water things. I bought some coral and rocks along with an animated dolphin and a jet ski. Again I spent a lot of time editing the terrain just so the coral would look natural at the bottom. After our second day of group work our lagoon was actually looking like a lagoon. Now we're still working on completing it within the next few days, but I have ran into a few road blocks. I have bought a ridable tiger that I won't get until the owner comes back from vacation. Also, I have tried to find animations so that people can dive off the cliff, but have come to find nothing yet. I think I'm going to go to the help island and talk to some of the residents and see if they have any suggestions about places to look for the animations. Each day though our place looks better and better.

Teamwork

This last week we had the assignment to find a place, somewhere interesting, to take the class on a tour to. We weren't set to meet until the night before the assignment was due so the entire weekend I spent just exploring for places that the entire class would find fun. I used the search option on our main screen and then searched under showcase for hotspots in world. There were a lot of cool places, universities, clubs, etc. I randomly selected some of the ones I found interesting, and after visiting I thought most of these wouldn't have necessarily appealed to my entire class. Finally I came across a place where you can ride seal sleds on a predesigned course. It was very reminiscent of MarioKart. I can't lie, but I knew this place would definitely appeal to the guys that make up the majority of the class. I kept the place in my inventory until the night designated to meet up with the rest of my group. As predicted the guys in my group liked it a lot and when we took the class there everybody had a lot of fun riding the sleds. I noticed that some of the girls opted out of "driving" their own sled, and instead rode on ones with other male classmates. I didn't know if this was because these specific girls didn't like doing activities like this or if it plays into the whole stereotype of men driving women around or if it was something entirely different. Of course the stereotype doesn't apply everywhere and to everything but I just found this interesting. I also wanted to expand a bit about navigation within the place we went, Southaven. Besides the arrows on the course, I think one thing we didn't discuss in class was the surrounding environment. It's basic but the all the hills and mountains sucked you into a vacuum that pretty much made up the course and the arrows told you where to go within that space. Until next time...

A Constant Tour

It amazes me just how much you can do in Second Life, and I think that that fact alone is constantly surprising me. I decided in the last few days to follow my interests, which, in this case, included history and Lord of the Rings. I searched for all things dealing with the Holocaust and found myself at the Anne Frank Musuem. When I was navigating the house and hideout replica I realized just how much work I still needed in manouevering even though I wanted so badly to blame it on the lag. On my way out I was able to talk to a Rabbi from the church next door and he told me to go to Help Island. I teleported on over and then went from there to the Welcome Island. I met a Resident there who teleported me from there to her place. Real life interrupted my tour which was extremely frustrating, but I now have a friend outside of the classroom, besides Kimmie, which is very refreshing. So I've promised her I would return to finish the tour asap. The next day I searched for all my favorite Lord of the Rings places and teleported to Rivendell. Can you say gorgeous? All that was missing were the elves, especially Legolas and Arwen lol. Although there were guards there and one night I might see about the houses they have for rent on the property. Finally, I've continued my search for free things, especially clothes. I found a new place for newbies that had free clothes, gadgets, cars, skins, and so much more. I think that if I want to use the cars more, like my Flintstones one, I'm gonna have to learn how to use them more efficiently instead of just running over everything in sight lol. In the next few days I look forward to exploring more museums.

First Experiences

I'm almost certain that during my first few times on Second Life my main concern, I'm sure like most others, as a newbie was working with the avatar itself (i.e flying, walking, etc.) and using the toolbox to create things. Learning how to put things on and editing those things you do create became a little easier each time and I imagine they will still be a little shaky until this class is over. But I know the one thing I was eager to do was explore Second Life to find those things I needed to decorate my condo, and for cheap. Thus it was nice that I had some help from one of the student assistants who pointed me in the direction of Yadni's Junkyard. Described as a "newbie's paradise," it was just that for me. I was able to find some really cool stuff including most of my furniture, some ripped jeans, a cool Ramones tee, and a lot more. I even got a Batmobile! It was nice to know that even though we may have to spend money on some things, there were places out there where you could get so much of what you need and want for free or cheap. Besides the junkyard I went shopping for a real life replica of my husky puppy. I was able to find one and it was easy to buy. But, I am still facing some troubles because no matter how much I feed her, she is still 80% hungry and 15% tired. lol. I will just have to keep working at it, but giving her other commands/tricks was pretty easy to grasp. All of the things that I'm experiencing in Second Life so far do nothing but excite me for the future. There are still so many things to be explored and I plan on doing just that.

Chase