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!