Killing the Sacred Cows of Second Life

Posts at the new blog site:

CLICK TITLES FOR FULL ARTICLES:
The Interface
One received orthodoxy is to dumb down the interface, make it easier to use, nest the tools and buttons and menu items so that the new user is faced with only a few easy choices. The conventional wisdom is that someone gets to SL and they’re so confounded with choice that they leave instead of face the grueling tasks of figuring out how to fly, drive, walk, teleport, build, chat, IM, join groups, search the grid.

But here’s the question – so what?

Orientation for Newbs
…Which brings us to Help Island and those first builds and arrows and handy signs. Lose them all.

And our special bonus feature…:P

My Avatar is Not Me, or, Why Virtual Worlds Will Not Become Appliances
My avatar is my interface to a culture, and in this case, the culture in which my avatar performs (just as I perform in the actual world within my own culture) has the unique property that it’s recursive and that its basis is techne – one in which the tool we’ve built in silicon and wire contains the tools within it.

RECENT POST ROUND-UP

The blog has moved, but a quick round-up of recent posts at the new location:

Next Time Your Group Gets Spammed, Fine them $200M
Killing Sacred Cows I: The Second Life Interface (During which I provoke, retreat, provoke again and come away wondering what it would take to make a simple client).
Second Life as a Pedagogical Tool
Pioneer Virtual College Looks To Profit from its Pioneering
Autodesk, MegaPrims, and the 3D Pipeline Puzzles Continue

Mega Prims and Wiis – Summary of Posts

Quick summary of a few recent posts at the new blog location:

Dating Avatars: Preparing for Face-to-Face Contact
Autodesk, MegaPrims, and the 3D Pipeline Puzzles Continue
Ambient Occlusion – Shadows in Second Life
Rezzable, Rezzable Let Down Your Hair (including a long and thoughtful response on Rezzable’s strategy by RightAsRain.

I’ve Moved – Relink to http://dusanwriter.com

Many kind thanks to all the folks who linked here, blogrolled and rolled over laughing, commented and cross-pollinated….and while I’ve flagged this in the header and so on, for those of you catching this in an RSS feed kindly note that I’ve switched domains so I could crawl out from under being on a WordPress server and take all the flack personally for glitchy stuff or slow connections.

Visit me at http://www.dusanwriter.com and if you have time update your blog rolls, it’s much appreciated.

(And for all you Papervision fans, I’ve set up your own little corner and have a few new samples for your entertainment).

Papervision Aggregated List and Examples

To try to keep my mind from getting to muddled, I’ve dropped past posts on Papervision into one page for reference. (Also available in top nav).

Enjoy.

Second Life Rendered on Your Phone – Vollee

Vollee has launched the ability to browse Second Life on your cell phone – rendered, ability to move, and testable now for free (if your phone is compatible).

This site has moved. Read the rest of this post here.

Urban Planning In a Web 2.0 World

Planning cities and buildings – the real ones – has, for a long-time, been a top-down exercise. Meaning that concepts and city plans were, for the most part, implemented from on high through architects, city planners, consultants and developers, allowing for very little collaboration with those in the “bottom” and those for whom these projects would impact the most – namely, the ordinary citizen.

This site has moved. Read the rest of this post here.

Papervision Alternative

Digado points us to a Papervision-like Flash 3D development project built by a team of Russians at Alternativa 3D.

This site has moved. Read the rest of this article here.