Immersive Learning Course

The Illinois Alliance Library System and Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois is offering an online course in Immersive Learning (IL) using Second Life as a learning platform.

The program will examine IL and study Second Life as an IL environment. It will also discuss how IL and Second Life affect educators and library professionals.

Educators and others looking for a good learning session might want to check this out.

Computerized Craft

The promise of 3D virtual sculpting has taken a step forward with the work of computer scientists at the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group. While aimed at platforms other than Second Life, the objective is to take the pain out of creating complex objects.

Headed by Vladlen Kolten, the group is beginning to make 3D trees in order to prove that object construction can be sophisticated without being difficult. But why trees, you might ask?

Botanists have catalogued trees in great detail over the centuries, categorizing things such as trunk width, leaf type, and limb spacing. Armed with this information, the Stanford group has created a mathematical engine that allows users to scroll with a mouse over certain attributes and creating trees. The long-term objective, says Kolten, is to improve the way virtual worlds operate and to allow the everyday computer user to create 3D objects using simple software.

The virtual world should serve as “a social network that allows you to share space and participate in experiences together,” he said. “You can form ad hoc groups that don’t require any sort of registration. You can just walk up to a person, walk up to a group of people, and start a conversation.”

Having recently made my own set of plants for a build - palm trees, jungles trees, and so on…I know the pain and agony of making the stuff, and have a renewed admiration for Heart VR, Straylight, and all the other in-world gardeners. Which also speaks to the point that no computer could ever generate a Straylight tree, and we’re likely to continue to see a split between mass and computer-automated production of virtual worlds and objects, and the craft/artist society that deepens our engagement with virtual worlds in ways that algorithmic-generated branches never could (yet).

Virtual Worlds Just Like the Real

Metaverse reports on Virtual Worlds, a company out of Singapore that will offer accurate 3D walk-throughs of real worldwide locations.

Called Mirror World, the technology will launch at the end of this year and will target tourism operators. In essence, the company hopes to create a virtual version of any place in the world that travel interest demands. In the press release, Virtual Worlds touts its ability to to create environments that are as “life-like as possible” and “expects to completely map the globe in phases.”

The concept of the Mirror World might make sense if it crosses over to the real - mixed reality spaces, or prototyping urban design or architecture. But I’m not sure whether worlds that “seem real” is what we really need. It harkens back to the days of Virtual Reality, when the objective was to create environments so seemingly real that we’d be fooled into thinking they were.

Today’s virtual worlds however come out of the gaming environments which proved that something doesn’t need to be realistic in order to evoke a real response. The other issue with “seem real” environments is that they don’t. Synthetic worlds that try to convince us that they’re the real thing also trigger a defense mechanism in the brain, in my opinion - “hey, this ISN’T real”, and you lose both the magic circle and the illusion that it’s real in the first place.

Having said that, the ultimate mirror world would be Google Earth or MS Virtual Earth with the idea that you could start mashing up the real with the imagined. So not sure where Mirror World would fit in if Google really does launch a virtual world…much as I also said about Twinity and other platforms that are trying to tag themselves to real world geographies.

Pinball Havok

For me, the main benefit of Havok4 is that sculpted prims are solid instead of being confined by awkward bounding boxes - no long needing invisiprims underneath sculpted objects saves prims, makes them more realistic, and may lead to their wider use.

But then, I’m not a scripter, so I leave it to this video to give a hint of what Havok can do in creative and capable hands:

Scenecaster’s 2.5% Daily Growth - The Quiet App

Scenecaster deserves a second look - with all the talk of virtual worlds, Metaplace, Second Life, OpenSim, Kaneva and There.com, GigaOM reports that Scenecaster is reporting growth at 2.5% a day.

I previously covered Scenecaster and included this assessment:

What’s interesting (about Scenecaster) is that the object, in this case a stool, is tagged to search results from Google, eBay and Amazon. This is one of the things that’s attracting academia to initiatives like Croquet - the ability to link virtual spaces into shared reference pools. They may not want to link objects out to eBay, but they MAY want to link out to class Web sites, Medline, or Google Scholar.

Linden promises that Web pages in SL are coming - not soon enough, perhaps. For users to be able to tag their content and then have those tags link out to external APIs would be powerful. It might also provide the sort of branding platform that corporations need to be convinced of an ROI beyond user visits or views. Linking from object tags to a Facebook, eBay, Amazon, or proprietary API can create the sort of cross linkages and traffic that companies need to justify their investment in empty stores and inefficient billboards.

Geeks in Life: Second Skin Trailer

A new documentary explores identity, love, addiction, and life in virtual worlds. Two years in the making, Second Skin has released a trailer and if its production values and neutral stance are any indication it could be a real mind-opener.

Meantime, BBC ran a show last night for the first time on adultery in virtual worlds. Haven’t seen it but the slant of the coverage harkens back to the “birth of the Internet days”…remember when the Net was a dangerous alternate universe populated by geeks and pervs? NWN had a nice reminder:

Has the Internet been overhyped? Even as cyberspace is being touted as the hippest place to congregate since the original Woodstock, some experts now contend that estimates of the number of people actively using the Internet web of computer networks may be grossly exaggerated.

Technology Trend Map

Imaginative piece of speculation and crystal ball gazing from Ross Dawson is meant to stimulate discussion in a fun and provocative way.

Between Digitilisation and Virtual Worlds lie Happiness and Constant Partial Attention before potentially veering off into individualism followed by…um, litigation.

P.S. I’m all for karma capitalism but I’m not sure what reality mining means. Sounds like work to me, and reality is hard enough.

Second Life and Stepford Wives

Over at Phasing Grace a wonderful discussion on the heels of the civil liberties discussion in Second Life with Philip Linden, in which all my lengthy posts here and here on alts, tribal morality, and whether our ability to make choices is really as open as we think were addressed from a different angle and far more succinctly by Grace who comments that if these issues aren’t addressed:

“…we will have highly structured, tightly controlled Stepford virtual worlds, all lined up in pink chiffon and serving cupcakes.”

Brilliant, and good discussion follows.