Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Article
Second Life -- "A libertarian paradise where there are no zoning laws"
3/19/2008
Doug Anderson just completed a thesis in Second Life that earned him a masters of science in art education from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design ("MassArt"). He is an art teacher at Prospect Hill Academy, a charter school in Cambridge and Somerville, MA.The title of the thesis was "Force Sun Midnight," displayed in a Second Life "sim" (a simulator with its own CPU in a server) and also in the Massachusetts College of Art and Design ("MassArt"), Arnheim Gallery -- complete with its own 3D goggles so the art leapt out at you from the wall.
The medium totally engages Anderson -- thus the reference to paradise. He explains: "Second Life's strength is in being a stage set for human interaction. I don't consider any of my work done until people show up. When you go there with a bunch of friends and start poking around, the artwork is complete. My work borrows a lot of basic structure from video games, especially open-ended games like Myst: The idea is that you are in an environment, you don't start with any clear objective, you have to explore a little bit, poke and probe a little bit to see what's going on. I leave a lot of cookies [not browser cookies, but little rewards for finding an interactive spot] or Easter eggs for people to reward careful exploration. You might click on something and find out that you can make a copy of it, or that it's animated, or that it responds to another object or makes a sound, for example. It might take a good 30 or 40 minutes to go through one of my environments and find all that's there -- or you might not find all that's there, so it bears repeated viewings."
When this editor visited one of Anderson's two exhibits, my avatar saw a plane about to crash into a street crossing with traffic stopped for a red light. My avatar, curious, flew up to see the plane more closely and it realized it could fly into the plane where the wing had broken off to see what was happening with the people inside. Fortunately, as my avatar was relieved to see, there were no people in the plane. But it felt uncomfortable being inside a plane about to crash.
How is such intricate and esthetically robust work possible in Second Life? Anderson notes that just in the past year, Second Life introduced a couple of innovations. First, the ability to make objects that are irregular or 'organic.' "I can use any number of programs to make the object and then can import them as a texture into SL," Anderson comments. "Before that, if you wanted to make something like a tree, you had to use dozens or hundreds of objects that were never convincing. This technology came along in the middle of this work and so I had to master that technology." The second is the addition of voice chat. "It was introduced last year very slowly at first but there was a tipping point and now people can talk instead of typing," says Anderson. Voice was important so that he could lead people through the show and narrate as he went from place to place.
Recommended Reading
- Gates Highlights R&D at CES08, Unveils Microsoft Touch Wall
Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates spent a lot of time Wednesday talking about "empowering the workers" at the Microsoft's 12th annual CEO Summit 2008 in Redmond, WA, where he gave a keynote speech. However, Gates wasn't talking about political revolutions or even pay raises for office workers before the CEO crowd. Instead, he was referring to new software technologies that can better enable collaboration, social networking and decision-making on the job.
- Vista Vulnerability Study Puts Microsoft on Defensive
Microsoft and some independent security researchers had the blogosphere buzzing Wednesday over a series of denunciations after one company claimed that the Vista operating system was more vulnerable to malware and other exploits than previous operating systems.
- New Blackboard Sync Application Leverages Facebook
Blackboard Inc. today announced Blackboard Sync, an application that allows students to receive course updates and communicate with classmates while logged on to Facebook.
- Standards: The Sooner the Better
Technology solutions work best when they well together. That is why the nonprofit group IMS Global Learning Consortium is developing learning tools interoperability standards for the education technology community...
- U.K. Education Group Escalates Microsoft Complaints
A consultancy to the U.K. government has forwarded complaints about Microsoft's licensing and interoperability practices to the European Commission (EC), according to an announcement issued by the Becta consulting group Monday.
- University Students and Researchers Enjoy JavaOne
The JavaOne conference, held May 6-9 in San Francisco, brought together developers from industry, education, and other markets, filling the Moscone Convention Center with a wide array of sessions and exhibits for the open source Java developer community.
