Weekend Whimsy

Each Friday we provide a sampling of content generated by SL users and posted on services like YouTube:

1. Virtual Live Band - Harmony

2. Burning Longcat

3. Welcome to OneClimate Island

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tube2SL to launch - more in-world cinema

A new virtual cinema is about to launch. Tube2SL offers a website that interfaces with its SL cinemas:

“The Tube2SL website will enable its members to upload their very own film productions for showing on huge virtual screens in the Tube2SL Virtual Cinema Complex located in the virtual world of Second Life. Our aim is to provide an interactive and fun platform for amateur film makers to promote and receive feedback on their work, enter contests, meet new contacts, learn and share new skills. We for see the Tube2SL project as a precursor to the future of on-line public digital media broadcasting.”

The launch is scheduled for September 30th, 1pm-6pm SLT (7am-11am on the 31st AEST), with the background being:

“The launch has been planned to coincide with the Tube2SL YouTube Short Film Producer 2007 awards ceremony that is to be held at the Tube2SL Virtual Cinema Complex in Second Life. We have been running the contest throughout this summer via the Tube2SL YouTube Channel, with each entry being shown daily in the Tube2SL Virtual Cinema Complex. There is no fee to enter the Tube2SL Virtual Cinema Complex, allowing both our members and everyday Second Life residents the ability to watch and vote for their favourite movies in a realistic 3D virtual cinema environment.

The official contest award ceremony will commence on Saturday the 30th of September at 1pm (Second Life Time), with Mr Murcus Parker-Rhodes announcing the contest winners before handing out trophies and prizes. Mr Marcus Parker-Rhodes is an accomplished British animator and former assistant to Terry Gilliam during the making of Monty Pythons Flying Circus.

Events are planned throughout the day including live performances by the Second Life and real life renowned Beatles tribute duo, Bill and Pam Havercamp. Entries to the contest have been many and varied, consisting of machinima, animation and real life productions. The contest prize fund totals 40,000 Linden Dollars (approximately $150 USD).”

Popularity: 6% [?]

SL Education vs Personal Beliefs

We have been tracking the growing number of educational facilities setting up presences in SL. Many have been active in setting up and conducting both courses and specific lectures in-world.

A recent email list posting amongst SL educators raised the issue of a student declining participation in the SL portion of coursework due to “personal beliefs”. The ongoing thread has covered a number of possible scenarios and reasons behind such a refusal and this may be a good thing given recent postings here about under-age content and use of “mature” areas when setting up a presence as an education provider.

Given the emergence of SL as an exciting and different medium for the delivery of courses and syllabus content the issue of not being penalised for refusing to participate in in-world coursework is a new and never before encountered tension that educators may have to deal with in a formal policy manner.

It has been discussed amongst educators that both strict Islamic and conservative Christian students object to graphic representations of the human body. As one educator stated, “In this case, SL would certainly be a religious problem.”

For SL based course-work it may mean requirign strict body and clothing forms for students when participating and locked areas for course particpants only.

A wander through either the Australian or Foreign Universities currently engaged in SL has shown most people in casual dress. But if a student were to choose the form of a furry or other such form, would it distract from the lecture, offend other students or in some way draw a code of conduct indiscretion under SL or the University’s guidelines?

Then again, maybe the term “hippy” may need to be rephrased to encompass fippies (furry), aippy (age-play form) or mippy (monster style students).

Popularity: 5% [?]

VastPark gives glimpse of ‘Worlds Collide’

VastPark, the virtual world creation platform we’ve covered previously, today released some screen shots from their upcoming platform upgrade “Worlds Collide’:

Looks promising wouldn’t you say?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Weekend Whimsy

Each Friday we provide a sampling of content generated by SL users and posted on services like YouTube. This week we feature the work of one person who has taken an aussie SL bent to his work:

1. Second Life Song

2. Still Call Australia Home

3. HELP! I’m being griefed

Popularity: 6% [?]

SecondLifeGrid.net launches - Linden Lab chases business a little harder

Linden Lab have announced the launch of SecondLifeGrid.net, dedicated to businesses and other organisations wanting to find out about the opportunities Second Life may present. Notice I said opportunities and not threats. I spent five minutes looking around the site and couldn’t see any information alluding to the challenges and threats of doing business in SL, though to be fair there are lots of links to external resources which will contain some of the downside.

The intro blurb pretty much sums up the pitch Linden Lab are putting to business:

“The Second Life Grid is a full-featured service platform of revolutionary technologies that support the globally renowned virtual world experience, Second Life. The Grid offers a comprehensive system of infrastructure, consumer features, tools, and services that allows any organization to provide its own unique immersive experience in the world’s largest interconnected virtual world.”

The formalisation of support programs for groups of non-English speaking new users is a welcome addition. A lot of other services already provided such as the ability for a company to offer their own registration and orientation portals, have been brought across to the new site.

In retrospect, this is an obvious thing for Linden Lab to have done and it’ll be interesting to see the impact it has on conversion rates for business - you’d think a more integrated approach for business would remove one of the barriers to jumping into the SL experience.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Ubrowser

The uBrowser website states that uBrowseruBrowser “is an open source test mule that renders interactive web pages onto geometry using OpenGL® and an embedded instance of Gecko, the Mozilla® rendering engine. Its primary purpose is to help me integrate Gecko into my company’s software - a 3D virtual world called Second Life.”

The developer behind this browser experience is Callum Prentice. Callum is part of the Linden Lab team and he goes into great detail at the uBrowser website on how he sees this software integrating with the content and developments going on in SL. His aim is to have “residents … put interactive content anywhere they like - the much rumored “Web-On-A-Prim”. As well as allowing for the display of regular Web pages”.

If this is the case and uBrowser achieves the goals that Callum is setting. it would bring about a synergy between the realtime interactions in SL and the semi-static text, audio, video and graphics that make up the bulk of websites.

Put your hand up if you’d like web on a prim?

Popularity: 8% [?]

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