July 2016 – Ciaran Laval

July 22, 2016

The Vordun Museum and Gallery In Second Life

This week’s Highlights from the Second Life Destination Guide has a host of attractive looking destinations, but I had to start somewhere, so I started at The Vordun Museum and Gallery. The blurb tells us :

The Vordun Museum and Gallery is a new art and history experience in Second Life. Featuring the use of experience keys, visitors can get a real life feeling of being at a museum. Three new exhibits will be featured at The Vordun, featuring various art by masters and Second Life residents, and a historic Titanic experience.

Inara Pey has already posted an excellent review : The Vordun: a new art experience in Second Life. I heartily recommend that you read it, but I will say that the experience does largely live up to the hype.

There are currently three exhibitions on offer; European Masters, 300 Years of Painting, Lip Service, which will run until September 19th and A Night To Remember, a Titanic experience and I mean that as in, it’s about the Titanic ship.

The three exhibitions provide different experiences. The first, European Masters, 300 Years of Painting provides the visitor with a HUD and also makes use of Second Life’s experience keys feature.

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July 15, 2016

The Drax Files: World Makers Episode 39: Sergio Delacruz

Episode 39 of The Drax Files: World Makers introduces us to Sergio Delacruz and Delacruz Park. I’ll embed the video at the end of the post.

Sergio hails from the Italian island of Sicily and is a content creator who creates experiences within Second Life. His latest example being the multiplayer inworld game Susan’s Diary. The blurb for Susan’s Diary informs us :

Susan’s diary is a creepy horror game where you must find the lost pages of an old diary in a haunted house and find what happened to little Susan. Visit rooms, secret passages and solve puzzles to reach the end of this experience.

I am not in a position to comment on the game as I haven’t played it. Games and experiences are an under reported aspect of Second Life, so I did enjoy this episode.

Sergio has embraced content creation in Second Life in a very large way, he creates and scripts everything for his projects.

However this doesn’t mean that Sergio doesn’t appreciate collaboration or shared content. Sergio informs us that he learnt how to build in sandboxes and studied free scripts to help him learn how to script.

Sandboxes are a resource in Second Life that don’t get anywhere near the attention or thanks they really deserve. They allow you to build and learn alone if you want but you’ll often find people happy to share tips with you at Sandboxes too.

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July 6, 2016

Project Sansar Clouds, Discovery And It’s Not Second Life 2.0

Project Sansar Concept Art

Project Sansar is making the news again and we learn a little bit more each time an article is published. A couple of articles I’ve read today add some more context, it’s not earth shattering news but it adds a little bit more.

The first article is by Edward C. Baig over at USA Today and comes with an accompanying video : Second Life’s creators try for a third — in virtual reality. The part I find interesting in this article is in terms of discovery. That means how people will be able to find Project Sansar experiences and although this has been mentioned before, the way it is described in this article really hits home :

Linden Lab’s design aims to give Sansar creators more power to attract an audience to their experiences than they do in Second Life, where visitors may stumble upon the places by chance. Some people never find such places and don’t stick around.

If you search Google for “I want to learn French” you might find in the search results a virtual reality experience in Sansar where you can actually “go to virtual places in France, meet French people and have French dialogue at the boulangerie,” Altberg says.

The key difference there being that unlike Second Life, you should be able to discover Project Sansar experiences via the web. I know you can search Second Life from the web now, but the Project Sansar approach sounds more organic in terms of discovery.

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July 1, 2016

There’s Still Time to Explore SL13B

Second Life’s 13th birthday celebrations may well have ended in terms of performances and music, but the regions are still open for exploration and as it’s a lot less busy this week, it’s far easier to navigate your way around.

The regions will be open until Sunday July 3rd and there’s still plenty to do, such as touring on pods, grabbing free gifts, enjoying the exhibits, hitting the Linden prize gives or enjoying the big hunt.

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