The Cornfield – Looking At The Experience Angle

A recent Linden Lab blog post invited us to Check Out Experience Keys in… The Cornfield! which is tempting but before you go rushing in remember to download the Experience Keys Beta Viewer, otherwise you won’t benefit from the full experience, nor will you really experience experience keys! Once you’re armed with your beta viewer you need to head to portal park :

SLURL : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LR%20Portal%20Park1/127/122/24/

Portal park has been revamped and is the portal to lots of different Linden Lab games, however the one you’re looking for is of course, The Cornfield.

Whilst walking down the path you may want to check out the Me menu in the beta viewer, this is where you will see one of the extremely important changes, the experiences link, but at this stage it’s going to be a pretty lonely link as you haven’t accepted any experiences yet.

Once you walk along the path and into a barn you will see a portal tempting you to walk into it, but just before you get there you will see a message on your screen asking if you want to participate in this experience. The message isn’t on screen for long but fear not, it just goes to the same place as your other notifications. In my screenshot below, if the message disappears I can get it back by clicking the notification icon, which has 2 notifications on it at this stage, one of those was from a group message.

The message is worth reading because it describes which experiences you are opting into. In this case the experience will

• Act On Your Control Inputs
• Animate Your Avatar
• Attach To Your Avatar
• Track Your Camera
• Control Your Camera
• Teleport You

Cornfield in green writing is clickable and takes you to the profile of the experience. More on that later.

Now this is the beauty of experience keys. Generally you would be asked to grant the above permissions and the next time you went back to this place, you’d be asked all over again. Experience keys makes this is a one click choice, by clicking Yes all of the permissions for the above are granted and they will remain that way until I revoke those permissions.

This brings us back to the Me menu I mentioned earlier, now that I have accepted an experience, it will be listed under Experiences when I click Me, Experiences. Then you will see something like this:

At this stage I only have The Cornfield listed, but that will fill up over time I’m sure. As an aside, the Events tab includes event reminders but I haven’t seen any discussion about that yet, it looks like a handy feature. Anyway back to the experience keys, if you click Cornfield from the above menu, you will see a profile of that Experience. This is where Experience creators have a chance to sell their wares, I would have ended up in the same place had I clicked Cornfield before I accepted the experience, when I first received the message if I wanted to accept the experience.

The profile will look something like this :

I think there should be an image there! However it didn’t show when I tried it out.  Allow is greyed out because I’ve already allowed this experience. The other options are forget, which basically puts you back at the stage before you have accepted this experience. Block will mean you won’t receive messages and interactions from this experience and Report Abuse means the person creating this experience has done something very naughty and you want to tell Linden Lab about it!

However in this example I decided it was safe to trust Governor Linden. Now some time ago I was talking about a portal and now that I’ve accepted this experience I can walk through it and see the first aspect of how experience keys make the process more smooth. I am teleported to a new location without being asked if I want to be teleported. I suspect that this will be the most popular usage for Experience Keys. This is a way of helping people navigate your location or sims.

However I do still receive a message that I have been teleported and I’m also informed which object teleported me and where said object was :

This happens because one of the permissions I granted when I accepted this experience was the ability to teleport me. This is why it’s important to read which permissions you are granting to an experience. However not everything has changed, I am not allowing objects to automatically deliver items to my inventory, so I still get a traditional message about that :

However a couple of other things have happened to me, for a start, I now have a Hud and it has auto attached to me. This is of course because one of the permissions associated with this experience was attach to my avatar.

Another thing that has happened to me is that I’ve had items attached to my avatar in the form of a basket and a plank of wood … I think it’s a plank of wood.

Now you may be thinking, is this all worth it? The answer is yes, we’re used to those pop ups asking us for permission and in many ways they are reassuring. However if you trust a location, they can get a little bit irksome. This makes the whole process far more seamless, there’s no searching your inventory for items, attaching them, checking umpteen notifications, this helps you get to the action faster.

This has real potential but of course Linden Lab are right to be cautious and so should you. Only accept experiences from people you trust, these are powerful tools. I do firmly believe it’s safe to trust Governor Linden, Patch Linden and The Moles but as this progresses, tread carefully, if you do that you should have fun.

I’ll leave you with a youTube video from Torley … yes I think we can trust Torley, anyway this is a youTube Video demonstrating all this in action.

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