Opensim – Ciaran Laval

April 12, 2017

Yuri’s Night Coming To Second Life And Kitely

On April 12th 1961 Yuri Gagarin, a Russian Cosmonaut, took the spacecraft Vostok into Outer Space. Twenty years later, April 12th 1981, NASA’s first Space Shuttle was launched. Celebrations of these events take many shapes and forms.

Yuri’s Night is very much part of those celebrations and even goes boldly into virtual worlds, Second Life and Kitely are two virtual worlds you should be familiar with.

The Celebrations in Second Life are co-sponsored by the International Spaceflight Museum and the National Space Society.

They are planning a whopping five hours of celebrations starting at 3pm SLT today.

The event launches (sorry couldn’t resist) at the International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life :

3:00-4:00 pm – Dance to our “Space Filk & More” audio stream.
4:00-5:00 pm – DJ Aristippus spins space-themed tunes and songs of the Space Age.

SLURL : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Aspen/200/120/3730

Then the party moves on to The Sagan Planetarium in Second Life.

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March 22, 2017

Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education Conference Gets Ready

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference will start on March 29th and run until April 1st. The event, as the name implies, concentrates on educational use of Virtual Worlds and part of the blurb for the conference tells us :

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is a peer-reviewed community event focusing on education in immersive virtual environments. This open conference is organized by educators, for educators, to provide an opportunity to showcase the learning that takes place in this community of practice.

Although the grand opening isn’t until March 29th, there are opportunities to have a peek at some educational usage before that, you just need to keep an eye on the VWBPE calendar to find the details.

The conference will have a large focus on Second Life but will also have representations from educational use in Inworldz , OpenSim and more.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Legacy” and this title relates to the fact that this is 10th VWBPE, which is a very impressive feat.

Whereas the focus of the conference is quite rightly education, there will be a couple of one on one interviews with people whom you may be more familiar with from elsewhere as part of the Above The Book interviews.

Ebbe Altberg and Bernhard Drax (AKA Draxtor Despres) will be featured. A blog post gives details on this event and how you can attend :

This year, VWBPE introduces a new segment this year called Above the Book, conversational interviews with Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, on March 29 at 1pm PST and Bernhard Drax, creator of the award-winning mixed-reality documentary series “The Drax Files,” on April 1 at 3pm PST.

These sessions will be in a private region. To get your invitation to attend you need to submit a question for our guests. Start thinking about what to ask! Questions must be submitted no later than Sunday March 26 at 11:59pm PST (extended from original March 20th deadline).

Still a couple of days left to consider a good question.

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November 20, 2015

The Reality Of Virtual World Shopping Is The Second Life Marketplace

Diana Budds has published an article over at Fastco Design; The Future Of Shopping Is . . . Second Life On Acid? The article features the work of British designer and filmmaker Allison Crank, who is based in Eindhoven, which is in The Netherlands, not Britain!

The basis of the article is that e-commerce is trumping the mall and therefore, the social experience of the physical mall is being lost. Allison Crank suggests that one way of bringing back the social side of the mall is to introduce virtual reality.

Allison’s concept is the basis of her thesis from June 2015; The Reality Theatre: Shopping In The Ludic Century and in the FastCo Design article we get to hear more of the concept:

Crank calls it “a new third place for the public to meet, perform, indulge, and play in immersive environments.” I call it Second Life on acid. The designer envisions her concept working with augmented reality devices like Microsoft’s Hololens or Magic Leap to superimpose this virtual world over our own. For example, if someone were commuting, he or she could strap on an augmented reality headset and participate in the Reality Theater.

The major problem I have with Allison’s idea is that we’ve seen malls in Second Life, lots and lots of malls. We’ve seen malls with impossible physics, we can teleport in Second Life. However, malls in Second Life have been undone not by a future more immersive product, but by the ease of point and click shopping that the Second Life Marketplace offers. This isn’t unique to Second Life by the way, I’ve seen people in OpenSim asking for web based marketplaces, indeed Kitely has a web based marketplace.

People love the ease of shopping that web based marketplaces provide. This isn’t to say that Allison’s idea is dead in the water, far from it, but it is a warning to people who think virtual reality shopping is going to be a popular tool of choice compared to a web based shopping experience.

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November 7, 2015

Immersive Edge A Hypergrid Story Launches In OpenSim This Weekend

This weekend sees the launch of Immersive Edge, A Hypergrid Story. I initially took a look at this project a week or so ago; OpenSim Storytellers Are Developing Some Impressive Storytelling Techniques. The launch covers more than just introducing people to Immersive Edge, there will also be presentations from writers and designers regarding techniques and tools that can be used in bringing immersive fiction to virtual worlds utilising OpenSim.

Some of the techniques will also be good for other virtual worlds, but OpenSim has made some great leaps and bounds in making it easier for people to create immersive fiction than other platforms. Let’s take a look at the presenters for the launch, or more accurately, let’s take a look at Nara Malone’s blog post introducing us to the presenters; Meet the Presenters for Immersive Edge Launch.

Sande Chen

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer. Her writing work includes 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus and the 2007 PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher. Sande was also nominated for a Writers Guild Award in Videogame Writing for The Witcher.

Sande is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform and a contributor to Writing for Video Game Genres, Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, and Secrets of the Game Business.

Sande was profiled as one of the top 100 most influential women in the game industry back in 2006 for her work as Director of Girls in Games, Inc. On top of that, Sande was nominated for a Grammy Nomination in 1996 for music video direction.

So that’s quite an impressive bio I’d say! Sande will be speaking on Sunday November 8th at 9:00am SLT. The title of Sande’s presentation is : “How Technology is Changing Storytelling”.
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October 30, 2015October 30, 2015

OpenSim Storytellers Are Developing Some Impressive Storytelling Techniques

I’ve spoken to Nara Malone a few times now. Nara is an author, a storyteller and storytelling is something I’m somewhat passionate about. Back in June Nara showed me around OpenSim and gave me some insight into how they were using NPC’s. Things have progressed since then.

On November 7th – 8th An Adventure Game in Open Sim will be launched. Nara informed me that the team behind this immersive storytelling projects includes 25 creators from various grids, including Second Life. They will be exploring stories told with NPCs. Here’s a trailer :

The key thing to note with a project like this is how much collaboration there is between different people. Coders, designers, storytellers are all working on this project, adding their expertise to create the whole and it looks absolutely fascinating.

One of the tools used is The Story Sequencer, Nara talks about it more here.

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