Peace And Tranquility

okay, so secondlife, often shortened to SL, is a pretty awesome place. it allows people to come together from across the globe in a virtual environment where almost anything is possible. when first signing up, you get to pick an avatar which is supposed to represent yourself, but can be anything. for example look at what i have for the most part of the adventure:

Me as Ironman in SL

but as soon as someone can get used to me being Ironman, i can be like wa-bam! and change into the famous Darth Vadar attempting to use the lightsaber to “kill” a fellow classmate as a practical joke. (of course we cant die in this virtual world)

Me in as Darth Vadar

as this is a virtual world, the seating of your avatar is limitless. meaning, my avatar can fly through the air, hover in the air, and use this to sit down on objects in a sim that one would usually not sit on. during class, i had the privelage to sit down on a speaker at the top of the stage, and after class in the africa region, i got to sit down on a bird as it flew in circles over the land.

Me sitting on a speaker during class

Sitting on a bird flying above the land

earlier i had mentioned something going from class to an africa sim, meaning, as a class we teleported from the stage area where we had originally gathered, to a virtual sim of africa, where you can hear the different animals in africa, and even take an automated hot air balloon ride across the entire simulation while a recording tells you what everything is. check it out, the first picture is when we had gathered at the NMC stage to learn the basics of SL, and the second is when we instantaneously teleported away from that region to a virtual africa.

Class

Class in africa

more about SL, it has its many advantages, like stated earlier, this virtual world allows people from all over the world come together at any time of the day to take a virtual vacation, or a virtual class. but this does have its disadvantages as well. in all the public places, you have the random chance, of someone you dont know speaking some language other than your native tongue, and then communication is halted between the two people. it can get frustrating. i believe there is a function on SL, if you own the land, then you have complete rights over who visits and who cant. this way it is possible to have a secure class online, without the chance of random people who dont belong walking in. or as it happened in our class, flying in and sitting down.

in the actual SL programming, i can tell there is still plenty of work to do. clothing that an avatar can be wearing, would not follow the avatar that was wearing the clothing all the time, as seen in the following picture. the following picture depicts one of my classmates sitting down at the NMC stage thing, but the skirt she was wearing decides not to follow the avatar, and go straight through the seat on which the avatar was sitting.

broken skirt?

and then there are some objects within SL that we found while we were exploring. one such object was a crocodile that was able to “eat” your avatar, if you sat down on top of it. but then the scripts had a problem because while the crocodile was busy eating the avatar, somehow the avatars behind would go through the crocodile to appear on top of its head.

crocodile + avatar behind

And now for the grand finale, a barrage of pictures taken from SL during my time there. some of the picture depict our class, and some pretty silly, as someone bobs for apples and milks a cow. for space reasons, they will be all linked via tinypic (and ease of putting them onto the blog)

http://tinypic.com/r/2rnk6lk/4

http://tinypic.com/r/3523yxi/4

http://tinypic.com/r/azihph/4

http://tinypic.com/r/2uhu6c3/4

http://tinypic.com/r/2gvmslx/4

http://tinypic.com/r/2zf05dc/4

http://tinypic.com/r/2wgszlc/4

http://tinypic.com/r/2upu2id/4

http://tinypic.com/r/i43hub/4

http://tinypic.com/r/2z87slz/4

http://tinypic.com/r/2ciic89/4

http://tinypic.com/r/nf5ons/4

http://tinypic.com/r/24awwfl/4

http://tinypic.com/r/11imj6b/4

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 23:41 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.