A Giant Likert-Scale Social-Graphing Tool in Second Life
By Tom Werner | July 17, 2008
Here’s a simple, clever tool for ice-breaking, feedback, or decision making with groups in Second Life.
It’s giant Likert-scale floor mat called The Opinionator (SLurl).
(It’s recommended by Jane Wilde.)
The Opinionator costs 99 Linden dollars, which is less than a half-dollar US. Right-click on it to buy it.
You can drag it out anywhere in Second Life that allows creating objects.
Present a statement.
When avatars stand on their answers (Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree), a pie chart shows the percentages of opinions.
Take a quick snapshot and you have a record of the group’s opinion about the statement.
It would also be a simple way to add some audience participation to a slide presentation in Second Life.
It’s interesting to imagine how 3D group-dynamics tools like this could make virtual worlds effective for team building.
Topics: 3D Internet, Second Life® | No Comments »
An Easy Way to Give a Tour in Second Life
By Tom Werner | July 16, 2008
One of the challenges of Second Life is that new visitors have a hard time navigating.
There’s a definite learning curve — and some frustration — involved.
However, there’s an easy way to show new visitors around Second Life without their having to navigate: the MystiTool’s AV Follow Chairs.
The AV Follow Chairs let you create chairs that attach invisibly to your avatar and follow you whenever you go (snapshot at left).
You essentially turn your avatar into a tour bus.
The MystiTool also has a zillion other features in it.
It’s not free but it’s very inexpensive: about $400 Linden dollars (less than $2 US) at Mysti’s House of Sheep (SLurl) in Second Life.
The MystiTool is a good example of how virtual worlds will get easier and easier to use, and more and more accessible to learners.
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The Distinction Between Games and Virtual Worlds Is Blurry
By Tom Werner | July 15, 2008
I was asked recently, what’s the difference between a game and a virtual world.
My answer was, basically, that a game has objectives, scoring, and winning, and a virtual world doesn’t.
But the distinction is blurry.
In an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal Junot Díaz described ’sandbox games,’ where you can stop playing the game and just do stuff.
Díaz noted that, despite the recent publicity about Grand Theft Auto IV, GTA III was the game-changer because it put the player in charge:
“GTA III brought a level of immersion, a depth of play never before seen in videogames. Other games allow you to play God or a hero but GTA III came the closest to letting you play something far more basic and far more strange. It let you, in a way, play a person…”
So, is GTA a game where you stop playing and just do virtual things? Or a virtual world where you can choose to play a game?
These immersive environments are going to become so flexible that they’ll be able to support whatever we want them to be: a game, a simulation, a 3D demonstration, a role play, a collaborative workspace.
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S4SL: Easy Graphical Programming in Second Life
By Tom Werner | July 14, 2008
Scratch 4 Second Life (S4SL) is a graphical programming language that lets you create Second Life scripts by simply snapping together graphical blocks.
With S4SL, you can snap together blocks to make Second Life objects respond to chat commands.
This of course is easier than using Linden Scripting Language (LSL).
You can begin to see a future in which practitioners can easily create interactive activities in a virtual world.
S4SL is by Eric Rosenbaum at the MIT Media Lab.
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The Crompco Virtual Gas Station
By Tom Werner | July 11, 2008
Crompco was the first company in the world to use Second Life for corporate training.
Crompco does underground tank, line, and environmental testing.
At the Crompco virtual gas station the instructor can click to remove the asphalt and the learners can see the underground gas lines in 3D.
Simple but powerful.
A big improvement over sketching gas lines on a whiteboard.
You can see a video here.
Topics: 3D Internet, Classroom instruction, Second Life® | No Comments »
Canadian Border-Guard Training in Second Life
By Tom Werner | July 10, 2008
Ken Hudson, in a slide presentation at the Federal Virtual Worlds Expo, described a border-guard training course for students at Loyalist College.
The course included four hours of training and 12 hours of simulation in Second Life.
The simulation took place in a virtual border crossing station in Second Life, complete with guard stations and vehicles.
(The snapshot at top left shows a real border crossing. The snapshot at lower left shows the virtual border crossing.)
Students role-played border guards and travelers.
The virtual border guards were able to check credentials such as passports and vehicle identification and interview travelers, all in Second Life.
Anecdotal comments by learners indicated that the students appreciated the realism of the virtual environment.
This is the sort of training that a virtual world seems very good for: where learners have to make real-time decisions in a physical space based on visual-spatial cues.
(A lot of workplace-related training in Second Life — at least what’s publicized — seems to be university courses that are heavily workplace-oriented.)
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Avatars Move Across Virtual Worlds
By Tom Werner | July 9, 2008
IBM and Linden Lab announced that researchers successfully teleported avatars from Second Life into another virtual world running on an OpenSim server.
So, for the first time an avatar moved from one virtual world to another without logging out of one and into the other.
This is a big step toward avatars moving freely between virtual worlds.
The avatars’ Inventories did not transport across the barrier. (This sounds bad, but apparently is good. Users are concerned that their stuff from one virtual world could be stolen in another.)
There’s a machinima film here.
And a blog post here.
Topics: 3D Internet, Second Life® | No Comments »
My Second Look at Wonderland
By Tom Werner | July 8, 2008
I installed OpenOffice and took a second visit to Wonderland.
I happened to meet a couple of other visitors on the St. Paul College node.
Sound worked, and we were able to talk by voice.
We all asked the same thing: ‘Have you been able to use shared apps?’
Although I installed OpenOffice, I still haven’t had any luck with shared apps. There must be some trick to it.
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Talking with the Freudbot in Second Life
By Tom Werner | July 7, 2008
It seems like chatbots (also called chat agents or conversational agents) are becoming more common in Second Life.
Bots are important of course because they allow for asynchronous activity.
The Freudbot (SLurl) (snapshot, top left) at Athabasca University in Second Life is pretty interesting.
The Freudbot was written for regular chat in Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), and then linked into Second Life.
A description of conversational agents and distance education at Athabasca is here.
And an academic paper entitled ‘Freudbot: An Investigation of Chatbot Technology in Distance Education’ from Athabasca is here.
Here’s some of my conversation with the Freudbot (I’m talking to software, not a human):
Me: What is the subconscious?
Freudbot Voom: Subconscious is not a term that I used. I divided consciousness into conscious, preconscious and unconsconscious.
Me: Tell me about dreams.
Freudbot Voom: Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, my friend.
Me: What are some common dreams?
Freudbot Voom: I mentioned that Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, my friend. The interpretation of dreams is an integral part of psychoanalysis and affords a unique opportunity to understand a person’s unconscious motives or conflicts. Many people believe that my book on The Interpretation of Dreams is one of my most important works.
Me: What makes people neurotic?
Freudbot Voom: Neuroses are the result of powerful libidinal drives that are repressed into the unconscious. The energy required to prevent them from coming back into consciousness can cause hysteria and other neurotic disorders.
Topics: 3D Internet, Second Life® | 1 Comment »
Giant Cell in Second Life
By Tom Werner | July 3, 2008
One of the great things about a virtual world like Second Life is the ability to change the scale of 3D objects.
Here’s a eukaryotic cell (cell with a nucleus) on Genome Island (SLurl) in Second Life.
You can enter it and see the cell structures close up.
If you click on a mitochondrion or a lysosome you get a notecard describing it.
Great stuff.
Topics: 3D Internet, Second Life® | No Comments »
