UK exhibition - wherefore art thou?

When I first started working on ArtsPlace I had in mind that I would do a new exhibition every month. Yeah, right! That rapidly slipped to doing a new exhibition every two months. And the reality... well, visitors to ArtsPlace will note that I haven't yet got beyond my first two exhibitions :-(.

I'm not too worried by this. Traffic to the current exhibitions remains reasonably healthy - note that I'm still intending to do some analysis of how many visitors I'm getting on a daily and weekly basis.

So, why is it so hard to do my third exhibition? Well, in part, I'd simply under-estimated the time required to build new exhibitions. I have other interests in SL, and therefore the time available for building my next exhibition isn't as much as it was for the first two.

More importantly though, the trouble lies in finding suitable material. In looking around for my third exhibition I set myself the aim of using a UK collection. I've considered a couple of collections at the AHDS, but made little progress - by and large, a lot of digitised UK content is made available on a 'personal use' basis. Re-using such a collection for an exhibition in SL would fall outside of this, and would therefore require significant negotiation to gain the necessary permissions. As an aside I'm slightly worried that such licencing seems to be the norm in the UK and I don't really understand why.

As far as I can tell, almost everything in the American Memory collection at the Library of Congress is in the public domain. Re-using it is therefore relatively painless. This doesn't seem to be the norm in the UK (though perhaps I'm guilty of extrapolating from a very small sample?).

I'm also tempted by putting up an exhibition of Illegal Art - not that this is UK-centric in any way. But it is an interesting collection of stuff. So far though, I've allowed myself to get cold feet about being sued for hosting this stuff in SL. Shame on me!

006.8 tee-shirts

I've put together a range of '006.8' tee-shirts... though you probably need to be a librarian to understand and/or be interested.

I can do them in black/blue/red/yellow/brown/emerald and short sleeved/long sleeved/vest style.

IM me in-world if you want one. They are free.

I'm assuming that Forest Press / OCLC aren't going to get upset about this! :-)

My neighbourhood

The area around ArtsPlace SL is beginning to get built up, with land that has been sitting around for sale for quite a while being bought and used. My near neighbours now include a number of Spanish people (there seems to be a growing Spanish community on Pak), a swimming pool (pictured) and a bondage gear stall! Nice.

Coincidentally, I've tentatively been offered space to move ArtsPLace SL onto the new ALA Arts Infoisland, though the area isn't currently open for access, which if it happens will be a much more appropriate location for me.

More LoopRez building

Here's a second attempt at using LoopRez to build... I'm not sure I like this one as much as the first, but I wanted something smaller and which could be chained together easily (as shown here).

I note that a Deluxe version of LoopRez looks to be available (or nearly available?). Interesting. Definitely looks worth having... see the tutorial for details.

Interface design

I'm now so used to using Alt and left mouse button to zoom in on things and change my view that I want the same action to work in my Web browser and other applications... I find my self trying to do this when I want to take a closer look at pictures in Web pages for example :-(

SL, Blender and SketchUp

I overheard a chat conversation between two people at the Berkman Sandbox the other day while playing some more with LoopRez. The conversation was in German so I couldn't understand it. But I followed up a couple of the URLs they were talking about (just being nosy I guess!), here, here and here.

These pages talk about using Blender, Google SketchUp and even MS Powerpoint as tools for building SL objects. Very interesting... not that I've tried any of this yet. But it seems to me to be indicative, in a very positive way, of the powerful ways in which SL can be interfaced to other software and systems.

Coincidentally, I was interviewed by someone from the museum community the other night (for me) in SL - part of some background research for a paper for the Museums and the Web conference. The interview was primarily about my experiences of developing ArtsPlace SL. In passing I was asked if I'd tried other 3-D virtual worlds. I responded that I'd tried There.com briefly, but didn't like it - largely because the camera handling disagrees with me slightly. But it's also interesting to note that the growth of the porn and gambling industry in SL which, while somewhat unsavory in some respects, can be viewed in quite a positive light from a purely technical view. As with the early days of the Web, the porn industry in particular is very quick and innovative in the way it adopts new technologies and generally leads the way where others follow (at least in technical terms).

LoopRez and buildings

I've been messing around a little with LoopRez over the weekend, seeing what it can do with buildings.

LoopRez is a neat little SL script which takes an object (any object) and repeats it in a circular or elliptical pattern. It's very easy to use, though tweaking the parameters to get the right results can take some time.

Here's what I came up with by repeating the object above ten times in a circle...

Note that by removing the roof prims from the resulting building, it is easy to build up multiple-floors...

By the way, this is the kind of thing that happens when you get the LoopRez parameters wrong! :-)

As an aside, I did nearly all the building for this in the Berkman Sandbox. I, and a few others round me, suffered a brief interlude of griefing (pushing and barging with sparks!) which was quite entertaining, at least at first. :-)

MeetingPod on SchomeBase

The folks at Schome have kindly agreed to let me set up a version fo the MeetingPod on SchomeBase, their SL island.

I've done this, using a different design to the MeetingPod on Cybrary City, as you can see in these pictures. It was great to be able to build next to water.

US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory

The NOAA/ESRL Virtual Island is well worth a look.

Jeff Barr's blog entry gives a pretty good summary of what is available. As he says, it's

a good demonstration of what can be done with Second Life to create interactive learning and teaching tools.

ArtsPlace SL in the AvaStar

The WPA Poster Collection at ArtsPlace SL has got a mention in the current issue of The AvaStar (Issue 4, Jan 12th 2007, page 27 [PDF]) under 'Art and Design'.

An impressive and varied display from the American Library of Congress.

How cool is that!?

Privacy issues with llSensor

I currently use llSensor in the Eduserv office in the Talis tower block on Cybrary City, the Eduserv MeetingPod and ArtsPlace SL to monitor how many avatars are visiting. I have done this up until now without giving visitors any indication that they are being logged in this way.

It struck me recently that this may not be acceptable from a privacy point of view (even though I suspect that this kind of tracking is commonplace throughout SL). Yes, I'm only tracking avatar names, but many people choose to make public the association between their avatar name and their real-life name, so in many cases I am effectively monitoring usage by identified individuals.

Obviously, I treat any information gathered in this way as being private. It is not disclosed anywhere. I do it primarily to monitor usage, but it is sometimes also useful to be able to follow up with people who have visited when I wasn't there.

Given my concerns, I could either:

• stop doing it! :-)
• add a CCTV (or similar) sign to the area in which I'm tracking usage
• switch to using some anonymised form of identifier (rather than name), e.g. an MD5 hash of the avatar name
• switch to an explicit tracking method (e.g. a visitor book of some kind)

I raised this issue on the AllianceSecondLife Google group and as a result of the responses have decided to experiment with a small 3-D padlock icon containing a notecard with a short privacy statement. This is what the result looks like.

This makes it reasonably clear to visitors what I'm doing and allows them either to complain or not return (or both!) if they so choose.

Lights!

Hmmm... OK, so the lighting still isn't working properly in ArtsPlace SL. It works fine on my work laptop, but not on my desktop machine at home. I assume it has something to do with how well spec'ed the video card is??

Anyway... I need to investigate further. For the time being, if you turn up at ArtsPlace after dark and you can't see well enough force the sun to 'noon' in your client.

Addendum: Thanks to advice received from the AllianceSecondLife Group I now realise that I needed to enable 'local lighting' in my SL client preferences. Doh!

Presenting in [Teen] Second Life

Global Kids have released a very useful PDF document describing various approaches to giving a presentation in Teen Second Life - though I assume that everything they say applies to Second Life as well.

The document covers six approaches to presenting, from the basic use of live video streams thru to highly-innovative 'physics-free presentations'.

It would be very nice if there was a companion technical how-to document, that covered the gory details of how to set up each of these approaches from a technical point of view. But as a general overview of available approaches this is a great start...

Imitating RL

I've noticed a tendency for creations in SL to mimic their RL counterparts. Obvious examples include people's avatars, which I suspect often are designed to be similar to the RL owner (albeit sometimes portraying a view of the owner thru rose-tinted spectacles). Clearly, I'm ignoring a significant leaning towards wings and furries by some residents which I presume aren't matched in RL!

Buildings also tend to take on a RL form more often than not. Why have a roof when it never rains, a bed when you never sleep or chairs when you never need to rest your legs? I guess these things make us feel more comfortable in some way? And, to a large extent, I designed ArtsPlace SL with a physical building very much in mind.

Similarly, many buildings tend to look as though they are constrained by the forces in RL - though there are significant exceptions. In my Eduserv role, I've just built a clear spherical meeting room that I call the MeetingPod, floating somewhere over CybraryCity. It doesn't need anything to hold it up, but the walls are helpful in preventing people falling off (though Silversprite Helsinki will know that there are some teething problems in that area).

On geography

It strikes me that the geography of SL can be quite disorientating. In RL we are used to geography being one of the things that defines what is and isn't possible - where you can easily get to on foot, and where you have to take a car, train or flight for example. In SL, everything is a search and a teleport away - co-location means relatively little.

While the teleport experience is quite liberating, it also means it is very difficult to get a sense of the overall layout of things.

I'm not complaining you understand. Just noting!

There are still occasions when I walk or fly somewhere - but often it is only because the teleport sub-system doesn't always seem to function 100% at the moment.

I'm partly thinking about this because I've built ArtsPlace SL on my own land, well away from its arguably more natural home on a sim like InfoIsland - and I'm wondering how much that matters. Clearly, there are issues with who your neighbors are in terms of what you look out over - but in terms of where you are, I'm not sure how important it is. At the moment I'm assuming that passing traffic is an irrelevance compared to getting good visibility is SL search engine results?

Welcome...

Hi, and welcome to the ArtsPlace SL blog. This is primarily where I'll post news and updates about ArtsPlace SL, my home in Second Life (SL), but I'll also use it to share my experiences of SL more generally.

Who am I? My name is Art Fossett and I've been a resident in SL for a couple of weeks. Not long... but long enough that I know I like it. And long enough the begin building stuff. Stuff like ArtsPlace SL, a space in SL intended to allow libraries, museums, archives and galleries to come together with artists and like-minded people in building innovative digital creations.

I've no idea how or whether this is going to work out... it may all come to nothing. But it seems to me that there is a potential in this pace for interesting things to happen.

In RL my name is Andy Powell. I work for Eduserv, a UK not-for-profit charity that works to support the effective use of ICT in education. I'm Head of Development for the Eduserv Foundation, a role that is largely about providing advice to the education community about the use of ICT and about providing some funding to support that where we can. In RL, I blog at eFoundations. To be honest, I'm not yet sure how my RL role and my ArtsPlace SL role are going to intersect.

Anyway, that's enough for now... I'll try and keep posting here regularly, as my experience of second life grows.