World builder

Impressive short movie from Bruce Branit:

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production.

Nothing to do with Second Life, except in the similarity of building techniques, and the fact that despite all the technology the resulting virtual world looks disappointingly like the real world :-)

[Via Digital Urban]

Theatron

News from the Theatron project:

Looking for a place in Second Life for performance, a resource for the study of theatres, inspiration for creativity, or just a neat place to take a look at? Then you might want to take a look at Theatron Island .

Theatron is a project run by King's Visualisation Lab at King's College London and funded by Eduserv. Seven theatres are available on the site; these are Theatre of Pompey, (Roman) Epidaurus, ( Greece , Greek and Hellenistic) Globe Theatre, ( London , Renaissance) Odeion of Pericles, ( Greece , Greek and Hellenistic) Piran Round, ( Cornwall , UK , Medieval Hellerau Festspielhaus, ( Hellerau , Germany , 20th C) Odeion of Agrippa, ( Greece , Hellenistic and Roman)

If you would like to arrange a visit, or book the space for a class, then please contact Mark Childs (mark.childs@coventry.ac.uk ), IM Gann McGann inworld, or follow this SLURL to the viewing platform. Only one of the theatres is rezzed at any one time, but any of the other theatres can be rezzed on request.

Theatron Island is part of the Theatron Project, which also involves the UK Higher Education Academy's English Subject Centre and PALATINE , the Dance, Drama & Music Subject Centre. Five other institutions from across the UK are performing and creating within the Theatron spaces. More information about the project is available and you can take a look at the findings as we develop them at our wiki. A project website is under development and will be launched shortly.

The Manual

This is the best SL resource I've seen for some time... The Manual: a list of 81 in-world activities ranging from easy (#1) to hard (#24) and the sublime (#28) to the ridiculous (#50).  Kudos to the guys at Leeds (@kisa and @cubistscarboro) for pulling this stuff together.

Facets of virtual worlds

Sarah Robbins' Virtual Worlds Facet Study is now available as a Google spreadsheet .  There's a lot of material here, covering 70-odd virtual worlds, so it's well worth looking at.

Tom Eckersley exhibition

As a spare time activity I'm putting together an exhibition of posters by Tom Eckersley for the ArtsPlace gallery on Eduserv Island.  The posters, 24 of them, have been selected (and used with permission) from the Eckersley Archive hosted by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).

As with any activity like this in the UK, clearing rights over the images has taken a while but I'm grateful to staff at VADS for dealing with this side of things on my behalf.

As you can see, I've got as far as uploading the images and plonking them onto poster sized prims.  Note that I used Picnik, the online image manipulation tool, to add a frame to each poster.  Now I need to get the sizes and aspect ratios correct, position them on the walls of ArtsPlace and create a notecard for each holding VADS catalog record for each of the selected posters.  Shouldn't be too long, assuming I get my finger out.

Watch this space...

AudioStreaming Firecaster

When we hold RL events for which there is a SL audience we usually use voice-chat to carry audio from the live presentations to the SL delegates.  I've always felt uncomfortable about using Art Fossett to carry this audio, even in those cases where it is Andy Powell who is speaking but particularly so in other situations.

For tomorrow's Maximising the impact of Virtual Worlds in Teaching and Learning event in Glasgow I've created a new avatar, AudioStreaming Firecaster, just to carry the audio from the event onto Eduserv Island. AudioStreaming will be positioned just next to the slides (that Art Fossett will be displaying in-world in sync with the RL speakers' slides).  That's leaves Art Fossett free to move around the SL venue as I see fit.

Education Support Faire

Linden Lab have announced an education support faire, to run for 6 days from the 25th to the 30th January 2009:

To support the educational community, we would like to invite you to participate in and attend Linden Lab’s inaugural Education Support Faire! Over the years, Second Life has provided ways for the world of academia to put to use creativity lending to immersive education, distance learning, knowledge sharing, faculty networking–and many other ways to enhance the collective educational community’s efforts in the real world. The success of projects surrounding these efforts within Second Life can be attributed to the many innovative educators, academics, and students who have chosen to utilize Second Life for these purposes.

The main goal for the Education Support Faire is to bring together educators, academics, and students to explore the support mechanisms available to residents who use Second Life to enhance real world educational efforts.