Virtual conferencing in Second Life

A commercial Second Life conferencing service, has some useful ideas about what and how to do it.

"Using the on-line virtual world Second Life, Conference Island provides a far more enjoyable meeting experience than video conferencing and is without doubt better value for money. And it out-performs telephone hook-ups because it is so visually stimulating.

It's about more enjoyable meetings. It's about putting people in the same room at the same time, even though they work in different parts of the world. Think about this: through Second Life you will give them a sense of shared space. Face to face across a table, dangling their feet in a swimming pool or flying on a magic carpet." Read more here.

Snapshot below of virtual meeting between PolyU students (HK) and staff from Rixos Hotel Group, Turkey

Proceedings from NMC Conference on SL & Virtual Worlds

The conference proceedings from the 2007 NMC Summer Conference in Indianapolis on Second Life and virtual worlds is available from NMC. The papers are available here as a free PDF download, full colour, hyperlinked, with embedded video - a useful read.

Table of contents:

• The Arts Metaverse in Open Croquet: Exploring an Open Source 3-D Online Digital World
• Beyond World of Warcraft: the Universe of MMOGs
• ClevelandPlus in Second Life
• Folksemantic: Web 2.0 Tools for Teaching and Learning
• I Taught It, Bought It at the Game Store: Repurposing Commercial Games for Education
• Multi-threaded Interactive Storytelling for Literary Journalism
• Out of the Cave or Further In? The Realities of Second Life
• Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise: Socio-emotional Dimensions of Digital Culture Which Are Transforming the Shape of New Media Literacies
• Searching for an Ideal Live Video Streaming Technology
• Selling through Storytelling: The Tale of New Media Advertising in Consumer Culture
  
• Stereoscopic Visualization of Scientific and Medical Education
• Student Video Projects: Supporting the Beginning, the Middle, and the End
• Supporting Authors of Digital Case Stories to Engage Faculty with Innovative Teaching Practices
• Teaching Field Research in a Virtual World
• A View from Second Life’s Trenches: Are You a Pioneer or a Settler?
• The Yale Galapagos Project

The 3D Web and Virtual Worlds

Interesting post about the future of virtual worlds. There is a move to make the independent worlds able to interface with each other as part of a virtual 3D web. Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link to this paper from: "Today's virtual worlds represent the first phase of 3D Web. Dedicated servers running their own virtual worlds are to 3D Web what MySpace is to today's Web. In the future, 3D Web will be a network of virtual worlds that are owned by various entities. The success of virtual worlds will depend on factors such as openness, enterprise-strength platforms, vibrant communities, and a portfolio of services." Read the paper here.

Amazing artwork

I just had to feature this amazing artwork from Chris Jordan. Chris explains that his series looks at contemporary American culture through the lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on... Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Picture depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.