The history of Second Life is extensively descibed in the official Second Life guide, [SecondLife].
Beginning 2004, almost out of the blue,
Second Life
appeared with
a high adoption and low churn rate, now counting, March 2007,
over 4 million inhabitants.
Considering the cost of ownership of land, which easily amounts to
200 euro per month rent after an initial investment of 1500 euro for a
single piece of land measuring 65,536 square meters,
the adoption of Second Life by individuals as well as companies such as ABN-AMRO,
Philips and institutions such as Harvard is surprising.
What is the secret of the success of Second Life?, we asked in
[VUSL], and we immediately confessed:
We don't know!
But in comparison to other platforms for immersive worlds,
including MMORPGs such as
World of Warcraft
and
Everquest,
Second Life seems to offer an optimal combination of
avatar modification options,
gesture animations, in-game construction tools,
and facilities for communication and social networking, such as chatting and instant messaging.
Incorporating elements of community formation, commonly denoted
as Web 2.0, and exemplified in
MySpace,
YouTube and
Flickr,
the immersive appearance, perhaps also the built-in physics
and the inclusion of elementary economic principles,
seem to be the prime distinguishing factors
responsible for the success of Second Life.
In addition, the possibility of recording collaborative enacted stories, [Stories],
using built-in machinima certainly
also contributes
to its appeal.
What has been characterized as a shift of culture,
from a media consumer culture to a participatory culture, [Participatory],
where users also actively contribute content, (was) for our
institution one of the decisive reasons to create a presence
in Second Life, to build a virtual platform that may embody
our so-called community of learners,
where both staff and students cooperate in contributing content,
content related to our sciences, that is.
Basically following up on companies like Nike, ING and ABN-AMRO, from which we, incidentally,
borrowed the island on which we built our virtual campus.
The 1st of March 2007, we went live.
In the evening there was a news item on national televison,
RTL4 news, featuring the students showing
the virtual campus and our project leader explaining
the reasoning behind our presence in Second Life and
how to give a course in the virtual classroom.
A similar item appeared at AT5, local Amsterdam television,
and various newspapers, among which Parool, Telegraaf and Volkskrant,
spent a multiple-column article to report on our efforts.
As a note, not surprisingly, all items focused on what
we have characterized as the naive interpretation
of our efforts, exemplifying the old credo
the medium is the message.
To be clear, as will be discussed below,
our intention was not to provide a virtual replica,
nor to provide an analogon of the Open University,
in Second Life.
After the news broadcasts, the number of visitors
increased dramatically, having stayed at a modest below 100
during the day.
In the evening, however, just after the news items on the national television,
the number of visitors increased rapidly.
Since at the time we did have only one island, it appeared to be very difficult
to separate internal experimental activities from visitors just asking for additional information,
and to exclude potentially malicious visitors.
In that evening,
we were even surprised by the invasion of an army of
Mario Brothers. Hilarious and non-harmful. But enough reason to sit back
and limit access to our campus for students and staff
only the day after our open day.
A few days later, after the first turbulent days following the TV broadcasts,
we re-opened our virtual campus to allow visitors to walk/fly around,
and enjoy our news items and informative videos.
The first idea that comes to mind, naturally, is to
use Second Life to offer courses online.
But, although we did have plans to give lectures (college)
on law, probably including the enactment of a particular case,
we did consider this approach as rather naive, and frankly I see
no reason to include what may be considered an outdated
paradigm of learning in our virtual campus, where there
might be more appealing alternatives.
Similarly, using the virtual laboratory for experiments
might not be the best way to offer courses, although,
again, we do intend to provide a model of a living cell,
allowing students to study the structure, functionality and behavior
of organic cells in virtual space.
Considering the success of our multi-disciplinary building team,
it seems more worthwhile to take the cooperative effort of
building as a model, and switch to a paradigm of learning
in which in-game exploration and building plays an important role.
As we observed in section 3.4, gaming
may provide a form of active learning, that is
allowing the gamer to
active learning
- experience the world in new ways
- form new affiliations
- preparate for future learning
This is due to intense involvement or immersion
in the game environment, which even
encourages critical learning or as we characterized it,
following [VideoGame],
situated cognition in a semiotic domain, that is a world of meaning.
What is this world of meaning that a game exemplifies, and how is it related to the more
general notion(s) of immersion and flow?
We explored the use of 3D desktop VR for presenting artworks in context,
using 3D not to contruct a replica of physical space, but as a means
to allow immersive access to both (representations of) artworks and information about
these artworks.
In [Dossier], we wrote:
the abramovic dossier presents itself as a digital archive in 3D space, containing
information about the artworks of the
performance artist Marina Abramovic by presenting media content
and relational structures, serving as an information source for museum curators
to conserve and install the artworks.
As a follow-up on the abramovic dossier, the 2005 Casus group developed
a digital dossier for the artist Jeffrey Shaw.
One interesting aspect of
the dossier for Shaw is the availability of a tool environment to learn about
the construction and de-construction of the Revolution
installation and to
experiment with the exhibition space parameters of the artwork, such as the
lighting conditions, and the color and texture of the walls and the floor.
In [Dossier] we further observed that with the Casus 2005 group there was, interestingly,
a strong resistance against using 3D for the concept graph navigation
mechanism. So we explored a mixed approach, using 2D for the concept graph,
and 3D only for the representation of the Revolution installation.
Nevertheless, although the dossier for Shaw does
realize many of the goals set for the next generation dossier, see section 10.2,
it did fail in providing an immersive application.
It did not achieve a
natural transition between browsing the concept space
and inspecting/experiencing the media recordings of the artwork,
thus disrupting the natural flow of attention ...
(C) Æliens
04/09/2009
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