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Things to do in Second Life - suggestions?
Euan Adie
Tuesday, 10 April 2007 09:46 UTC
Does anybody have any recommendations for people to meet, cool places to see, that kind of thing?
Here’s my contribution: I thought that this was quite interesting. OK, it’s a bit rubbish but at least it’s not a casino or shop selling adult body parts.
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Replies
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Another interesting place is Terminus, a virtual ecosystem with various species which interact with each other, mutate and spread throughout their land.
A brief description from their island:
The Ecosystem working group is a small group of dedicated scripters and builders committed to the notion of developing a simple, but functioning, ecosystem within the confines of the Second Life platform. We are attempting to develop common protocols for animal-animal interaction and believe our experiments here can enrich Second Life and the scientific understanding of complex systems themselves.
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I maintain a list of science-related places in Second Life. You can get that list (a notecard full of landmarks) by clicking on the sign at the Science Center on Info Island II
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I have not made my mind up yet: I find the technology interesting, but quite limited too. Unlike games, there is not story, and much more like the WWW. However, I fail to see at this moment the advantages over WWW.
I found the ‘International Spaceflight Museum’ most interesting sofar, though I like Bradley’s ‘cemetary’ with Blue Obelisks quite interesint too (on central island of Second Nature). BTW, the ethymology of the blue obelisk comes via open science from the ‘Blue Obelisk Movement’ at http://blueobelisk.org/.
So, a counter question: Euan, where do you feel that SL has something to offer that other technologies do not?
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Egon: I’m not sure at the moment. :) If development was a little easier (if you could script objects in python, javascript or anything apart from LSL, for example) and the graphics got a bit better I think there’s a lot of potential for kickass visualizations of all sorts of data (from both the web and RL).
So wow factor, I guess.
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You can also make interesting museums in Second Life, like the International Spaceflight Museum, where you can tour with your friends and see how big the Saturn V Rocket is compared to them.
Second Life is a great place to have live events: discussions, presentations, debates, meetings, chats, salons, cafes, etc. Live music is very popular, with dozens of shows every day.
As an example of an event, John Wilbanks, the Executive Director of Science Commons, gave a talk about SC yesterday at the Science Center in SL. There were scientists there from all over the place – and they didn’t have to book an airplane or hotel to do so. Phil Plait, “The Bad Astronomer” is coming to talk on Saturday.
I’ve met many scientists and other science-types from all over the world in Second Life… people who I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise. Some of those chance meetings have led to collaborations.
The other day, I met someone in SL who had just started and was trying it out. He walked up to me and asked me if I was a real person. I said yes. He then asked me Turing-test-type questions, like “Read that graphical sign over there.” Eventually he was convinced. I could see the light going off in his head: “Oh – this place is full of people!”
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I think the visualization of a molecule docking in an enzyme pocket that Hiro Sheridan (Andrew Lang) put up on Drexel island is a good example of a chemistry application. No it won’t replace molecular visualization programs but it does provide a different interface – and we don’t yet know where that will lead.
Egon – to try to answer your question about the utility of Second Life, it is about networking and collaborating. Poster sessions work extremely well – I say they work even better than exhausting and expensive face-to-face conferences. I had the chance to experience that at the Best Practices in Education conference on May 25th.
I’m trying to gather some posters on Drexel Island and, if we can get to a critical mass, I think that a chemistry poster conference would make sense.
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