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Showing posts from December, 2007

Art Fossett on SL

Yesterday I attended a very fun and immersive Second Life talk by Art Fossett, the in-game avatar, accompanied by his on-earth alter ego, Andy Powell of Eduserv. It was fun mostly because he'd organised it to take place on Eduserv island, in the conference room, and invited friends and colleagues to attend online. They kept chuckling like a misbehaving class, turning into dinosaurs, cartwheeling around, and calling him Chubster behind his back (on the projection screen, but he could spy them from his laptop so he caught them out). All very innocent fun though and it complemented his talk quite well. The presentation was organised as a series of t-shirts, which took a while to res the next topic name on the avatar's chest. Interesting for the links it turned up, although they kept mentioning something called slideshare, (which I guess I should google!) where the slides will probably turn up soon enough. There are a lot of mailing lists following Second Life activity in higher e

Planning for dream machines

Workshop is in 2 months, have found http://www.ventrilo.com/ and http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24 and above all discovered Garry's Mod, a modification of half life 2 that allows you to position characters from the game, and the many sci fi characters that forum users have created and posted online, can be used to create situations, poses and scripted movements or multiplayer acting environments. The link I gave above was for a forum where people post the videos they're making, or making calls for actors to be in their movies. But I have to remember that we aren't making movies. Maybe we're making archives, personal archives or documentation about things by encoding it in a three dimensional space. Or maybe parody star wars re-enactments? Garry's mod costs 10 dollars, so I'm tempted to use it to create characters in the workshop on the second day, although that would mean windows machines again, and some of this is so limiting because it&