The Builders' Dance

One interesting characteristic of Second Life is that its authoring/development can be done collaboratively. I'm used to working in my own closed environments by myself (Flash, Final Cut, Dreamweaver, and even Word) and only later distributing what I've created for criticism, reaction, fame, and glory (OK, I tend only to get the first two, lol). But in Second Life, I can build furniture or a place, or script an object, or design an interaction, and when I do so, I can do it with friends/colleagues. We can literally work on a single object at the same time.

This of course changes the nature of the designing processes, introducing synchronous collaborative possibilities not available in traditional multimedia authoring environments.

Yesterday, I learned of a really cool spin one couple put on this. While they build together, they "park" their avatars in a dance animation (the "Lindy Hop," a jazz dance popular in a bygone era). This in no way prevents them from building, but it establishes a visualization of their intimacy, with connotations of earlier days and sounds, that plays while they work together. This would not be possible IRL, since it is hard to construct houses while doing the Lindy Hop! Very cool.

alle on the Holodeck

One of the benefits of being a tagalong is that if you can find yourself following cool enough friends, you occasionally see some very interesting things. Last night, I was hanging out with two very cool friends, when I was invited into a Second Life "holodeck."

The holodeck is a room inside a smallish cube. Each of its walls has a photo from RL, which are joined seamlessly together to create a 360 degree panoramic view of a scene, such as the sea and cliffs of Monterrey, a ski chalet in Slovenia, or the flowery fields shown in the picture below.



The holodeck contains 25 such scenes. The trick is in getting the photographs to line up seamlessly, which the designer accomplished using a QuickTime VR camera. In essence, all that is going on here is a simple application of QTVR in SL, which as a technical strategy isn't terribly exciting conceptually.

But the results actually are unusually compelling. The reason, I think, is that we're not used to seeing our avvies (a) in photorealistic environments, and (b) in environments with draw distances above a couple hundred meters. Interestingly, once the photos load, the illusion is quite compelling, both disorienting and creating a sense that you are in a much larger space than you really are.