Day four of the Second Life Community Convention began with.Linden Lab‘s Tom Hale (pictured on the right) unveiling new features that are coming soon, and sneak peaks at wish list items we could see over the coming year. These include features such as searchable maps, pre-developed land for sale, a new registration form for new members (thank you, Linden Lab … I’ve had to guide several noobs through the confusing current registration procedure!), a new social website-like dashboard that integrates the various aspects of a resident’s Second Life existence, and a redesigned secondlife.com website. There were also mentions of plans to allow use of allowing the use of mesh for 3D modeling, allowing multiple media textures including Flash, interactive web textures that allow clicking on links, and collaborative text editing.

 

In the afternoon, machinimas from the 2009 MaMachinima Festival were shown. The next two pictures are from two of the machinimas shown. The first is from the machinima Orientation, which was made in Second Life at Virtual Holland by Chantal Harvey, with performance by Arthole (Arahan Claveau and Nebulosus Severine). The next one is from Erlkönig, based on the story by 18th century German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and made in Second Life by Cisco Vandeverre.

According to the Mamachinama website, these machinimas can all be viewed from within Second Life, but when I tried it, the SLURL was for an invalid location. DVDs were handed out to people at SLCC, which is where these images came from.

 

One of the most amazing workshops to me was the one in which Max the Virtual Guide Dog was demonstrated. Most people don’t know that there are blind people in Second Life, who join for essentially the same reasons that sighted people do – to have fun and to meet people. Max allows the visually-impaired to navigate through Second Life and be aware of where they are, where they are headed, and what objects and avatars are around them. You can learn more at the Virtual Guide Dog Project.

This was the fourth and final day of SLCC 2009. You can read about the preceding days of the convention in Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

"When you are in Second Life, do you pretend to be someone you are not?" This is a question that a college teacher who holds classes in Second Life asks his students. This brings up a hugely important question in virtual worlds and depending on how he meant it, could indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of how virtual worlds work.

When a person adopts an avatar of a different race or gender, or a different persona than how he or she is known in the real world, is it pretending to be someone else, is it exploring different sides of ones’ self, or is it simply being whothe person feels most comfortable being? The question implies that it’s simply pretending to be someone else, but can be far more to it than that. In virtual worlds, it’s common for people to adopt avatars who are very different from their real life identities. It doesn’t have to be pretending to be what they are not.

.This was only one of a long list of issues raised on day three of the Second Life Community Convention.

 

One fascinating workshop was "Plastic Reality", in which a panel consisting of Kolar Fell, Capn Kurka, Filthy Fluno, Tuna Oddfellow, and Manx Wharton discussed virtual worlds, art, and mixed reality, and showed a video, Synthetic Masquerade, of a mixed reality art exhibit at San Francisco’s Somarts. The video can be seen on YouTube.

One point made by the panel was, "Saying that virtual life isn’t real life is like saying that a phone conversation isn’t a real conversation." The issue of how people outside virtual worlds perceive virtual worlds and their fear and/or misunderstandings were raised in several workshops.

 

Several workshops discussed ways that Second Life is being used for dealing with social issues; one panelist mentioned it being used for treating substance abuse, and two others discussed their work to create tools that will allow the homeless to gain skills using Second Life, and to provide a a place to call home for a person who doesn’t have one.

Two recurring themes of the workshops were of Second Life’s enormous power as a collaborative tool, bringing together people around the world who otherwise could not work together, or even meet, and as an educational tool. Dr Yesha Sivan showed a particularly amazing machinima for introducing students to Second Life that simultaneously shows what can be done in a virtual world and how virtual world concepts might (some would say "will") emigrate to real life in the not too distant future.

The keynote speakers were current and past Linden Lab CEO’s Mark Kingdon and Philip Rosedale, who discussed plans for coming changes in Second Life.

Day two of the Second Life Community Conference went smoothly. Attendees arrived, were issued their badges and SLCC teeshirts, and proceeded to Grand Ballroom for the morning’s keynote speaker, the legendary technology visionary Ray Kurzweil.

However, Kurzweil wasn’t there. At least not in person. He was in Second Life, and delivering his talk via streaming media to the audience assembled in the St. Francis Hotel, who watched his avatar speaking on two large projections screens. He spoke of the exponential growth of technology leading to changes in society that are much faster than the linear growth frequently forecast by economic modelers and spoke about the six paradigms of the grown of technology The First Paradigm began with the 1890 census, the first to be conducted with the then startling new tecnology of punch cards. Kurzweil projects that the current Fifth Paradigm, based on Moore’s Law projecting the growth in power of computers, will end around 2020 and will be supplanted by the Sixth Paradigm, molecular computing.

Kurzweil addressed far more than can be covered here. For more information, go to his website www.KurzWeilaAI.net.
 

 

One recurring theme in several workshops I attended was privacy and whether or not people’s Second Life avatar names and real life identities should be freely linked both in Second Life and on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Most people at the workshops appeared to be in favor of this, but some people try to keep them separate, for example entrepreneurs trying to maintain a distance between their business and personal identities. There were serious concerns about the privacy we are giving up in so many aspects of our lives, and that there has not been sufficient serious public discussion about how much is appropriate and acceptable.

Another theme was the use of Second Life in education, such as teaching the Native American Comanche language. Another fascinating application was Texas State Technical College, which has AA degree programs in which all coursework can be taken in Second Life. The college also has a YouTube channel.

 

Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services gave a fascinating talk – ok, fascinating to technical people – about using the Linden scripting language LSL together with PHP to collect data about objects in Second Life.

Wagner James Au, author of the authoritative Second Life blog New World Notes was at SLCC with his new book, The Making of Second Life. I haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting. His long involvement in Second Life gives him a historical perspective that few others possess.

The biggest problem at SLCC on day two was that there were so many interesting workshops, more than than any one person could attend. There are two more days of events – SLCC 2009 continues through Sunday August 16, 2009.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The first day of the Second Life Community Convention was a day of controlled chaos and the halls of the ornate Westin-St. Francis hhandwritten being adorned with signs made from from pages torn notebooks. The chaos was so bad that members weren’t given name badges and weren’t even registered. Anyone could have walked in for free. The picture to the right, of the registration desk, tells is best.

There was only one printed schedule, which a Linden Lab employee was keeping a careful eye on, but at one point a Second Life member, furious at the chaos, took it from her, saying "I paid two hundred dollars and I deserve at least this!"

The two workshops I attended, "Building Community" and "Mixed Reality Presentations",
went well.

 

The "Building Community" workshop presented the experiences in creating communities in Second Life from four perspectives: people with disabilities, a corporate region (Nokia), and two social regions, Dublin (famous for its Blarney Stone pub), and Orange Island. The presenters were Gentle Heron, Han Rambler, Hydra Shaftoo, and Fabian Alexander. Kathleen Linden moderated the workshop.

Gentle Heron pointed out that although Second Life is often referred to as a "level playing field" for people with special challenges, it really is not so much level as more level than real life.

In general, the panel discussed issues involved in creating a successful community, such as having a clearly understood goal and rules, getting people around you whose judgment you trust and to delegate authority to them, and to be prepared for the unexpected.

 

In Kenzo and Rhiannon Chatnoir led the "Mixed Reality Presentations" workshop, assisted by a team in making the workshop itseld a mixed reality presentation. People in Second Life were taking part in the workshop via streaming media and could see us while we saw them on a large projection screen.

SLCC 2009 continues through Sunday August 16, 2009/