My brother just reminded me about this great YouTube video… I am sure most will have seen it but it’s surely worth seeing again?
Social Media Revolution: Is social media a fad?
Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore.
This video is produced by Erik Qualman the author of Socialnomics.
There are some more videos on Erik Qualman’s interesting blog: Socialnomics – Social Media Blog and after visiting the blog myself I have reason to believe Erik is a tall man with a great view.
I saw a mention about web.alive a new online 3D webspace that runs inside your browser on the Second Life Educators listserv and decided to take a look. I went to http://apex.projectchainsaw.com/ and bravely downloaded the exe file. (The download was fast with no signs of N1H1.)
Download security warning for web.alive. Note the publisher is Nortel Networks Ltd.
web.alive license agreement. (I am showing these basic download dialogs to assure you that 'projectchainsaw' is not a virus even if it sounds like one.)
First view of web.alive shows you your avatar staring back at you
I was then shown a very simple direction guide to help me get moving. The Help button provided me with additional easy to follow directions.
I began exploring the area and seemed to be gliding smoothly through the space. It looked like the kind of environment that you find around a large London railway station, an anonymous place designed for hordes of people to rush through. However, on the occasion of my visit there were no other avatars around making it feel more like an early Sunday morning. Everything around me was concrete and glass with small round pods situated here and there reminding me of those little shops that sell croissants and ties to commuters. Screens were set up in these pods and with a simple click these began showing Nortel movie advertisements. There was another screen in each pod that looked as though it could be enabled to show web browsers. (I wonder, does that mean that an avatar could be in a virtual world via a web browser accessing another virtual world via the in-world web browser? In other words we could access layers of virtual environments through web browsers?)
View of pod rooms. (Note the small area map in the bottom right corner of this picture.)
Conference room. The picture in this shot shows the rooftop space I was exploring.
I wandered away to send an email and stopped looking at web.alive in my browser and was surprised on my return to see that someone had been trying to talk to me. I saw an avatar walking away and gave chase. I was helped by a little map at the bottom of the screen that showed an orange dot (the other avatar) while I was indicated by a red kite shape. I finally caught up with the other avatar who told me, via voice, that he could hear me typing and suggested I try speaking. I was very surprised to find that he could hear me straight away (especially as I normally spend a few minutes getting voice enabled in Second Life). I had done nothing to set up the voice connection, it just worked… good job I was not singing or swearing! I discovered I was chatting to a friendly fellow from Nortel in California who told me there were other environments available to explore (I plan to work out how to access those next.)
View with shallow canal (accompanied in web.alive with watery sound effects).
For now web.alive is in beta so anything I write that sounds judgmental is obviously a little unfair. Having said that I certainly feel that they could be braver with their sound effects and environment. Perhaps they will take these extra steps now that they have created such an amazingly smooth operating technology? Still, I really missed the lighting available in Second Life and this made me realize how important lighting is to conjuring up atmosphere. This got me thinking that virtual environments have an ‘Ambient Presence’ as opposed to Social Presence which describes the sense of the human being behind an avatar. ‘Ambient Presence’ describes the almost unconscious hooks which help immerse us in the sense of being within a physical space when in a virtual, computer generated environment. Ambient sounds and atmospheric lighting play important (almost subliminal) roles when it comes to absorbing us into an immersive experience.
View of city scape below (accompanied by traffic sounds that sounded very like a large drowsy fly).
My work involves communicating with over 100 sites all across America. I would love to find a cheap online vehicle that could really compress distance and make it possible for people to communicate easily when the whim takes them. That is, create a virtual space where I can talk to a colleague in another state as easily as I can walk across to someone else’s office in the physical world. Second Life has the ability to create beautiful spaces with ambient presence and avatars with Social Presence but the operating controls and intense hardware requirements keep ruling it out. web.alive has conjured up an excellent program that is astonishingly easy to use and can run in a browser. All it needs now is a little more imagination and it could become a major rival to Second Life for business and educational users. One more thing, I keep forgetting web.alive’s name! I wonder if they plan to keep it? I honestly prefer the name projectchainsaw! At least I can remember that!
Some shadows on the roof for some much needed atmosphere...
Just discovered that web.alive does not run on Macs
ThinkBalm have created their own virtual office/meeting area on web.alive. Also see the post about ThinkBalm on Joe Rigby’s blog MellaniuM (Visit these two sites for direct links to ThinkBalm’s web.alive connection site.)
AM Radio’s installation of satellite dishes has closed. Thanks to the NPIRL group notice from Bettina Tizzy I knew the exhibit was about to vanish away so I flew over to the location to grab a few final hour photos.
Satellite dishes and jeep by AM Radio
Dusk in the desert
Listening to the stars
More
Film of satellite dishes moving through listening cycles titled ‘Waiting For You’ by AM Radio available on Flickr.
I managed to get another trip into Burning Life before it fizzled into a sprig of charcoal. I spent my time riding the Carousel of Progress reproduced in Second life by Jandai Writer. The juxtaposition of entertainment mediums was thought provoking to say the least. There was my avatar within the virtual world of Second Life watching the Disney animatronic avatar discussing (in folksy Disney fashion) technological progress in the Twentieth Century. Jandai Writer provided two ways to experience the Carousel. You could perch your avatar upon her virtual carousel and watch sets depicting kitchens through the century pass you by. Alternatively, you could sit in a tent and watch the movie that shows the original carousel experience as seen by a theater audience. (How is that for layers of ‘mediums’ piled upon each other?)
Cyberloom rides the Carousel of Progress
Disney meets Second Life courtesy of Jandai Writer (First kitchen tableau)
'Modern kitchen' tableau 2
Watching the 'Carousel of Progress' in Jandai Writer's movie tent
As Burning Life ends today you will have to watch the ‘Carousel of Progress’ via YouTube instead (see below).
I have been traveling and found myself away from good Internet connections. I knew Burning Life was alight and could not visit! All that art and no access! Anyway… finally back to my familiar computer and stable cable connections. After wandering around for a while I found this very fine tower created by Francis Bagration location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Burning%20Life-Hardin/193/111/24/
Tower by Francis Bagration
Two beautiful spiral staircases begin at the base of the tower
Another view of the tower's base plus great balls of fire!
Cyberloom at top of tower checking out the floating mushroom...
Getting high - floating above Francis Bagration's Tower with mushroom assist
And finally, a visit to the peculiar outhouse with its homage to Elvis
Bryn Oh’s Robo Insects are on display in virtual Vienna’s Natural History Museum in Second Life. Cyberloom went to pay homage with avatar dressed as a steampunk dragon and soon began to feel ‘at one’ with the virtual sculptures. Then, after communing with the ‘Mayfly’ exhibit (above) started to think the Robo-Insects needed to be set free… liberated into the thin virtual air of Second Life. However, dear reader, reason prevailed and Cyberloom switched avatars to view the rest of the exhibition as a more ordinary avatar (wearing steampunk clothing) and somewhat less prone to the emotional over reactions of steam dragons and steampunk robots.
Close-up of rhinobot sculpture
Cyberloom inspects Bryn Oh's jellytronics
Closeup: Bryn Oh's steamclock
Inspecting the Retelevise
Beautiful steam wyrmling (or dragon) created by Daryth Kennedy and available from the Isle of Wyrms in Second Life.
A: “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
- Kurt Vonnegut (Quote taken slightly out of context.)
Cyberloom is returning to Locus in this post, at least that is where I begin. The truth is DB Bailey showed me a glimpse of the underworld… There is a special place to stand high up in the mountain tops of Locus, and once you have located this perch you can use your camera to zoom down through the pixel thin rock crust to see a great cavern reveal itself below. DB explained to me that this is a place that can be glimpsed but never visited. My first attempts to use the camera disoriented me and I fell off the cliff face into the cold sea far below. On my second attempt my avatar eyes were able to penetrate the rock wall.
The edge of Locus #1
The underworld looked a friendly enough place, there were swirling gas clouds and strange abstract shapes moving through the steam and/or smoke. DB said this location was his favorite place in Locus, he said he liked the ‘painterly effects’ conjured by the gaseous haze. After DB left (to move furniture around the tepidarium and check the large naked giant was sleeping peacefully) I took the opportunity to pan my camera around the underworld of Locus. I discovered I was able to swing the camera around and peer out from the underworld into Locus.
The edge of Locus #2
You must go to Locus and seek out the underworld for yourself and I know that it will look quite different for you. I imagine that is part of the mystery that constitutes the underworld? That is, it is some form of mirage metamorphosing into different hallucinations for each of us? The most intriguing aspect of this strange journey is that DB Bailey invited me to examine the furthest extremes of his avatar-made island. He designed the space in 3 dimensions, it is a space we can venture into and explore yet it is all an illusion. The virtual world of Second Life invites us to indulge ourselves within the illusory space, it coaxes us into its very center and we oblige by operating our avatars so that they accord with the illusion. Now, the intriguing invitation handed out by DB Bailey is for us to travel with our virtual cameras to the extreme edges, or limits, of the illusion to see what happens next. At the very least we see the illusion begin to fracture…
The edge of Locus #3
Speaking for myself, I keep returning to wander this illusionary world of Second Life because it shows me ideas in visual forms, and juxtaposes those images with their accompanying thoughts, in random fashion. This process (a visual version of the die game in The Dice Man) reflects each individual player’s own mind and preoccupations. It can also generate new insight and understanding into ourselves and others in both our First and Second lives. In other words ‘playing’ Second Life can be a thought provoking process for some of us because we hover around its seams chasing some philosophical insight or other. Mind you, I end up with more questions than answers and feel very much an amateur trying to play the game of another book. I am referring to Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game“a game which is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.” (Wikipedia)
The edge of Locus #4
On the other hand, perhaps a simpler way to say all this is to describe this shared virtual space as a consciously shared dream? But then, what is a dream? It could be described as the ‘join’ between our conscious and unconscious worlds. But the dream analogy feels too easy and dismissive because the surreal vagueness of dreams can be like a drunk having a profound turn of thought. (Difficult to credit dreams and drunks with too much attention because they so easily slip away later with a ‘did not meanit’or ‘forgotten it all’message).I am joining DB Bailey now and encouraging you to intentionally stand at the very brink of the virtual world with (relatively speaking of course) a fully functioning conscious mind, and see how far you can go with your camera before the scene before you begins to disintegrate.
The edge of Locus #5
There is a group on flickr called ‘Bug Hunters of Second Life’ that helps people figure out what has gone wrong with their display when the Second Life illusion breaks unexpectedly. I once found another flickr group that invited people to submit their photos of random SL aberrations but I cannot find it now (there are 3,682 flickr groups with the Second Life tag after all!) This invitation from DB Bailey to balance on the edge of what is visually possible in the virtual world, then deliberately pan out of world with your camera is like being given the Subtle Knife. The subtle knife can cut portals through the boundary fabric of different worlds thus enabling the characters (of Philip Pullman’s ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy) to walk through to alternate realities.
There is something poetic about seeing my virtual camera as a subtle knife… I am off to cut another portal… see you later aligator…in another reality crocodile.
Today was the first year birthday of the Pop Art Labs. Sadly, I got there rather late for the celebrations – the birthday party had already been running for a good 6 hours by the time I popped in! Still, the Labs looked festive with fabulous flowers everywhere, a band called Engrama was playing and people were dancing, or mellowing out as the sun rose in the early morning sky. Here are some photos recording my very late visit to the birthday bash.
A big congratulations and Happy Birthday wishes to Pop Art Labs and the charming master mind behind the whole fabulous operation Claus Uriza!
Happy Birthday to PAL- Pop Art Labs!
Engrama playing the final set at PAL's birthday party
Claus Uriza dancing (Claus is one of the sweetest people you will ever meet in Second Life! If you see him say hi!)
I returned to DB Bailey's Locus to explore the island further. Visits to Second Life can take on a dreamlike quality and the fun is we can photograph our dreams with our virtual cameras. My first stop was to visit Bryn Oh's Wings displayed in a winter landscape.
Then I found myself in the tepidarium, a mysterious room, full of light beams and water fountains. DB Bailey has placed a couple of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema in the room, they stand alongside elegant French furnishings.
The tepidarium was in the midst of being furnished when I visited and there was a giant naked lady slumbering on the floor! When I say giant... I mean gigantic! My sensation of dreaming was complete but I was in someone else's dream!
Links to visit:
DB Bailey’s Locus (See this amazing island for yourself but don’t wake the sleeping lady…)
” All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”
This seems an apt quote to use with Second Life where the virtual sun rises and sets several times in 24 hours. And, should we be so inclined, where we can go and adjust the environmental settings for a whole day of endless end to end sunsets! Judging by the proliferation of romantic saccharin avatar photos to be found on flickr, Second Life’s sunset is one of the most favored ‘hours’ of the virtual day. But Chesterton observes how splendid architecture can be after sunset, an observation we can apply to architecture in both our physical and virtual worlds. Another reason for selecting the above quote is because so many Second Life builders are working into the small hours adjusting prims, and adding textures, to their fabulous creations. It seems fair to deduce that virtual building is itself largely a nocturnal art, conducted by creative individuals opting to build something (rather than watch yet another cop show with assorted murders on TV).
Pagoda by Patch Thibaud and DB Bailey's temple.com building (layered building on the left).
Well, some virtual creations do become ‘like the art of fireworks.’ Seems to me that my own (nocturnal) virtual wanderings have led me to some fabulous displays of nocturnal art recently. First Kolor Fall and now D.B. Bailey…
I found D.B. Bailey at Locus quite by accident. I was checking landmarks for my next Second Life class, as places tend to come and go in Second Life, it is always a good idea to ensure they still exist for when you need them. Second Life has its own seasons that mark its ebb and flow of decline and productivity. Builds pop up then vanish, simply melting away to leave large dents on mown lawns, or lost aspidistras marooned beneath the sea.
Inside the the temple.com building
I had a landmark to the Cetus District, an area of Second Life that replicated a traditional art gallery district of London or New York. I landed on a mountain peak instead of a cobbled street and could see from the buildings below me that there had been some dramatic changes to the location. I went to explore and began to marvel at the imagination of the builders. When I clicked on these buildings I kept seeing D.B. Bailey’s name and discovered from his profile that he is a first life architect called David Denton (see David Denton Architect ). I was then lucky enough to meet David Denton in avatar form and he treated me to a tour of Locus. It turns out he is experimenting with Second Life to build a real world shopping mall in Cairo. See his write up about this experiment in Dispatch from Cairo: a Message from DB Bailey in The Arch blog.
Urban Spectre build by DB Bailey with assistance from Desdemona Enfield, Douglas Story and Dizzy Banjo
I have often thought that Second Life is like a 3D sketch book, and find it intriguing to see someone brave enough to use the virtual world as a tool of exploration, and communication, with a first life project. This surely is a glimpse into the future? Locus is a gorgeous place to visit and appears to be enticing some of the bright stars of the virtual art firmament to display their wares there. The architecture on display will surely influence other Second Life builders? I found myself marveling at the mind and imagination of DB Bailey and his skill for drawing in what looks like complex 3D layers. Friedrich Joseph Schelling described architecture as being like *’frozen music’ and here you can see that thought realized! And one final observation, due to DB Bailey’s use of autumn oranges set against electric blues the architecture at Locus will indeed remind you of G.K. Chesterton’s fireworks and sunsets!
