Cool new Museum

The Tech - a technology museum across the street from the convention center in San Jose, California - is in SL now. They're going to try to build exhibits in SL and in the real museum - get SL and RL designers working together. They have a great space to exhibit spaces and lots of room for people to work on their projects. There's even a contest with a $5000L prize.

They have an IMAX theatre to show videos. They want to have mixed reality events (which I love of course)

Right now the exhibits are about music and dance - you can play a guitar, create art together. Fun times.

Real Life in SecondLife

I saw this on another blog striking writers picketing in SL on the NBC Universal island

Other Christmas decorations

I blogged earlier about decorating hte Park Island for the winter - made it snow, covered the ground with snow, put in some dead/wintery trees.

I went over to the many Rezzable islands the other day - that's a subject for another post (what are they doing with all those islands - urban sims, vampire castles - all for RPGs?). They have the Greenies house. And now they have an island with a huge Greenies Christmas tree. Here are two pics.

Club Penguin News

I was just watching Disney channel (yeah - that's right - the disney channel!)

and they've been taking radio disney and club penguin vans around doing events. They just announced an in world charity contest. Kids play games in Club Penquin and earn coins. They can donate coins to one of three charities. There's a pool of a million dollars - Disney will split up the money in the proportions the players donate their coins.

Cool way for Disney to get started with their connection to Club Penguin. And a great way to introduce kids to philanthropy.

More pics of the island dressed for winter

Folks wanted lights and a school name - so here we go. These first two pictures show the lights and then the lights and hte name.




Here's a completed picture during the day.



This picture shows the island all dressed up and at night.

possible griefer attack?

Here are a couple of pictures I took on the Electrolux site. They're having an innovation contest.

One time I visited there were these pacman characters spewing out. I couldn't tell if they were supposed to be there (maybe part of someone's innovation?) or if they were part of a griefer attack (however lame).

Anyway - interesting to see particles this big.

Book Launch

I went to a presentation by an author of a RL book about Sl - How to Get a Second Life. The author is a SL entrepreneur - used to run a club, then a security service. Now he runs a company called SL Guides that sells small focused help booklets for doing things in SL. The new book is supposedly a guide for users from day one through experienced.

It was held on Book Island, next door to Publisher island. There are a variety of book publishers (RL and SL) there as well as authors. Interesting idea.

And there were 65 people there - another full event. (Friday I went toScience Friday and there were more than 60 people there too)

Here are some pictures.

Lazer Tag

Some students from the University of Texas designed an arena/play space for lazer tag. What a hoot. We each got guns and a game HUD (heads up display). Each gun only held so many bullets/rounds at a time - you had to get additional ammo from powerups scattered around the space. There were also shield protection and health points scattered around. Once we figured out how to play - they left a lot of important basic details out of their documentation (oh, like you had to join the group they created in order for the guns to work and you had to be in mouselook mode to shoot) but we eventually figured it out. Maybe that was part of the experiment - see how long people would struggle to figure stuff out, how long they'd stand around without being able to play...

ANyway - they created a fun space with multiple floors, things to go into, fly over, look around on. They had a good size crowd too last night. I don't know if they're doing it again. I'm going to check on monday and take my students there. It's a good example of a game built inside the virtual world.

I of course got too carried away playing the game and forgot to take pictures - d'oh. So if we go back in on Monday I will be sure to take some then.

Here's a SLURL - if you have SL running, ou should be able to click on this link and be teleported.

Some more wintery island pics

Might be a more promising headline if I'd just come back from Aruba - but no - just pics of the Park Communication island dressed for winter. I got hte snow a way that I like, I added some more items, I made an ornament that glows in the dark and put it around and some banners.

Here are some new pics of the work i did today