Tech -- Culture -- Humour
I noticed a new aussie presence popped up on search this week: LeeLee Land. Owned by SL resident LeeLee Dagger, her aims for the island are:
“One island, sprinkled with beautiful houses, half a cup of romance and a pinch of that community feeling! This is the simple recipe I followed to cook up LeeLee Land.
Having been on SL for a while now, I noticed many aussies tend to stick together and I thought there might be a market for rental properties – aussie owned and aussie occupied. I will provide residents with a modern home that ensures them privacy and security while ensuring a romantic atmosphere for those quiet private moments. All houses surround a gorgeous shared area comprising of a water fall, lounges and a dance floor.”
Of course, Telstra have a similar rental offering but it’ll be interesting to see the level of take-up. Are you the sort of SL resident that likes close engagement with other RL countrymen?
In my recent research on foreign language areas in SL, I came across Assisi. It was launched a few days ago and on my initial wanderings amongst different world areas I missed this excellent replica build of the Saint Francis’ Basilica in Assisi.
To quote from the notes and in-world press release:
“The Basilica, built with original proportions and sizes, is unique in its quality and details, and in its interior churces avatars can enjoy many renaissance paintings of Giotto, Cimabue, Pietro Lorenzetti and many others.
Every painting has a caption explaining the brief details, just by clicking on it. It’s also possible to wear an HUD (Heads Up Display), built by Wedoit too, to have a complete virtual visit, accessing textual and audio informations about the paintings. The device is currently available in italian and english languages only, and it is distributed at the two entrances of the churches.”
The detail and effort that has gone into this particular build is quite impressive. Add to that the use of Audio and HUD and the SL visitor has a unique experience in culture and language not often found.
It’s possibility in structured lessons from; language to architecture to cultural studies to art to history is not to be underestimated and perhaps examples one of the fundamental ways in which SL may be headed in supporting educational RL world.
Further info can be found here.
As indicated on Saturday night’s posting, the interest in the use of voice technology is being canvassed. There has been a recent flurry of activity by educators interested in using the voice and audio ability of SL to enhance lessons in learning a foreign language. The approach to learning languages seems to take the form of eavesdropping in areas and cityscapes from various regions around the world.
This approach could have some interesting ethical and pedagogical issues. It would seem to be university language courses that are utilising the idea of organising field trips to various cityscapes and “eavesdropping” on inhabitants going about their daily business in their native tongue.
What would prove interesting is if private language colleges and teachers started to offer guided experiences in this way.
To this end I paid a visit to one popular area for those interested in learning Italian. That of Mantova – Italia – Italy.
Being in Australia you need to check the relevant timezones so as to encounter people in this area. But, at the time I was there a number of people dropped in and used the SL talk option. The quality and clarity of sound was quite good and I can see how this method could be a major resource for immersing learners in relevant language lessons and experiences.
For those interested in finding out more about language learning in SL you may like to take part in the Festival of European Languages, September 26 on Belle Isle.
From the information sheet provided by the organisers:
8am SLT (4pm London) Welcoming
9am/5pm Russian/Baltic states/Finnish
10am/6pm Eastern Europe/Greek
11am/7pm Italian/German/Scandinavian
12 noon/8pm French/Belgian/Dutch/
1pm/9pm English/Spanish/Portuguese
It’s been fairly widely reported over the past week that there’s a new kid on the virtual world block. Metaplace has some significant backing and looks promising. Some key snippets from Metaplace’s company, Areae:
“We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own”
“committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol – anyone can write a client for any platform they want. We decided to use Web standards for everything we could, which is why you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world. The scripting language (we call it MetaScript, of course) is based on Lua. You get the idea – no ‘not invented here,’ no closed proprietary approaches”
“We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else’s world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games… and set up doorways from one to the other”
“We fully intend to be customers of our own product. We’ve already started work on our first big game – a ‘worldy MMORPG’ with what we hope will be a ton of fun game play. What’s more, we figure that some of you who have been looking for a game like that might want to help us build it.”
Metaplace is at alpha testing stage and if you’re keen, you can sign up for that testing.
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