Second Life is a virtual reality; a world that you can create yourself and live in. In 1999, it was build by Philip Rosendale, who started to collect the team, called Linden Lab, to care about Second Life. Second Life was sponsored by many people and companies, such as Mitch Kapor, Benchmark Capital and Ray Ozzie. Linden’s Lab employees are from: Electronic Arts, Disney, etc.
About a year ago, I was asked to join the Second Life team of North Shore Kabbalah Academy to build a virtual learning center (Ari Online Kabbalah Educational Center). It was interesting to me because in the past I had been a fan of The Sims (Electronic Arts game). The Sims is a great opportunity to manage the world. You can build your own house, choose wallpaper, siding, buy furniture, make wire electricity through the entire house, and, finally, create your own avatar whom you can dress, put shoes on , add makeup to, and much more. The Second Life’s rules are almost the same but you can move around the virtual world at the same time with other people from all over the planet. There are fancy houses, top designers’ clothing and public sex houses, too. Yes. Behind each avatar stands a real person. Who knows what they are looking for?
Well, after spending 3 days in the place called Ivory Tower, I learned how to build and design things in Second Life (SL). A month ago, our first learning center was built. It was weird, but worked.
People were sitting around and listening to the lector who had a microphone. There was a lot of trouble understanding how everything works. We needed permission and a correct link from the server to open an audio stream; otherwise we could not have the possibility of listening to a life-streaming audio. And so on.
Now the center looks like this.
From the store I bought a nice house. I made the necessary corrections for our purposes using special tools: size, color, texture, and angles of the prims. Prim is a meager unit of everything built “in the world” (that’s what Second Life’s reality is called between secondlifenians). From a cube, a cylinder, and/or a sphere you can build a box, a column, a chair, drums, etc.
Now we have a big team – about 15 people. We have musicians. Every musical instrument has a special animation that a person can turn on, and his or her avatar will play on a violin, drums or on a piano. The screen shows movies. It requires that you have a Quick Time player. You can watch a movie because there is a script that is inside the screen. The script allows the object, which made as a screen, to stream a video. Linden Lab made up a special language that differs from the other languages for programming, which already exist. Almost every complicated object in the world has a script inside: a violin, a microphone, a “Giver” box. Scripts help represent what this object is “doing”. Touch a Giver box, and it will give you a Notecard with a description of what has been put inside: a course’s information, a book, or a landmark, for instance. You can keep all of them, so next time you can easily find this location in your Inventory’s folder with landmarks, or objects, or Notecards.
The book is a different and interesting story. I bought a special press to print it. You have to have set up all the pages; you have to upload all of them to Second Life; you have to follow all of the instructions EXACTLY during the process. After magnificent actions, your book will come up. Now you can read the book as you do in the real world. It has a good animation of turning over the pages, a sound of what you doing and the menu, where you can go to the site and buy a hard printed copy of this book, for example. I set up about 20 books for the Book fair that took place last spring in the world. People purchased our books, came to class to listen to a lesson and donated us a little money, about 300 Lindens. (1000 Linden dollars cost 4.09 American Green Crisps).
I am also a cameraman. I was scared at the beginning of the first filming. You have to have a computer with very good parameters to launch the Second Life program. You go to the www.secondlife.com and download the installation file from there. You have to have a good memory on your computer, a fast processor, and a strong video card. I used to film a program, called Camtasia (a screen capturing program). I like it very much, because it is a powerful program and met a most of my requirements. Unfortunately, it stopped to work on my new computer, because it had a different operating system, Windows Vista (which I like but it still gives me a lot of problems). The problem is that Camtasia can’t recognize a sound card on your computer. I suppose the conflict of Vista with Camtasia still exists all over the world. I tried many programs that capture streaming video, but only one of them works on my computer – the Fraps (www.fraps.com). It is a free program specially designed for capturing 3D games. You can watch my clips on Youtube. My nickname there is zameret32.
I can add one interesting detail. When our team started to make clips, we understood that the mouse does not have an appropriate flexibility in the world’s space. The mouse movements represent camera movements and zoom. One of my friends suggested that I buy a special device called Space Navigator on www.3DConnexion.com.
It was very helpful advice. I know that Space Navigator is used for such programs as 3D Earth by Google, and others. This device is equal to a plane steering wheel in Second Life. It goes in every direction you want, including upside down, and requires some practice. Here is the link that helped me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEAyMDDSh5g
This clip is made by Torley Linden, a cool guy from the Second Life support team. He has a lot of great supportive clips regarding Second Life on Youtube. I made them in the program called Adobe Premiere.
I still have a lot of things to say, but suppose that it will be much better for you to check it out yourself. Thank you.
