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Hi. My name's Jeremy Kemp. I'm the Assistant Director of the Second Life
campus here And I'm here to give you an overview of the
Second Life virtual environment; how it relates to other virtual environments
And this is an overview for the 203 course. So while there are many virtual environments
out there, we're going to be focusing on the Second Life
virtual environment. Think of it like a virtual world built and
owned by its residents. It's a vast digital continent.
And it's filled with librarians and their customers, some entertainment and some other
features as well. You'll find museums and concerts, settings
for teaching and learning, role-play and more. Now, to the outside spectator, it may be very
difficult to see why anyone would jump into what seems like a game.
But this is a tool, actually, and it defies the traditional view of online gaming.
For instance, the average age of users is 35-years-old.
And you'll participate in a range of very professional activities in this environment.
Because Second Life isn't a game, it is very important to look
And I will break those down into six key activities. So we're going to look at:
Professional services role-play, interfaces and Web interconnectivity, groups and events,
commerce and creativity, personal discovery and identity, and finally,
Marketing and outreach. The first of these six key activities are
the creation and enjoyment of groups and also events.
So Second Life has a free voice tool so that multiple people can get on with their headsets
and chat with each other. It's pretty inexpensive to create group.
So you'll see things such as author programs, book discussions and also programs that promote
reading. Now I'd like to introduce Robin Williams,
an '08 graduate and let you watch her film on communities in Second Life.
I think this is really interesting. (Female voice) I like to think of Second Life
as a city garden project. The city is the hustle and bustle of our daily
lives. We have these areas like Second Life where
we can work with people from all over the world to grow something
that could be amazing. My fellow gardeners are friendly and eager
to give advice and share hints and sometimes clippings or samples of their
work. Every so often someone peaks through the fence
and yells: (Gruff male voice) Heh? What's this? Gardening?!
Gardening's the stupidest thing I've never done.
You could not pay me to garden! I can't believeÉ It makes me so angry that people would waste
their time. You could be solving world peace. I would
never do this. You could not pay me enough to do this.
It's ridiculous. You guys and yourÉ (Female voice) Although our plantings may
not live forever we take pictures and movies and learn from the process.
Is it a game? Some people will grow or develop games, some won't.
Your product is limited by your imagination. It's true: gardening isn't for everyone. It's
a lot of hard work. But for those of that enjoy it, it can be
a lot of fun! (Male voice) Okay, the next set of activities
I'd like to talk about is interfaces and web connectivity.
So Second Life allows you to build, very rapidly, spaces such as teen library spaces seen here.
You can also connect to web databases and see things like real time weather data.
Now you're starting to see more and more 3-D interface affordances and designs in the operating
systems. So the rapid prototyping ability of Second
Life allows interface designers to play with new types of ways to interact with data
using 3-D viewers and builders. The third key activity that happens in Second
Life is professional services role-play. And I'm going to show you an example of this
in the Information Island Second Life reference desk
where reference interviews are conducted mostly for information about Second Life.
But they do do interviews for information outside of the Second Life environment.
Here you can see an overview of the reference desk.
You'll notice some ready reference terminals around the front of that.
And also there is a volunteer on duty here. People sign up for one-hour blocks.
Now the next key feature is the commerce and creativity aspect of Second Life.
Two things are unique to this platform: one that funds are convertible to US dollars
so they flow back and forth. This is new. Another new thing here is that all of the
intellectual property created created within the environment belongs to
the people who create it. Usually terms of service for virtual reality
games leave the ownership of intellectual property with the company
that runs the game. So this is a little bit different.
One activity that a lot of people find exciting and interesting is personal discovery and
identity development. So there people who are experimenting with
their gender identity, with their hobbies, with their work roles. So it's kind of a freeform
place to do a lot of experimentation. The final set of activities I want talk about
are interesting for library administrators. Obviously, Second Life has lot of marketing
and outreach benefit so you could think of it like an extra branch.
You can also serve younger populations and do things like this Machinima
to do promotional videos about your own branch.