Kamil207's Weblog

Second Life Experience

kamil207 — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:42:49 +0000

This has been a great semester and a very enlightening experience for me. I am not the most computer savvy guy in the entire world, but I felt like during this semester, I have learned something that I can and will be able to use in the future. Living in virtual worlds seems to be the next step in the technological revolution. It began with MUD’s, and has expanded to the internet, websites, social networking websites, and easily publishing content on the internet, and now the door has opened for the scope of virtual worlds to expand. I had heard of Second Life from many news clips and articles on CNN and what not, but when I took this class, it was my first experience with any virtual world let alone Second Life. What I found once I joined the Second Life community was remarkable. Second Life was not just some stupid video game, but it was another world inside of my computer. People were making a living, and Second Life had it’s own economy with its own currency. This was a real world being lived in through a virtual reality. When I first created my avatar, I had no idea how to maneuver myself around the world, how to make my avatar look the way I wanted, or what to really do in Second Life. I believe that if people can get past the frustrations of Orientation Island, and learn the basic features of the program, Second Life can be a very useful virtual world to live in. As you stay in Second Life for longer periods of time, you get used to it and your skills in it really progress. I went from barely being able to walk, to being able to build things such as benches and flags directly from scratch. One thing I enjoyed doing was changing the look of my avatar. I never tried to make it look as I do in real life, simply because I thought it would be fun to make myself look different, and have various pieces of clothing.

Second Life Post #10

kamil207 — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:14:08 +0000

During the show, I was in charge of taking video clips of the show for the video presentation that we have to make. This video is taking the place of our second test, and I definitely think it is a better more interactive assignment that suits this class better than having an actual test in class. Plus since nobody was actually completing the readings, this is a better way to show how we are progressing in second life. To record the video in second life, I needed to download a program that did video screen captures that worked on a Macbook. This program was called SnapzPro. At first, Snapz Pro was very hard to get used to as I had never used a screen capture program like that before in my life. Since I was the only one in charge of taking the video clips too, I felt very unsure. After a while though, I figure out how it worked and started the screen capture and took various clips. I learned to take different clips and I took this one where I rotated around the area of our entire show, and it included the Welcome sign and all of the pieces and people in our place. It was like a 360 degree view where you could see everything that was going on in our show, from the dance floor, to the building area, to the display area. Now that the show is over and I have all these clips, I need to put them together and make our video project with the rest of my group. I am not sure but I think part of the grade is putting all of the group members voices onto the video. I am not familiar with video editing or anything, so I hope it doesn’t prove to be very difficult . Since this is replacing a test grade I am kind of worried and want to do really well on this last assignment.

Second Life Post #9

kamil207 — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 19:07:35 +0000

Our art show was last night at 5:30 pm SL time right on schedule. Before our show I went to the laser tag event and invited many people from there to also come to our art show. It turned out to be a really good idea because we had at least five people come to our show from the laser tag event alone. Also right when the event started i invited all of my contacts and most of them surprisingly showed up, even though a couple of the people I invited flaked out on me. I think that we generated a lot of traffic to our event and it was pretty successful. The set up for the show went up until the last minute because some of our artists sent in their pieces a little bit late. Although we got everything done, we were working up until the show started and I think that if some of the people had been more on top of things and sent out their art work to us sooner, preparations would have gone a lot smoother than they did. Up until the show began we were stressing, hoping that people would show up, and hoping we could get all the pieces up in time. Overall though I think we were sufficiently prepared to handle all the people that showed up for the show. When the show started, things got really fun. Dime Jetcity, a fellow group member, bought a radio receiver and we played different types of music, and then midway through the show we decided to get a dance floor, and a lot of people also began doing that. Also, we had an extra part of the island for everybody to build their own things using different prims and shapes. Some people made ice cream cones while some made bees, and there were many different things that people made themselves. It gave people a chance to express their creativity.

Second Life Post #8

kamil207 — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:48:34 +0000

Currently we are hard at work on our project. We have the email account all set up for everybody to email all of the art work to for the art show. We have enough people to finally have a good sized art show with many pieces, and some of the artists are even people from our own class. Dime Jetcity has already posted some art for display at our art show. He made a logo for a clothing company he hopes to create some time in the future. We also have a great variety of people from Second Life who have committed to this and submitted their own art as well. Another person who has submitted art that is from our class is Maanit. He is an amazing photographer and has emailed us a plethora of photos that we can choose from to display at our art show. What makes it even cooler is that some of his photography is done right here on UT’s campus so the scenery is recognizable and the tower is also in view in some of his shots. The last phase of preparation before the art show is advertising and getting our name out there so people show up to our art show. We have taken care of this by going to Info Island and telling a lot of the librarians to spread the word about our art show. Most of them know Joe very well so it makes our job easier when we say we are from his class. We created a notecard with all of the information about our class and the project on it and we have been handing it out to people at different locations such as art galleries in second life, info island, and any other place we visit. We are hoping to have a very good turn out at our show, and think we have been advertising well enough to achieve a high amount of traffic on the day of our show. I have attached a picture of what the actual art gallery looks like when you first enter it.

Second Life Post #7

kamil207 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:00:41 +0000

This week in second life our group finally began actual work on our project. A fellow group member and I went around to second life art groups requested 10 artists to come to our art show that we are organizing. Although only 4 of them agreed to give some of their pieces to us to be on display, we are still searching for other artists to contribute to our show. We also created an e-mail list for artists to contact any of us with questions or comments for us. The cool thing about our art show is that it isn’t only paintings that can be displayed, we also accept different scripts that people created and different second life architecture created by people. The location of the art show is going to be on our island and we may build something like an art museum type of building to hold the art show in. Also, we are leaving a comment box in front of each piece of art so that the people viewing the art can leave their comments for the artists on their various pieces of art. One problem we thought we were going to have was getting people to come to the art show, but we are sending an email out to the second life educators email list and hopefully enough people on that list will be intrigued by this show and come to see it.

Second Life post #6

kamil207 — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:09:32 +0000

Well we haven’t really been on second life doing many projects since the last time i blogged, but i am very excited for the upcoming projects that we are going to be working on for the rest of the semester. Bernie is in our group and he can play guitar so maybe we will be able to set up a concert for him i don’t know logistics yet but i think that would be a really cool project to work on. We have yet to really sit and discuss any of it but some other ideas that we had on our last class was to recreate the drag right off of west campus. We need to get into contact with people in second life so that we can set up whatever we need to to figure out how to build the drag or do the concert. We are still open for suggestions, and i think there are a lot of different things that we can set up for this project. The object is to hold an event or build something that generates traffic and gets people to come to in secondlife. It will be a challenge, but i feel that with our newly learned background in second life we will be able to create and manage what ever we decide to do and be successful in getting people to come and see what we have built. Personally i want to build the drag over again in second life because i think it would be cool to see a digitally created version of something that we all see every day.

Second Life Post #5

kamil207 — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:05:55 +0000

This past week I watched all of those tutorials you told us to watch and built all of the things you told me to build. I thought it was pretty cool how all of those things were just built with different shapes that is pretty cool. It is possible to build almost anything with all of those shapes that they give us. Also you showed us those additional shapes that can help us to design hard things such as lamps and stuff. It took a while to really get the hang of it and be good at building things, but after a while it wasn’t so bad anymore. One thing I don’t really like though is that it was hard to find a camera angle that I could use to see if I was building everything right. I built a bench, flag, sent you a postcard like you asked, but i also built myself another bench which I am keeping in my condo.For our tour that our group has to give, i think we decided to take everybody to mercedes benz island. It is a really cool place to go. They also have the new c class available to test drive, which i thought was really cool. They even have a test drive track that you can drive the car on. Another cool thing about the car is that it is a manual transmission and you have to shift gears up and down, and i drive a stick in real life so i thought that part was pretty cool.

Second Life Post #4

kamil207 — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:43:21 +0000

This past week I did not get a chance to use second life as much as I would have liked to. I was busy because I had tests and quizzes in all of my other classes. I enjoyed our class on Thursday though. After we finished up with the tours we did the activity where we had to order things in order of importance if we were stranded at a plane wreck. Our group thought that the food would have been the first and most important thing to get, but apparently we were wrong. At first, nobody from our group could agree with what we thought was most important. I think this activity was really interesting. I am also looking forward to watching the tutorial videos and learning how to build various things very much. It is a very cool assignment I think, and will teach us how to master building and creating things in Second Life, which is very useful. It will also help me put even more things that I want into my apartment once I learn to build things. I hope that the things we learn this week in second life help us to learn how to do things that we can use to make actual lindens in second life. I have been interested in learning how to find a way to make money in the second life economy and way of life. I hope i can build and sell a bunch of things for money so I can have more lindens in my account.

Second Life Post #3

kamil207 — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 04:42:20 +0000

This week I got to know Second Life a whole lot better. I began to decorate my place and working on the assignment helped me get used to working in second life a lot more. I put in a couch and a table along with a love seat in one corner of my place making a sort of living room, and then I added a bed in the other corner to be my bedroom area. Also, when decorating I also came across a door bell, which I put on the front entrance of my place. It’s really cool because it actually makes a noise when you ring it. This activity of decorating the apartment was really cool. I put up pictures of where I previously lived, and pictures of all of the colleges I have attended. I put up these pictures because the story I told was the story of how I ended up at UT. The places where I lived in high school affected which college I went to very much. When living in Albuquerque, I was a good student and had a group of friends who I had known for a long time, but when I moved to Houston I didn’t know anybody besides my cousins. I was also really mad that I had to move away from all my friends during high school. This made me stop trying in school just because I didn’t really care anymore. Pretty soon though, I was able to make new friends and got back on track as far as school is concerned. It was one year too late though because my GPA was already screwed and I ended up getting capped to UT. But after a year at UTSA I finally made it to UT so the story ends well. Other people who gave tours of their apartment also talked about how they got to UT, and some people were like me and did not start at UT from their freshmen year. I also really enjoyed looking at how different people decorated their individual condos, and I still need to figure out how to put a bar into my place because I thought that it was really cool getting a bar in your condo.

Second Life Post #2

kamil207 — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 20:36:06 +0000

Second Life is really beginning to irritate me. I still am having trouble getting things done that I want to try and get done. I also still have no idea how to put my name on my condo. I have tried uploading an image of my name at least a dozen times and every time I try to upload, Second Life crashes. I think I might even be getting charged for each failed upload so it sucks even more. One good thing though is that I finally got off of Orientation Island. I finished each activity on Orientation Island, but I could still not figure out how to get off of the island. It turns out that all I needed to do was to go to help island and exit into the “real” virtual world. After that Joe just gave me a teleport to the island. As far as my appearance is concerned I got a bunch of free new clothes, and I finally figured out how to make my hair look normal… I detached it and am now completely bald. I don’t know why the program keeps crashing every time I upload anything not only a picture. Once I learn how to claim a condo I want to go to the junkyards and pick up one of those free boxes of things so I can decorate my place. I have seen other people’s condos and have an idea of what I would like to put into my place. I also want to start attending some of the tutorial courses that we talked about in class on Thursday.