Pumpkins? Whatever next?

Following my call for people interested in sharing the sim, I'm delighted to say that it will be funded for at least another year. I eventually raked together just enough internal funding to cover tier but I also have one person wanting to rent a third of the sim and another making a significant input based on a collaborative project. On top of that I had offers to go and share another sim and to have content hosted elsewhere. Marvellous stuff, especially the opportunity to work with new teachers and have their students use the island too. As I'm staying put, I've closed the Daxos shop and I'll ultimately put the freebies from there in the resource centre on the island (at the moment most are rezzed on display).

Despite appearances, the picture above is not a Halloween leftover but represents the genome of a mycobacterial phage (virus that infects bacteria related to the TB bacterium) called, yes, Pumpkin (or the somewhat less memorable Cjw1). There isn't much to show at the moment apart from the blue open reading frames (the useful bits that encode genes) offset according to which of the two DNA strands they are on (there's quite a disparity). You can run the mouse over the ORFs to see their index number and pop the chosen one up by touching it. The relevant page from the database is automagically displayed on one side of the prim and you can zoom in using the + button on the toolbar shown). Rightclick and touch the ORF prim to return it to its original position. Well, that's the theory -- there are still a few "issues" as I write and some way to go before it is useful in class.

As there are less than 150 ORFs, I've decided for the moment to explore this prim-intensive approach rather than use textures and touchpos scripts as on the giant genome.

Alice in WonderSLand

The Avatar Repertory Company staged their version of the Lewis Carroll classic last night. As my first taste of a fullscale theatrical production in SL, I was mightily impressed, both with the performances and with the staging. The story lends itself brilliantly to SL with the consistently excellent Alice changing in size as required in a way that would be hard to imagine in RL. The absence of facial expression beyond lip movement did not affect my enjoyment at all. The voices were well able to convey the emotional dimension and a real-life production would probably have resorted to a degree of deadpan anyway.

The staging was highly imaginative and made use of the potential of both the environment and the story to deliver a full sense of wonderment. There may have been more standing on tables than would have been the case in RL but this is the stuff of an avatar's existence and taken therefore as read and barely noticed. You can occasionally see how things are done but I think only in a way that makes one complicit with the cast (who chatted amiably with the audience at the end and admitted to a degree of improv on one or two occasions). Given that they are drawn from multiple continents, the ensemble playing was wonderful.

I don't know whether it puts an unbearable load on the sim but being able to alt-zoom the avatar camera gives the audience the ability to stage one's own play-within-a-play and steal some keepsake photos in a way that would not be possible in RL. With 55 in the sim, SL did a splendid job of sustaining what was at times a very kinetic performance and deserves a full measure of credit as well. Tickets (L$500 well spent in my opinion) can be obtained from xstreetsl: just search for Alice in WonderSLand. The very able front-of-house staff also contributed to the experience but do make sure to turn up early to follow the guidance on setting viewers (instructions cover Emerald and Viewer 2.0) and allow SL to cache textures.

Interested in a sim share in Second Life?

I've posted this in various places so I may as well share here on the off-chance that anyone still reads blogs:

I'm looking for 2-3 educators (or departmental-level small groups thereof) to share sim costs with me from June 2010 onwards (though a later joining date might be considered). I'm a microbiology lecturer at the University of Liverpool in the UK, former director of a national subject-specific support centre for e-learning, and a small-scale developer of educational tools and content free for use in SL. All subject areas welcome.

If interested, please leave a comment on this blog

I was planning to give up the sim and rent parcels only during teaching. Unfortunately, the intervention of the anonymous organisation means that I require the option at least of using the RegAPI to confine student avatars to the island should senior management so decide. I don't have the luxury of time to debate the true meaning of FUD on SLED as the sim closes at the end of this month and projects for next year are due by the end of this week. Wonderful timing (not).

I suppose running the island in lockdown mode might encourage a few more staff to dip their toes into SL but I have no idea how I would explain it to the students. Going to an educational OpenSim grid after this seems an improbable option unless anyone knows one that has disavowed the call. As there's now no point in paying tier on the new Centre at Daxos, that will close before it actually opened. Not a first for SL, I suspect, and one of its strengths, namely that you can try things and fail at only moderate cost.

For anyone who has read this far, educators get a discount so a third of an island (5000 prims) would therefore be $50 + VAT at 17.5% per month, six months in advance. I'm anticipating a fairly drastic reorganisation but obviously won't do that until people sign up. I'll also have to rebadge the island .

On the upside, I have written the script for a Downfall parody based on this episode but I'm not brave enough to publish it here. It's probably unintelligible to most people anyway but, well, it made me chortle.

Who broke the metaverse?

Today (yes, it is Saturday, everywhere) I showed up on Genome for a meeting with a new group of avatars interested in biology assessment in SL. I contributed nothing but interruptions but Max did a great job despite the usual problems with voice and also thanked me for the new multi-sculpted lysozyme model which replaces the old one at the top of the Tower. As a consequence, she now has 700 more prims available to use elsewhere. This small "win" came following my visit to a Japanese sim to buy (with my own L$) a new tool developed for a totally different reason. I love what Max does and giving her those 700 prims back was a small token. All this was trivial stuff really but the grist of much that happens in a social virtual world.

Or it was until yesterday when an avowedly open but pretty much anonymous organisation (actually a model of opacity to non-members) decided to issue a recommendation that educational use of SL should stop until such time as they received a (free, heh) legal opinion on the situation regarding IP in SL, which some of their members (unnamed) were concerned about. And while they were about it, why not throw the adult content thing in for good measure. Two for the price of none. These guys run a hybrid grid that doesn't support SL (to add insult to injury, the site includes an antediluvian SL machinima) and, judging by the SLED list, some of their members were concerned that they couldn't legally export stuff they'd bought in SL so they could use it on these other grids.

Well, tough. Much as we might wish otherwise (especially for backup), that's the way SL works and, to the best of my knowledge, nothing much has really changed. The confusion maybe comes from the open source third-party viewers: you can use these to export basic objects: that's perfectly legal according to the new Terms of Service provided you made all of it. Maybe it was an oversight, maybe it was deliberate, but SL does not presently support cross-grid licensing of third-party content, even full-perms. One thing it does have, however, is litigious content creators so LL are caught between a rock and a hard place. The ultimate answer, of course, may be to develop content externally and import it into multiple grids, as I do in part with the sculpty generator.

Conflating this with the adult content aspect (which in practice is not really a problem and in things like search has improved a lot lately) seems gratuitous to me. If it does worry you, the answer is to tie students to your sim by registering them using the RegAPI. You then close the island to external visitors. I personally haven't the time to see how this legal thing pans out, what with the sim otherwise closing, so I can see my having to act defensively, try to keep the sim and then have the option of doing the RegAPI at extra cost, resulting in an inferior learning experience (no visits to the African township, for example) and no outreach opportunities. I just hope I never have to switch it on, effectively an electric fence round the island. How will I fund the island? Well, the current thinking is to look for 2-3 individuals or small groups to share.

Others are concerned that their faculty can't get grants for projects in SL because funding bodies demand backups. Well, tough again, and that's no excuse in my book for trying to pull the metaphorical walls down. I have had nothing but trivial seedcorn funding, some gifted educator/developers to learn from, a galaxy of tools to facilitate development, and a modicum of committment. Nothing I do is anywhere close to perfect (it would be much better if I had an accomplice) but some of it is improving and, I think, showing promise. Max runs Genome from a departmental budget. That's the future, infrastructure, not grants. Get over it.

But why not just go and develop on these new, carefully sanitised education grids, I hear you say? Well, firstly nothing I have seen suggests that the overall feature set, performance, tools and content, is yet comparable to SL (that will change). Indeed, if it was, why is the export of content from SL even an issue? Make or source your own. I personally have to resort to hosted solutions and the price differential between them and SL is also not yet sufficient to compensate for the loss of quality. In my opinion, for my purposes. In some cases the showcase video for these platforms looks lovely and (unsurprisingly) highlights the functionality that is superior to SL's while, of course, artfully hiding the fact that only three avatars can move at one time (unless you have gigabucks of RAM) or the maximum concurrency is in the 20's. But you can have limitless prims and multiple sims. No thanks.

Of course, all is not well in SL either if the more vociferous residents and bloggerati are to be believed. There were prophecies that this would be a year of pain and so it has proven, despite the fact that the service is (mostly) stable, still runs on our fairly basic hardware and offers additional features, most notably shared media. But one interest group after another prefers to complain until you wonder how they find time to use the service at all. And some quit, making sure that everyone knows in excruciting detail how much greener the grass textures are at their intended destination.

But it wasn't the residents that broke the metaverse. People come and go but SL's still running. It wasn't even this anonymous organisation and its supporters on SLED; Max will ignore their recommendations (if she's even heard of them) and, arguably, so should I. It certainly wasn't the Lindens that wrecked it -- they just run one small part of the metaverse now, albeit a commercial one with high walls and unconvivial pricing.

But ultimately it was me, I broke it. I got cross at an avatar I associated with this anonymous organisation and refused to help her induct a newb. That was mean-spirited and Max wouldn't have done it. OK, the apology is in the email.

Anonymous organisation: you may have all the grants, you may have the future even, but you are not the metaverse and don't forget it. The metaverse is about people, it's about connections, shared histories. Shame on you.