Posts tagged ‘Second Life’
Me and My Avatar
What does your avatar say about you? Do you secretly desire to be taller, thinner, or younger? Do you see yourself as a canine, a cartoon character, or a jedi knight? Do you feel a desire to change your race or gender? It’s not always clear exactly what our avatars say about ourselves, but clearly they do mean something. After all, consider how much time we spend customizing physical characteristics for entirely virtual identities. Considering how quick and easy it is to change them, it’s surprising how few people actually do. Regardless of what they say about ourselves, our avatars are certainly a statement that we make to the world.
With that being said, I put out a Tweet and Plurk asking people to share photos of themselves with their avatars. Here’s what people shared.
Steve Dembo (and Demb Oh)
Wendy Sigele
Liana Iaea-Honda
Jennifer Kraft
Do you have your own image of yourself with your avatar? Share a link!
Across the Metaverse
I’ve been working on a Second Life article, and part of it was spent checking out a few other virtual worlds. And while I thought I had a pretty good grasp on what was out there, this video shows that I really was just barely scratching the surface.
Think you are a Virtual World Guru? Then share just how many of the worlds in this video you have avatars in!
What’s the point of Second Life?
Got an email from a friend of mine (who’s name shall be withheld to protect the innocent). He had a conversation with his district technology director that he asked for some help with.
I had a short conversation with our district technology director yesterday and Second Life came up. I was telling him how streaming video would be projected in SL and how cool it was … He cut me off when I was trying to explain how I thought it would be interesting to some of our teachers to see what SL was like. He asked me: What is the point of using SL? Can you please provide me with some talking points to help me in the future with “what is the point of using SL”.
So I put together a few ideas of my own, regarding why I think Second Life is significant.
provides us the opportunity to experience things that we could never experience in real life. Because avatars aren’t bound by silly things like physics and laws of nature, we can experience things firsthand in an interactive way, as well as new ways that we could only imagine before.
For example, I can watch a hurricane occur from beginning to end, pausing it, rewinding it, checking out its perspective from above and below the water line, from up in the air and so on. Instead of just studying the cell, and the parts of the cell, I can step inside one and see them moving in three day. I can see the shapes and relative sizes of its parts relative to each other. I can study a painting by Van Goh, and then actually step inside it and explore it.
It can also a valuable tool for distance learning. It provides you with a flexible learning environment that also has a personal touch to it. Virtually face to face meetings.
It’s an ideal environment for breaking down our mental barriers regarding physical characteristics. Would students treat someone differently if they had a male avatar? Female avatar? What if they chose to be African or Asian, even tho in real life they’re white? Would that make a difference in how people treat you? Should it? And so on….
And obviously by its very nature, it can really help engage the video game generation. It gives them a virtual learning environment that they can mold to suit their needs.
To be honest, I’m not certain that SL is the ideal platform for education, but I do think it’s the best we have right now and well worth exploring so we’re prepared to leverage it as well as future virtual environments. It provides a platform for live social networking, which is becoming an increasingly important skill in the business world.
However, I’m just a dabbler. I haven’t gotten to spend nearly as much time in world as many other people, and I know some of you reading this have made serious investments into using Second Life in education. I’m hoping that you’ll help my friend out and share your ideas with us.
So in your expert opinion, what is the point of using Second Life in education?
Cell phone + Web cam + Second Life = Magic
Before I get started, MAJOR kudos to the DEN in Second Life Leadership Council who have done a phenomenal job of putting together a truly amazing weekly series of presentations. It’s one of the best sources of professional development that you probably didn’t even know existed. And the speakers don’t just focus on Second Life either.
So last night I had the opportunity to present. The way I figure it, Second Life is all about breaking down boundaries and trying to see how far we can push technology, education, and most importantly our own perceptions of what is and isn’t possible. With that in mind, I sat down and thought about what I liked and didn’t like about presenting in Second Life.
When I first presented in Second Life, the thing that I disliked the most was the fact that I had to type out the entire presentation. Yes, I could have pre-typed it all and used a script to display it all, but that’s just not the way I roll. So the entire presentation was almost an exercise to see how well I could type over a long period of time. Not too fun, and I’d imagine that while it may have been novel for the audience, it must have been pretty tedious.
All that changed when they introduced voice chat. Now all of a sudden, I could just talk normally and everybody could hear me in real time. HUGE improvement. However, there were other challenges still in place. For example, in order to show slides, you need to take a PowerPoint, save it as JPG images, renumber them (adding in a leading 0), upload them into Second Life (which costs 10 Lindens per image) and then put them into a viewer of some sort. Even once you’d done all that, you still had to deal with issues like other people hijacking your presentation and clicking through it while you’re trying to present. And of course, depending on how large your images are, often they take quite a long time to rez (and you never know whether other people are seeing the same thing you’re seeing).
Of course, the final issue is always that durn avatar. I’m a multi-tasker, but there’s no way that I can realistically present coherently and make my avatar do interesting things at the same time. I’m just not that talented.
As I see it, the solution for so many of these problems is live video streaming. To go from a frozen avatar waiting for his slides to rez, to a live talking head that can switch back and forth to a presentation or screencast-demo. I’d heard that there were ways to stream into Second Life, but most of those presentations were big ones done by major corporations, likely spending oodles of money. With a little elbow grease and some creative thinking though, I thought surely there must be a way to do it.
And there was.
Step 1: Veodia
Veodia is a streaming site that I knew from the Office 2.0 conference. They have very high quality streams and the ability to watch them via some mobile devices, iPhone included. However, interestingly enough, they also provide an RTSP link for their streams. I don’t know much about RTSP, but what I do know is that it can be used to stream into Second Life. So I set up an account there and got my webcam groove on.
Step 2: Create your ‘video screen’ in Second Life
Just create an object, any object. Apply a unique texture to one surface of it. Why unique? The live stream is going to replace ALL instances of this texture. So if you use it anywhere else, it’ll be replaced by the live video. No, I don’t know what will happen if you use the same texture on some clothing, but I do intend to find out.
Step 3: Tweak your land settings
Yes, you do need to have permission to modify land settings. Or, depending on where you’re presenting, you could have a land owner do this for you. By going to World -> About Land and clicking over to the Media tab, you can choose a specific texture for your lands streaming media. Apply the same texture that you used in Step 2 here. Then, choose Movie from the drop down box and for the URL, paste in your Veodia streams RTSP link.
Step 4: Click Play
At this point, all you need to do is rez your video screen and click play from the movie controls for the land (lower right corner of your screen). Once you do that, the texture you choose will be replaced by your live video stream. Don’t forget to smile for the crowd!
That’s it. Pretty darn simple when you get right down to it. And then all of a sudden your face is streaming live into Second Life as big or small as you want. Since Second Life is memory intensive, and so is streaming video, and all of my computers are pretty underpowered, I actually streamed from a different computer than I was running Second Life on.
Of course, beaming myself into Second Life was a neat trick, the goal was to improve my ability to present in Second Life. This means I had to get around those wonky PowerPoint presentations. I wanted to share my desktop in real time, to be able to display websites and navigate them without dealing with all the slow rezzing issues. To tackle this one, I turned to a free piece of software called Split Cam. It’s PC only, but you could also use Many Cam or CamTwist to do the same thing. Basically it serves as a virtual camera that sites between your streaming server and your webcam. Using Veodia, I choose SplitCam as my camera, and SplitCam displayed my webcam to be streamed. However, with a couple of clicks, I could switch and have SplitCam display my desktop instead. So far as Veodia was concerned, my desktop was just another webcam to display. By doing this, I could share everything happening on my desktop through that same video stream.
Not only did it work, it worked REALLY well. I could show web sites. I could demonstrate software. I could even pop open PowerPoint and start a slideshow full screen. It displayed the exact same slides I’d want to show in Second Life, but it did so INSTANTLY for everybody watching. No waiting to rez. I could click through it as fast as I could want and no need to wait for people to catch up. Very slick. I highly recommend it as a means for presenting.
To be honest, if I had left it there it would have been plenty. But there was one thought that I couldn’t get out of my head. “I’m still tied to my desk. How can I get away from it?” I suppose I could have tried to find a wireless webcam, but that still would have had limitations.
I have been exploring methods of streaming live video via cell phone recently. Qik looks like it has huge promise, but while they announced Blackjack support last week, as of writing this they still haven’t been able to deliver. Which brings me to CometNow. While CometNow has major UI issues, an awful embeddable widget, and is in dire need of a proper support page, it DOES allow you to create a live video stream from most Windows Mobile devices, and it works very very well. How to bring that stream into Second Life tho?
I wound up going about it the old fashioned way. I started a live feed on my phone first. Then I used SplitCam to display my desktop and loaded up the CometNow page. I made it full screen and voila! Cell phone streaming to CometNow. CometNow displayed full screen on my computer. SplitCam sharing my desktop to Veodia. Veodia sending the stream into Second Life. I actually had to crank up my computer speakers and then the webcam picked up and rebroadcast the audio.
And then I took a walk! It started off badly tho. I wanted to show Aiden to the group, but it turns out he wasn’t asleep yet. He kinda sorta started screaming which made the Wife justifiably pissed. But I was able to take the people in SL watching down the stairs, through the living room, out the back door and into my backyard. Live. I could have walked around the block. Driven to Walgreens. Jogged a few miles. And taken the audience with me the entire time.
Yes, the video was choppy. Clearly I was pushing this computer (and my broadband connection) way past the red line. But the fact is, it worked, and I was able to do it for free.
Streaming live from my backyard into Second Life. Who would have thought it? It was a very cool little experiment that worked, but really it was more proof of concept than anything else. How can it be done more elegantly? What possibilities does this open up? What do you do with this sort of ‘power’? And how can we use it to improve education?
I’d love to say that I have those answers, but I don’t. But maybe you do. Hopefully you’ll take this experiment and try it out yourself. And then see how far you can stretch it yourself…
Click here to view some images from the presentation