Art Fossett's Page

In a way, I wish I was part of Chilbo - part of me is dead envious cos it looks like a fun community.

As part of their summer fair there are three interesting looking panel sessions coming up - the first tonight. I'm guessing that they will all be well worth attending.

We make money not art has an interesting piece about the work of Marc Owens, including a description of a RL virtual transgender suit and an facility known as Second Death which will terminate your avatar after a random amount of time in-world (terminate as in permanently delete the account).

The first would probably go down a storm at SLCC?

The second is quite interesting. One might say, I suppose, that our avatars die when we do, or when the virtual world(s) in which they are manifested die (whichever comes first)? As I've argued before, I think the personas we see in our avatars are bigger than a particular avatar in a particular virtual world and I'm not sure I have a particular desire to feel virtual grief in the way described here anyway. But it's an interesting project nonetheless.

Interesting post on the OpenHabitat blog (OpenHabitat is a JISC-Funded project) discussing an in-world meeting that went "wrong" and the coping strategies that attendees adopted to cope with the "wrongness".

The tentative conclusion is that in-world voice should be used to augment in-world chat (i.e. that chat remains the primary communication method but that the noises-off provided by voice can be used to indicate the status of the various participants).

Nice idea... especially for those, like me, who don't like in-world voice much.

It reminds me a little of the story we heard at the wrap-up meeting of the Learning from Virtual Worlds: Teaching in Second Life project about students who self-organised themselves into using in-world chat for communication and in-world voice to share music with each other.

Steven Warburton has a nice post on Liquid Learning discussing the barriers to innovation in virtual worlds in the context of teaching and learning.
He suggests 6 areas in which there are barriers - technical, identity, culture, collaboration, time and economic - which seems like a useful breakdown to me.

He closes with a discussion about the choice of technology for a remote presentation with colleagues from the UK to an audience in Kuala Lumpur. In short, Elluminate was chosen over Second Life:

Not only were we going to have to trust the technical robustness of the platform (gulp) but we were also forced to assess the question of added value from using Second Life? Fighting server lag, low bandwidth problems, variable audio quality and the sheer awkwardness of manipulating an in-world slide viewer were just too much to contemplate so we shifted to the Elluminate.

While this doesn't seem unreasonable given the nature of the presentation (RL presenters speaking to a RL audience) he ends with:

here is a vision for SL that would help make it more usable - a whiteboard, an integrated IRC type chat client and a status indicator panel.

I suppose so... though SL already has an "IRC type chat client" (in-world chat - which in my experience serves perfectly well as a back-channel while voice is being used to carry the main presentation) and status indicator (just ask people to '/clap' or chat something when you want explicit acknowledgement). I agree that the whiteboard is missing and as I've argued elsewhere, this highlights SL's fundamental problem with handling text-like documents in any collaborative sense.

Apologies for the cross-post, but I've written up my contribution to the education panel session at Virtual Policy '08 on eFoundations.