Second Life: Freya Ophelia

This final project is kind of looming over my head. I met up with Chris to discuss it (in real life…I would rather talk to real Chris than a panda bear) and we decided to work on altering states of movement. So, for example, instead of walking everywhere on your feet, your avatar would back flip everywhere, or walk on their hands everywhere. I think our environment has an interesting effect on our bodies and our motion. The first “human” beings on earth had a much different stature and way of moment, tailored to their environment and needs. Years later, in the present day and age, our bodies have morphed to fit our current environment and needs. No longer hunters and gatherers, our entire way of moving has changed. What are the implications of a virtual environment on movement? Seemingly none, in SL anyway. The movement is pretty arbitrary; you can walk or you can fly. But then again, a lot of environmental conditions are the same in SL as they are in RL, resulting in similar needs, and, I suppose, similar ways of movement. To me this is strange, because the world of SL seems so limitless, yet we’re all very limited in movement. I’m not talking about gestures (though those seem to mostly mimic real life as well) but the actual way the avatars get from place to place.

I think the way to change the way an avatar walks is to create a new animation, in Poser probably, then attach that animation to the avatar (maybe through an object?) Chris noticed that when an avatar holds a cup that they constant lift their arm to their mouth to drink. This gives hope to what we want to do…it is possible to attach a script/animation to an object that changes the motion of an avatar. I found the actual animation for walking in SL today. Though I can’t see the properties, the animation does have an owner, and a message to him is as good a place to start as any.

Freya was no help at all during my search for a start on this project…she kept wandering off to freebie boxes or to play piano or something…..it’s so hard to stay on task in SL!!!

"Buckbee, who is initially focusing on creating 3- to 7-inch statuettes of Second Life avatars, meets clients as his in-game persona, "Hal9k Andalso," and takes the screenshots necessary to turn their digital selves into polymer using the rapid prototyping machines common in industrial design firms. "

...are you SERIOUS? A little statue of your avatar? Come on!? I thought the point of SL was to escape reality, and here we have someone turning the virtual back into the real. I guess people are more attached to their avatars than I thought. Identity has always been a strong pull of SL though. When asked what draws people to second life, the creator of SL said: "Identity ... If you went to Australia, you could be a new you. The thing about "Second Life" is, it's a pretty potent offering that way, right? In the real world you can't change the way you look when you walk in."

So I suppose if people are drawn to the change in identity, they would want that virtual identity to become as much of a reality as possible, hence the real life avatar statue...but still...isn't the main draw of having a virtual identity the ability for infinite change? A statue of your avatar is always going to look the same. I don't know, the whole thing sounds preposterous to me.

I’ve been rooting for SL from the start. I think learning and meeting virtually is the way of the future. But one thing the classroom has that SL doesn’t is dependability. The classroom is never down for maintenance. The classroom is never lagged. The classroom, as much as I hate it, is always there. Second life, on the other hand, seems to be riddled with problems. Before we can take meeting in a virtual environment for educational purposes seriously, we need to take a long hard look at technical difficulties.

My group and I also had difficulties getting our project together because of the stipulations SL puts on objects. We each made our separate parts, but when it came down to having one person pick them all up, the trouble began. In the end, I had made such a debacle of our project Tyler said “you just keep working on that” and he snuck off and started over. Maybe I just don’t understand the settings for sharing objects, or maybe SL really was making it difficult, but either way, the experience was frustrating.