Advice for non-profit organizations getting into Second Life I’m currently at Carnegie Mellon University’s Technology in the Arts Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. CMU is my alma mater, and this morning I gave a presentation on Second Life and how non-profit organizations and artists can use the virtual space to expand their audience and create 3D immersive experiences, especially if they’re on a budget. Panel was called The Art of Second Life: Artists and Arts Organizations in a Virtual World.

[SLED] Classes, Congress and Book - Second Life on Education I am a professor at a Brazilian University. I was a member of this list but some months ago I left because I was not being able to read all the e-mails! Now I am back.

I have been working with Second Life in Education in Brasil.

Second Life: A Virtual Universe for Real Engineering RELATED ARTICLES RESOURCE CENTER BY THIS AUTHOR Prototypes Speed Festo’s Endurance Testing

First there was the drafting table and the pencil. Then there was 2-D CAD; next came 3-D drafting utilities like SolidWorks and ProEngineer. Now, San Francisco-based Linden Lab has evolved computer-aided design to its next plateau, offering free access to a computer-generated alternative universe called Second Life (SL) where users can build anything. Ironically, the SL developers did not intend to design a solid modeling tool. SL was just another massive multiplayer online experience until users spontaneously began utilizing it for engineering design.

I Am Legend … and so are you! It’s here! The Electric Sheep have teamed up with Warner Bros. to produce the I Am Legend survival horror game, playable in SL right now! Based on the upcoming movie of the same name, the game will let players take sides in a dying, apocalyptic New York.

The Big Prim Problem For quite a while now Second Life has been home to a variety of jumbo-sized prims, megaprims, and other larger than the usual ten-meters-maximum prims. The original “megaprims” were produced by Residents’ manipulation of the client last year; “new” ones cannot be made, but the existing supply can be (and are) copied and distributed. Linden Lab doesn’t support or encourage the use of these prims, but our policy up until now has been ‘live and let live’.

Claudia Linden and Discovery Education Webex Claudia Linden will appear in the Discovery Education EdTech Connect Series. “She’ll share success stories and best practices from exemplary K12 and higher education projects in Second Life. “

How Do You Feel About Megaprims? In a post on the Second Life blog, Michael Linden has asked the community what to do about megaprims, they want to get rid of them, but are asking residents what are the good uses, what are the bad uses, should they remove them all, or should they just remove the ones down to a certain level, he even mentions that there is one megaprim that is 65,000 meters wide, and says that one is gone.

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I ment to post about this yesterday and forgot, but Second Life pased 10 million signups Thursday, the 11th of October, at about 9:35PM. From Second Life Insider Today in Second Life - Thursday 11 October, 2007.

Machinima Festival UK - Reallusion presentation Not all of the speakers are recording their presentations for immediate playback, but one speaker, John Martin of Reallusion, had the foresight to do just that! He couldn’t make it to the Festival, so he streamed live, using his webcam and desktop, to a website, Operator 11. It allows you to upload webcam media and play it in real time. You can find the high quality version of his iClone demo here.

Machinima Festival UK - I was going to tell you … I was going to tell you that the UK Machinima Festival is being streamed right now from 2:30am-9am PDT/SLT on both Saturday and Sunday. I was going to tell you that SLers account for a whopping 8 nominations! I was going to tell you that we’re all gathered at Hathead II island to watch the stream. I was ALSO going to tell you that you could watch it online from Quicktime.

Then I found out that the actual awards ceremony won’t be streamed.

PODball! Cube3, who released the CubePODZ, previously reported here, have created a new game that can only be played with their versatile vehicles: PODball. Owing to the vehicles’ ability to adapt to three different surface media, PODball will feature 3 layered fields upon which to compete, meaning that players will have to master their crafts, and the transformative structures inherent to the CubePODZ.

Free Second Life Traffic Logger Launched Online marketing agency Clear Ink has released Slogbase, a free service allowing companies to track visitors and measure traffic to their locations in Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Slogbase, offered as an open source application, monitors visitor numbers and follows their routes through users’ ‘islands’ in Second Life, including information on how long people stayed.

How to Reduce Client Side Lag in Second Life No one likes lag, whether it be local, server side or some hardware’s fault in the middle. Have to admit I’ve many a time found myself explaining the details and walking people through changing/disabling certain settings. Rather than continuing to do that here’s a guide that I can now point them to. It also makes an interesting and information filled blog entry worth sharing.

Security in Second Life - its Real 7 Things You Need to Know About Security in Second Life. Security in a virtual world like Second Life is a major concern. There always seems to be someone around who wants to amuse themselves by making others unhappy (”griefers”), and businesses need to know what do to when that happens. According to Dharma Austin of LSD Security Inc., an in-world security company that has worked with dozens of sim owners, most well-populated sims in Second Life are completely vulnerable to attack. I asked her what people really need to know when it comes to security.

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