Category Archives: secondlife

Mar 16

BarCampBrighton and SL connections

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Aleks Krotoski talking about the social graph.

  • [missed the start] A social psychologist, trying to examine connections
  • Pathways can be mapped across friends and people.
  • Mass friending…impact the data and how the network connects.
  • there are certain relationships and strengths of relationships. You can technological measure strength but difficult as you get to semantics.
  • Adding arrows to the graph starts adding information. You can add lots of information, but then it all gets mushy in the middle.  Fuzzy and gooey and technologiest don’t like that. Then I come into the mix and go oooh psychology.
  • So how do you measure strength…

    • I asked the social psy questions. list friends and rating of them..
  • Based study on actual connection on a virtual world, on the qualitative assessment of relationships

    • Second half of study was looking at getting behavioural shortcuts for this
    • some evidence about how interactions acorss various channels indicates trust.  ie talking in public, IM in SL, outside of SL via email.
  • Once you have all the information, all the messy stuff. I was looking at interconnected, closely related groups of people.  I’m interested in them…as they know each other. In the mess, many people, but don’t know others, they identify as something.  Look at a self-decared group to see if they are differently connected.  I did an island analysis, pulled out 4 groups of people who are extremely closely connected to each other.  There’s a lot of trust between each other.
  • The point: There are social relationships which have psychologies that can;t ey be articualted through technolgy.  There are social flocking/network effects in these spaces – people move to where their friends are.   Whatever is happening…they’re capturing a lot of data about us.
  • The data they are capturing is going to be a key discussion coming up

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Mar 15

BarCampBrighton – Slorpedo

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This is about Slorpedo – a mixed reality game in Second Life

  • based on an Icehouse game Torpedo. Difficult to play in real world, due to complex rules. so fits well with a virtual world
  • built at HackDay London, uses reacTIVision
  • How it used to work – runs on laptop (server), interacts with SL, via some kind of HTTP, something inbetween – which as written in Processing.
  • Source code lost….URL was hard coded, they did not know the magic numbers.  Tried to re-write it Python yesterday. Approx 60 linrd, in Amazon S3 data,
  • Now – webcam : reactivision : PythonScript : Amazon : SL scrip : game in SL
  • Interesting intersection of technologies.
  • You put your pieces on the board in real life.  Using one hand. aim the subs at the other subs. First one on with all on board, yells stop. Then it switches to SL, where the subs fire all their torpedoes to see who wins, the one with the most subs left wins.
  • Q?; could you play across countries?   Yes, but you’d have to have projector…and how do you say stop?

A rally fun session with people slapping down fake submarines in real life to have them translated into fake submarines in Second Life

Bar Camp Brighton

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Apr 11

Urban Planning in Second Life

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I love the concept that a Paris residents association is asking members to propose a new design for the redesign of a central part of the city.

The association is urging locals to come up with their own ideas for the area’s gardens and post them in the online world of Second Life, where people create virtual doubles of themselves called avatars. Accomplir will shortlist five of the best projects, which will then be displayed on an island in Second Life.

How many entries do they think they will get? How many people can do such design? If you want to see one in action, take a look at this superb video from Lordfly Digeridoo who planned and built a site for a college requirement.


Click To Play

Jan 24

Get a First Life and take a Blog Survey

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You will, I hope, have seen Darren’s Get a First Life site, a call for people everywhere to sign up and try some of this real life stuff; you have to scroll down to comment 16 to get the real social impact of this, with Linden Labs posting their take on it and giving a licence for the logo to be used in making of the First Life tshirts.

Get a First Life

But, just before you rush out and use your real genitals, take the blog survey over at whydoyoublog.com, giving Darren lots of numbers for his Northern Voice presentation (and you may just win something)

Nov 07

Big Brother In Second Life

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I’m not sure whether I think this is innovative or downright scary but Big Brother is moving into Second Life.   Check out the trailer, which appears to be the sales pitch for the franchise and does not mention the SL version.

In the virtual version, they are looking for 15 people in 3 time zones who can be online for 8 hours a day during December.  At the end of it, the last remaining inhabitant wins a tropical island inworld.   You can follow the who thing in SL and I guess through other media – any profits will go towards a charity chosen by visitors to the world.    Given the following of the show, I’m guessing we’ll see membership increase dramatically.  Hopefully the income will include additional hardware to run the world.

I’ve never seen the TV version, so can’t really comment on the potential for this, though I guess it is high.   However, I’m still not sure it’s April 1 somewhere, it just has that feel.

Mar 29

Second Life

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I’ve finally gone and joined Second Life. I’ll probably spend time over the next few days trying to work out how to use it, with all the accompanying pain of having to work to learn new things. My character is called Chel Maladay, and currently has no assets beyond the clothes I’m, standing up in.