It has been an incredibly busy month for Ener Hax and the Second Life iliveisl estate. Shutting down an established private estate is no small feat. Thankfully, the good will fostered by Ener meant that the iliveisl community eagerly stepped up to keep the estate together by buying their sims and working together. That is the biggest plus that Second Life has – its residents. Linden Lab has shifted to a platform provider and not much more.
Even Torley, the Lab’s evangelist extraordinaire no longer blogs about Second Life on his own blog. Is that a move to a more balanced life or simply accepting you are just another employee? I can certainly understand wanting to blog only about your core interests.
For this blog, and the iliveisl blog, we also blog about our core interests. Mine are eLearning and teaching in virtual worlds. iliveisl focuses on building and living in virtual worlds.
Teaching with virtual worlds, in my mind, extends beyond what we typically define as teaching. I like using virtual worlds to help people connect and collaborate and also to “show” a space.The iliveisl senior scripter, DreamWalker, has turned us on to a way to show different room configurations for teaching, meetings, and other uses. You may have heard of holodecks in virtual worlds, but this is designed for use in your existing builds.
Basically you create a room, for example, auditorium seating with a podium and video screen, and then “store” all items and positions. Then perhaps set it up for a smaller meeting. Once your rooms are setup, you access them via a simple menu, select the one you need and in a moment the room sets itself up!
Apart from being a wonderful resource, DreamWalker cares deeply about helping others enjoy virtual worlds. She spends much of her time helping noobs and has now been introducing Reaction Grid to Second Life residents. She has spent far more time in Reaction Grid’s main world than myself or Ener. We have been building out our private Reaction Grid hosted “Enclave Harbor”.
Her experience on the main grid has been with scripting as well as meeting with the people she talks to in Second Life. She shared her observations with Ener and the top four concerns expressed by residents were:
- No search for people or places.
- No groups.
- Difficulty logging in, frequent crashes.
- Weird graphic glitches.
Of these, the only one that concerns me are groups, but that will come soon. This is alpha software. That said, I find it works much better than Second Life. I can film at higher frame rates and can build without the silly 10 metre limit of Second Life.
I rarely crash (the same frequency as in Second Life), I don’t search since we build anything we need ourselves and I rely on the web to find points of interest, and I don’t experience any graphic glitches (but we are an isolated grid).
Here is the biggest reason I love Reaction Grid – the CEO and CTO both took time to address these concerns and offer solutions. They used the opportunity to further educate users and provide resources. See their comments here.
What a breath of fresh air!
Ener can’t get a simple shout out on Twitter from Linden Lab’s CEO, yet the top people at Reaction Grid take the time to share their passion.
