Open Forum: What's Your Dream Project in Second Life/OpenSim/Blue Mars?

Someone named Andra Snoodle recently told me she'd like to create "a large scale project for a sociological study about exclusiveness in Second Life." To do that, she wants a sim to build a place called The Manor (working title) where a group called Society hangs out. "Only known to each other within the walls and unknown outside to the populace at large," she explained, "we will progressively pick those in SL that we think can be a positive player in this social experiment." The point, she said, is to see if "in a place that is so open and free, what happens when exclusivity invades? Will it spread like wildfire as it does in real life, or will inclusivity prevail?"

An intriguing if devlish idea. What dream project would you build in Second Life, or if it was cheaper, in an alternate OpenSim world, or Blue Mars? Let your imagination leap like a gazelle on amyl nitrate in Comments -- if you're lucky, maybe someone reading will take you up on your idea.

Comments

[Ajax Manatiso]

I once had a dream project to turn an entire sim into a depiction of Dante's Inferno -- his vision of Hell -- but then I realized -- I have been to many sims that were just pure hell.

[Flo2]

Actually there WAS a Dante's Inferno - maybe still is? - I've seen it about a year ago in SL. It was a part of a literature education project, just like the famous Macbeth sim. I appreciated the idea, though the place looked very "2005-like", unfortunately.

About dream project ideas: obviously if anyone has a good dream project idea, none of them will give it away for free. :P

[Alvi Halderman]

My dream would be a more crowded space where space is a problem, I would like to see a Landscape like New York where people use the whole Spaces inside them which makes a community easier to handle, a place where you can have privacy and more, these things will probably leak into Blue Mars faster, but i don't feel that blue mars works >.>

[EileenK]

I want to build a public library that actually serves the ones behind the avatarim. This is a doable dream though I'd have to shrink my garden nursery on my 2048 if I wanted to build this project on ground level.

I could offer you your hometown paper, access to homework help for your kids, links that would help youfind your favorite best seller at your local library.

My problem with the dream is time and also where my sim is located, I'd have to do "collection development" in both English and Portutguese.

[Cube Republic]

I'm always working on dream projects.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Immersive simulation of one part of Neuromancer, in all its dark glory. Viv Trafalgar and I have been wool-gathering on this for some time.

[Winter Seale]

My impression is that there are lots and lots of exclusive little enclaves in Second Life. The thing is, by being exclusive they also become obscure, so hardly anyone's aware of them. The trick to that idea is

My dream is to start a post-modern second life cult, that uses and admits to using all of the standard methods of cult indoctrination. My theory is that most of them would continue to be just as effective even if you explained to people up front what you were doing. I'm also curious how the meme would spread in world, and if it would hop-the-barrier to RL for some. (That right there is the main argument against actually doing it. =p)

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

"a post-modern second life cult", Winter? You mean, like, ostensibly by-the-books Goreans who manage to sport Furry avatars and have a sense of detached irony as they quote Roland Barthes at you?

Sign me up! It's just like grad school all over again! Say....1990s English PhD program immersive simulation in SL. I want to be Stanley Fish.

Now I have a new dream project, Hamlet.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I fear my dreams are rather prosaic. I would build an island of classical myth as seen through the gauzy, romantic eye of art noveau, an overgrown temple and amphitheatre, glades and grottos, a lazy place for idle lounging and diversions both erudite and earthy. Pastel, pastoral, suspended in the eternal golden amber of a sunset that never ends, it would be a haven for those longing for refuge and peace.

Oh, and maybe a labyrinth for those that get a bit bored of refuge and peace :)

[Rodion Resistance]

We don't have to dream it--we're already making it ;) http://moonworld.cet.edu/

[Renmiri]

Me and Blaze are trying to do some very neat things on Opensim. Will say more when we get it to work.

I think Opensim and OSgrid has "come of age" and is ready to explode in adoption real soon. Stay tuned!

[ZenRascal Mandelbrot]

SL is incredible as an experience and as a technical implementation.

But some of its limitations are, well, mind-boggling. Are you really telling me you can't have maybe 100 or so avatars in the same place at an event? And while we look at the reasons this modest situation bursts SL's seams, everyone knows much of the SL world is deserted or nearly so. The majority of LL's server farms are loafing, doing almost nothing.

Where is the scalability for this? Maybe LL is now too committed to its current SL architecture to make massive changes. So it will probably have to be another group, another virtual world.

But that's my dream project: To grow an architecture that flips LL's on its head so that avis in proximity scale smoothly and naturally without becoming the bottleneck they do in LL's current system.