New World Notes

Caltech's Second Life Campus Now Available as Free Venue/Hosting Space to Fellow Academics for Research, Teaching, and Socializing

The legendary Caltech University launched a virtual world campus in Second Life last year during the pandemic, and is now offering Virtech to academics worldwide who are interested in a free venue/hosting space for their research projects and educational events.  

"As the academic year ended, and as the pandemic restrictions end, we are transitioning to the next phase of of Virtech, as an experimental and educational space," Virtech director and Caltech astronomy professor George Djorgovski tells me. (His SL avatar is charmingly dubbed "Curious George".) 

Here's the kind of projects Virtech's team is most interested in hosting, and how academics can get in touch with George and his team, to apply for access:

How Offline Mesh Hurt Educational Projects in SL (Comment of the Week)

While many of us have talked about how the addition of offline mesh transformed Second Life into a consumer-focused world, educator Joe "Iggy" Essid offered this comment on how it hurt virtual world teaching projects like his:

I recall when Mesh arrived. Most of us in the .edu sector had already left, but I thought "there goes another magical SL experience": team-builds in-world. I think two students I knew could make things in Blender, and even then, it would be made outside SL and imported.

The magic of SL was always when folks interacted, in there. I didn't mind how much more realistic mesh avatars looked or how clunky the physics-engine proved; we were not building avatars or scripting HUDs, but we were making the spaces where avatars interact. I'm not a coder, so I imagine in-world building tools for mesh would be laggy and complex, but then building itself was complex already, the permissions system a mess, and the UI for SL clunky in the extreme.

Had in-world mesh tools existed, some of us in education would have soldiered on and given away Creative Commons content to colleagues, as a brave handful still do in OpenSim. Sure, we could keep using prims, but after a while, our builds would resemble the black-and-white people in Snowcrash's color Metaverse.

We dismantled our project, a virtual House of Usher peopled with actors, one of whom went on to win SF's Nebula Award. I also took down the version in OpenSim, after the host we had closed shop.

A former Linden told me "hey, buy some cool stuff from Turbosquid and import it to jazz up your build."

Sounded good until I priced it. Four items would blow the entire budget. We had already lost two hosts because of the .edu discount coming to an end. Game over.

Essid discusses his project to create a roleplay experience based on Poe's Fall of the House of Usher in this academic paper here and for HyperGrid Business here.

Caltech Launches Virtual World Campus in SL as Pandemic-Era Social Space

Caltech is among the very best universities in the world, famous for being the home of Richard Feynman and other science legends. (And perhaps even more famously, for being the setting for Big Bang.) Now it's helping drive a rebirth in educational uses for virtual worlds with Virtech: 

Virtech is an interactive, social, and private space inside Second Life, designed to furnish the Caltech community with an alternative to in-person interaction. Through the use of avatars, participants can visit a rich virtual space furnished to enable engaging experience as well as seamless social interaction. Virtech is a safe, pleasant space to socialize, create, collaborate, and learn. It is open only to the members of the Caltech community and their approved guests, and the members of other academic communities by a special arrangement. It is operated by the Virtual Reality Lab, which is a part of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery at Caltech.

Virtech's launch is led by Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, a longtime advocate of virtual worlds for pedagogy. (Unsurprisingly, his Second Life avatar name is "Curious George".) While virtual worlds for universities peaked and declined about a decade ago, COVID-19 has once again brought their potential value to the fore: 

"The pandemic has taken away an important component of the student life," as Professor Djorgovski puts it to me. "In the normal times, the incoming students have to establish new friendships and networks, learn from the older students, and collaborate.  The older students are also affected, and this is becoming a critical issue for their social and psychological well-being.  Standard social media or videoconferencing apps are a poor substitute for the interpersonal interactions, but Virtual Worlds offer a qualitatively superior experience."

More here.  As a first goal, he and the Virtech team are planning to give students a 3D space for social interaction and collaboration. "Later on, we plan to use it for educational activities, such as the lectures, office hours, discussion groups, etc."

And no, notwithstanding SL's somewhat sordid reputation (or for that matter, what Big Bang might imply), Virtech has restrictions on Adult-rated content, privacy protections for students, and is barred from outside visitors:  

SL Users: Please Take This Survey from UC Irvine's Tom Boellstorff on Your Virtual World Usage During the Pandemic

Here's a fun short survey for SL users for a study on virtual cultures during the COVID-19 pandemic. (One of the questions above.) The study is led by my pal Tom Boellstorff of UC Irvine, who's easily among the most preeminent academics with a focus on virtual worlds. (He's the author of Coming of Age in Second Life, among many other related works.)

"I’ve been conducting various research projects in Second Life for almost 17 years now," Tom tells me, explaining the genesis of this study. "A couple years ago, I completed a study of disability in Second Life, and after that wonderful research experience moved on to some other projects (I’m actually finishing up a book on the Intellivision video game system from the early 1980s, which is great fun!) But then when COVID-19 hit, I decided to return to Second Life to see how COVID-19 is reshaping online interaction. I was lucky enough to get support from the National Science Foundation that means I have three wonderful graduate research assistants. Until next April we are conducting research in both Second Life and Animal Crossing. It’s a wild ride, setting up research with very little warning, but it’s been a great experience for all of us."

Here's the key questions Tom and his team hope to answer:

"The basic idea behind our project is that what people call 'social distancing' is really physical distancing. Online, new kinds of connections are being created. What are they, how are they working, and what lessons can we learn as it’s happening? In particular, the Internet isn’t a unified entity. Virtual worlds share some things with social network sites like Facebook or Instagram, with mobile devices, with online games, and so on, but there are distinctive features as well. What do virtual worlds specifically offer? What is the potential and what are the dangers? How can learning from what people are doing in virtual worlds help us better respond to the transformed lives we’ll all be living in the wake of COVID-19?"

Even better, Tom will share the results with New World Notes. More about the study here, excerpt below:

Industrial Design Students Still in COVID Quarantine Learn How to Prototype Real Chairs in a Virtual World

Gargoyle presents his chair design to students and instructors

Industrial designer Robb Godshaw was recently set to co-teach a class in rapid prototyping at San Francisco State University, when a somewhat inconvenient global pandemic broke out.

As originally planned, students would first learn how to use CAD software, and then learn how to use to computer-aided manufacturing software to actually create a full-size wooden chair via 3D printing and CNC machining. So at the end, each student would literally get to leave class with the chair they’d created from start to finish.  

That was supposed to be the “satisfying and empowering” portion of the semester, as Godshaw puts it to me, but the problem was, the university was (back last May) still in lockdown. “This made COVID especially frustrating,” he goes on. “I thought hard of what lessons students had learned in the previous semesters, and tried to find a way that some of those lessons could be learned virtually.” 

But where Zoom or another online video conferencing platform might work for most other subjects, his class needed some level of in-person teaching:

“There are students whose chairs suffered from serious structural issues, craft issues, aesthetic issues, ergonomic issues, and simple scale issues, as it is very difficult to know how large the chair you are designing on a computer screen is.”

That meant “finding a tool that would allow people to move in real space with human sized avatars that would allow for sitting and chatting”, but also didn’t necessarily require a new gaming PC or a VR headset. 

The online learning alternative he ultimately landed on, as you can see below, just turned 17 years old:

Educators Who Use Virtual Worlds: When Do You Want a Live Group Demo of Breakroom, the Free-for-Public Schools 3D Social Hub from Sinespace?

The developers of Breakroom, the new 3D social hub for remote teams from virtual world company Sinespace (a sponsoring media partner to New World Notes), are starting to hold live demos to companies and organizations interested in using the platform for classes, meetings, events and other online group activities. 

Brearkroom’s lead developer is Adam Frisby, a co-founder of OpenSim, and is free to use for public schools, so Adam and team are planning to give demos specifically catering to educators -- especially those already familiar with OpenSim and other virtual worlds.

Question is, when is the most preferred day/time for such a demo? The team is planning to schedule them on weekdays between 8am-Noon PST, but if there’s a strong preference for other time slots, they’ll try to accommodate some of those as well.

So please take this survey to help Sinespace schedule demos during the most preferred days and times -- and share this survey with any virtual world-based educators you may know!

In Coronavirus' Wake, Virtual World-Based Educator Using Both Zoom and Second Life to Teach Her Classes (Comment of the Week)

As educators discuss the appeal of Linden Lab's new post-Coronavirus land discount for schools, teacher and reader Kaylee West offers a unique perspective on using virtual worlds as a pedagogic tool now that her students can't be in the same room as her:

Like many other institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic we are using Zoom for live online classes, and Zoom and similar platforms are excellent for a lot of the teaching we need to do. However, they can't do what virtual worlds like Second Life can do (simulation and multiuser collaboration), so my SL lessons will continue.

For the first time, however, I won't be physically in the same computer lab as my students, but will use a combination of Zoom and SL to conduct the classes. Zoom, with its screen sharing capability, will enable me to brief students at the start of a lesson, and help them solve technical problems during the lesson, which is much easier if you can see their screen.

For me, this has been one big area that I would love to see better developed in SL -- some form of desktop or screen sharing. Maybe this takes development into a whole other technical area that Linden Lab can't support, but it would make the functionality of SL much greater for assisting students and newbies during lessons. Still, if LL wants SL to be able to compete with platforms like Zoom and Collaborate for certain types of interaction, they will need to look at features like screen sharing, etc.

Hopefully someone at Linden Lab notices that last request. Kaylee's been using Second Life as a teaching tool in her university for 12 years, and has noticed some interesting (and positive) advantages to that over the years:

Educators & Non-Profits: Will You Buy Linden Lab's SL Sim Discount Offer?

If you're in education or work for a non-profit organization and you're also interested in potentially using virtual worlds for your work, please take this survey. If you missed the news from last Friday here's the gist:

SL-Based Education Not Hurt by "Wokeness", But Institutional Indifference (Comments of the Week)

Great comment thread in response to one educator speculating that a very politically incorrect Second Life would never work as an educational tool on today's "woke" campuses. SL-based artist Nebulosus Severine says not so based on her personal experience:

So-called "woke" colleges (I attended one) frequently engage their students about society's dark sides, controversial issues, and problematic human behavior ON PURPOSE. It doesn't try to shelter students from them, it encourages them to face them & discuss things like this - that's kind of a big part of what being "woke" is about??

While I was still in school, we had several incidents with controversial groups on campus, including anti-abortion protesters who posted graphic images on large signs, etc. And we were all able to handle these things like civilized fucking adults. School staff made it a custom to alert students to events like these, so that we could choose to avoid them or not as we chose, because we're all grown-ass adults who have agency. And these controversial topics of discussion were the norm, not the exception. The process of becoming woke is to examine controversial topics, to try and understand them, not to run away and hide from them because they're upsetting to think about.

That sounds right, though there is a substantial difference between controversial groups on campus which students can avoid or engage with as they choose, versus what we were talking about: SL-based educational programs, where students might be required to share a (virtual) environment with these controversial groups as part of their necessary coursework.

In any case, Victoria Leavenworth, another reader with experience in virtual world education, argues that the real problem with SL-based education is the institution itself:

Educator: Second Life as a Teaching Tool Would Never Work on "Woke" College Campuses of Today (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: Gorean roleplay, one of Second Life's most popular roleplay subcultures

There's a very interesting reader thread on the recent Electronic Gaming Monthly article on Second Life as told through its old guidebooks. including this thought from "Iggy", who some ten years go, when SL had hundreds of "virtual campuses" owned by real life colleges and universities (up to and including Harvard!) was once among the most passionate educators advocating for the use of Second Life as a teaching tool in colleges: