Archive for November, 2009

Educators from Second Life Branch Out to Other Virtual Worlds

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Burial Chamber
Location: Virtual Valley of the Kings

I was amazed that we got 18–or 17, with someone crashing frequently–into Rezzable’s Virtual King Tut Experience. It was our group’s first foray outside Second Life. It will not be our last. We plan visits to Metaplace and Reaction Grid soon.

Our transcript shows a lively and lighthearted group of educators pondering what it will be like to explore multiple worlds. Given our group’s upcoming name-change to The Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, the change of venue was appropriate.

Readers know that I am less than pleased with how Linden Lab has handled educational issues recently, and now they heap on changes that will hurt small merchants, and educators, using the Xstreetsl market they acquired last year.

Time to shuffle our feet, if not vote with them, in other virtual worlds. Land is cheaper there and, in time, content will be as rich and the community large enough to sustain our efforts. Rezzable itself left much of its SL property over pricing.

Others will, in time too. Princeton has scaled by its SL presence, as Paisley Beebe noted in her interview with jokay Wollengong.

Who will the winners and losers in as these technologies evolve? If you know that answer, time to make some strategic investments.

Bot Technology In Second Life For Medical Training

Thursday, November 5th, 2009


Location: Waiting Room

I’m impressed with this YouTube video, done my my SL Roundtable colleague Kali Pizzaro. “Colin,” the bot shown, can reply to simple text-chat questions, and as this technology develops, it could provide a good training simulation for medical professionals.

Kali’s original post on this notes how the test demonstrates “our work on connecting “Second Life” avatar-patient-bots with specially written AIML [artificial intelligence markup language] and speech synthesis software. Hopefully we’ll add speech recognition too.”