The Dream of Reason (Again) in OpenSim

Location: Virtual House of Usher

With some instructions from Jokay, I was able to configure the Firestorm OpenSim viewer to log right into the build of Nevermore, transported (far as I can tell) seamless from hosting by Reaction Grid to Jokay's new host.

The transition was really smooth, though Roderick rezzed as Ruth (quickly fixed).  I've now saved his usual outfit as an outfit, replete with skin, shape, hair, AO...something I've long done with Iggy in Second Life but just forgot in OpenSim.

My plan would be to use Jokay's grid as my Lifeboat in case the looming changes in the SL viewer render our campus desktop Macs and PCs unable to run their latest client.

Stay tuned for more about the plant to use SL, one final time, for what may be my last hurrah in virtual-worlds teaching: my final exam suing the SL build of the House of Usher simulation/improv for the History of Cyberspace course.

This is No Way to Run a Railroad

 
Location: Watching Linden Lab Run Things Into the Ditch, Again.

I'll again try to host my meeting of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable tomorrow. Our title for the meeting is "What will you do with virtual worlds on your summer (or winter!) vacation? (TAKE TWO!)"

When last attempted, the Grid was down and only one lonely avatar made it to the Roundtable venue.

Then we rescheduled promptly, so we could at least talk about holiday plans before the Summer (or the antipodean Winter) break fades away. But Linden Lab has other plans: three days of work and "some regions may be taken offline and remain offline for extended periods of time."

I cannot imagine our newest educators in the group being pleased with this.  At the same time, Premium members are promised a "latest Premium-only perk. . .a fully interactive railcar that you can ride across more than 80 regions of the Second Life Railroad. Up to four people can ride and explore on each car!"

Well, wheeeee to that! I could not even get four of us to log in last time, and I certainly have had rotten luck crossing sim borders in my own vehicles.

What a fiasco this virtual world is becoming, for any serious work.  This is no way to run a railroad, even a fake one.

Hat tip to Prim Perfect for alerting me to this in an aptly named post, "There have been better weeks for Second Life."


My summer plans: beef up the Jokaydia Grid build for Fall. After all my prognostication about mobile apps in the last post, my department chair asked me to teach my first-year seminar again, and I most likely have missed the deadline for the iPad Initiative grants. I will run the Usher simulation again for my class...somewhere.

Usher in OpenSim: One Hour, 19 Prims, Staircase!

 
Location: Nevermore Region, Jokaydia Grid

Give me an idle hour during exam week, and my thoughts return to fixing little problems my last class identified with the Virtual House of Usher. There's a small chance that I'll teach with the simulation in the 2012-2013 academic  year, so I decided to spruce up things in OpenSim.

On both that grid and in SL, much of my summer work will focus on adding more clues directly from Poe's stories-within-stories that make "Usher" such an interesting tale. These additions further my pedagogical purpose of adding reasons to return to the primary text. After all, one purpose of the simulation is to deepen how students read the text.

But first we need stairs that work!

Many students new to gamelike spaces never really figured out the spiral stairs I had once thought so clever. So when parts of Usher returned to Second Life, Enktan Gully's staircase, a "dollarbie" from Enkythings, saved the day. Along with other repairs and revelations from the Fall 2011 final exams that took place in Jokaydia Grid, one lesson included getting rid of the spiral stairs.

Enktan's original gave me the model for reproducing a more battered and rustic version in Jokaydia Grid.  Finding the right Z-axis spacing would have been tough, otherwise!

Here's Roderick at work.


And after an hour, on both grids, the finished product. It weighs in at 19 prims, to the original's 31 and, I think, about 30 for the spiral.

While I don't have any problems with available prims in OpenSim, it's best to never let a build get in the way of learning. I even put aesthetic considerations after that, though both builds will get some needed attention this summer in their decor, particularly in deepening the sense of general gloom.

I don't suppose there are any "gloom consultants" out there?

Spaceports Saved, ISTE Island Closes

image credit: Scott Merrick's Flickr Photostream

Today, welcome and sad news in one dose. First, the International Spaceflight Museum was saved, by the action of "a higher-up Linden" than the staffer who denied Katherine Prawl's request to restore her sims. See the comments at New World Notes for more details.

Thus one door creaks open while another door slams shut. Alerted by a Tweet from Jokay Wollongong, I discovered that the island for The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) in Second Life will close as of March 1.

Scott Merrick's blog makes it clear that while ISTE will lose a region, the organization's virtual-worlds initiatives will not end. Scott notes that "The task force that examined options recommended two of them to the ISTE administration and and they accepted one, which involves rental space for ISTE" at Eduisland and a new ISTE region at Jokaydia Grid.

ISTE has long been a major player in the SL educational community, and it provided a popular orientation spot for new student and faculty avatars seeking to avoid the freakshows of the public welcome areas.

Now ISTE appears to be making the same moves I saw in my survey of educators: a smaller spot in SL to support educators and a larger one outside it.  This will save ISTE money, while maintaining their work with 3D immersive learning, given that tier fees for Jokaydia Grid run about 1/12 of what one would pay Linden Lab for a similar product that does not offer offgrid backups.

Thus, the SLexodus continues. Go by ISTE Island to thank them and bid them a fond farewell.

Creating Claustrophobia in a Build

Location: Attic, Virtual House of Usher

I'm close to finishing the SL build, at least to the point where I'll open the doors for visitors. Later, we will schedule a few events with our Usher actors.  I wanted, first, to address some concerns that my last group of students had in the OpenSim build.

See the chest to the left of my avatar? It's way too big, and I cannot resize it.

Normally, I'd build something or do without, but here, I  decided to "leave it big" (also letting me pull out an old inventory item we liked before).

Students noted that the House in Jokaydia Grid was not cluttered and crowded enough, and in both OpenSim and SL builds run bigger, with taller ceilings, than most real-life spaces.  That's the fault of 8' tall avatars and the clumsy way the camera follows  us when we move.

To create claustrophobia in wide-open spaces, I have tried a few methods to "trick the eye." These reverse the process I wrote about for creating the illusion of vast distance. Notably:
adding low-prim partitions and obstacles in rooms

• splitting some Jokaydia-Grid rooms into two rooms in SL
•  living with the jumbo-sized SL items, or making some things a little larger than to-scale. That way, space gets crowded!
• tinting distant items slightly darker to add complexity to the space. This also keeps the build from being too bright, a complaint by a few of my students last term.
• adding prims, such as rafters in the attic, that lower the ceiling without making the camera bounce around when an avatar walks.

In doing these things--and I am sure I will find more techniques!--I continue to be amazed at the low-cost affordances of building in SL or OpenSim. While some educators are tempted by Minecraft or Unity 3D, I would ask them to consider the outcome desired.

For now, at least, for low-volume simulations SL and OpenSim suit my needs perfectly. I've been back to the Trident Main Store again and again for items I cannot or do not wish to build. Unlike some of the mesh items from Turbosquid that John Lester showed me for building, the costs have been trivial, a few thousand Linden Dollars total.

Students and Academic Roleplay: Some Responses

 
Location: Virtual House of Usher, Second Life

The work in Jokaydia Grid last semester gave my students the chance to sound off about roleplay. I was pleasantly surprised how many of them slipped into character. In a post last month, I looked at ideas students had for improving future expeditions to the House of Usher: new settings, characters, effects, and props. In this post, I share some reflections about what students felt they did well to make the improvisational roleplay work, or not.

My student Elon, who is drafting an academic article about the nature of story in the game Mass Effect, replied a great deal with useful information. Like a good academic, he's drafting ideas for the later project.

• Logan: students were required to think critically and put effort into the simulation if they expected to gain a better understanding of the story, and quite possibly change the story altogether within the simulation.
•  Elon: In order to be a proper role-playing character, the user has to continuously maintain the world’s setting and authenticity. To do this, I had to first find out about the House of Usher by reading the story, and then I had to carefully maintain who I was within the simulation.
• Emily:  A character must be created and maintained, usually conforming to some specific guidelines but otherwise left up to the player. For example, my character was given a motive of holding a grudge against the Ushers due to the fact that they had denied her a loan. 
• Elon:  I decided to tell Roderick I admired his paintings and wanted to wander around a bit. I still couldn’t find the family papers. I was panicking by the time Roderick called for us to see our quarters, but luckily Mark drew Roderick away to explore the island with him. This gave me the opportunity to find the papers, detailing his family history and more information about the nature of the land.
• Emily:  If my character had not chased Roderick out into the swamp, then [a major clue] would not have been found. Since my partners were convinced at the time that Roderick was evil, it is likely that the ending of the story would have played out altogether differently if I had not possessed that proof of his innocence.
• Elon:  The interactive experience isn’t purely just with the game engine, but also with other users . . . . The result is an experience where everyone has their share of invested time, choices, and manipulations of the plot.

OpenSim Exam: Cautionary Tale, Happy Ending

Location: Jokaydia Grid, Virtual House of Usher

With some glitches along the way, six groups of students completed their final exams, or at least the immersive experience upon which they'll base a take-home essay exam.

It all began very poorly, and that's a warning to those working in OpenSim for classroom work critical to students' grades. The first day, the grid would not load, but I was in luck: the one student in the lab happily delayed his journey to the House of Usher and joined a group later in the week.  Jokay Wollongong, our grid manager, was thenceforth online for every exam: thank God. We had a serious crash later in the week, but Jokay restarted the region and we all relogged.  In fact, we roleplayed the disorientation within the scope of Poe's story, and odd things do happen to Poe's characters.

The culprit for our crash may be the old server software that runs Jokaydia Grid. Jokay cannot fix that, but the owners of the servers at Reaction Grid can. The good news is that Reaction Grid plans an upgrade next week. I'll hold them to this...I want to restore hypergrid availability to our build.

A word about the talented folks at Reaction Gird: the company has switched emphasis in recent months to Jibe virtual world technology. Jibe is promising for ease of use and the ability to run inside any Web browser. On the other hand, it's not for those who wish to build collaboratively in-world and in real time with students. That's a killer app for my use of virtual worlds. Jibe's protocols for 3D object design, like those of SL's recently introduced Mesh technology, are beyond my and my students' skills; Richmond lacks enough advanced arts students who might wield Maya or Blender.  And there is no incentive for faculty here to learn.

On the other other hand, prim-work in OpenSim or Second Life are within my skills set and those of the student-builders I train, often in teams working together, so that's where I'll stay.

As for getting hypergridding back? It offers special affordances for educators. That, after all, is how edutech works: we share and link to each other.  Even Blackboard, the course-management behemoth, is now moving to a more open model with the arrival of a "share" button.

The closed-grid model, on any platform, is that of the video-game world. It protects IP and functions for gamers and socializers, but it's not best for many of my colleagues in education. I give my own content away with Creative-Commons licensing or in the Public Domain. We are even considering whether we have tech support, locally, to host an OpenSim grid on our campus, as schools such as the University of Bristol are doing as they pull their work out of Second Life.

As we move forward to new engagements in an OpenSim grid or Second Life, I still need more data. From my students' essays, I plan to gather data for an article about effective educational roleplay and types of student roles. But I've already learned one lesson: without Jokay Wollongong's hands-on help, I'd never have trusted Reaction Grid's old version of OpenSim for something as crucial as a final exam.

Next up, I'll finish the Usher series from Jokaydia Grid with reflections by the students, from their exam essays. And a surprise twist right out of Poe: Usher is coming back to Second Life!

More on Motives & Missions

 
Location: Peeking Behind the Stage Curtain

I recently wrote of a change to this iteration of the Usher experience: my students all received a motive and a mission before they began their "expedition" to meet Roderick and Madeline.

Students liked this, as we had discussed the literary idea of "backstory" in class. We considered how, for popular fantasy series such as the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter novels, readers come to realize that a fictional world existed long before the events and it has influenced current events mightily.  Thus Aragorn's Numenorean blood has a history, as does the Ring itself. In the case of really strong television series like Mad Men or The Sopranos, backstory helps flesh out the actions by major and minor characters on screen.

Poe adhered to his own rules for short stories: he had the right, as he invented the genre. "Usher" is a self-contained world, with references to other texts, real and invented for the story. The Ushers and their problems, however, exist in a sort of vacuum. We have hints of ancient family history, some of it dark, but unlike Tolkien's world, we don't get to hear any "stories within the story," though the poem "The Haunted Palace" appears in its entirety inside "Usher."

That's because a short story, like a one-off sitcom episode, has little backstory: we get a set piece that can stand independently of any world revealed in little bits. The short nature of the narratives prevent such complexity.  All we need to know is that William Shatner's character sees a gremlin on the wing of an airliner in the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 feet," and off we go with Shatner's over-the-top performance.

Lacking Rod Serling's voice or a television studio's resources, I decided to employ these motives and missions. Note that neither I nor the actress playing Madeline knew who got what, and Madeline was partly aware of one motive (I sent part of it to all of the folks in her role).

Here they are, as chosen randomly by students:

Motive: A man was drunk in Whitby’s pub, the Three Tuns. You saw him pay for his tab with a gold coin. The publican (pub owner) let you look at it, after the man stumbled out. It was a newly minted gold sovereign, enough to cover pub-bills for a month. The publican said “The Ushers have a lot of gold. That’s their man-servant, Jenkins.”

Motive: Madeline was once engaged to your brother. It was a secret between her and him, until he told you. She broke the engagement off without any explanation. Your brother, heartbroken, went off to serve as a Colonial officer in Africa and died of malaria. You’ve always been curious.

Motive: You hold a grudge against the Ushers. Their father, Sir Howard Usher, refused to loan your family money, despite their being old friends. The last of the family fortune is long gone. You have kept up a correspondence with Roderick, and from hints in it you learned, over a year ago, that Roderick too is facing financial ruin.

Motive: You had a sister who began to fall asleep at midday. Eventually, she began sleepwalking. She died when a doctor’s medicines went awry and she never awoke. You suspect that your sister might have had her body stolen by ghouls who sell such to the medical colleges in London. From Roderick’s letter, you fear something might befall your old friends…the men who steal bodies have been very active in Yorkshire.

Motive: You are from Cornwall, in the Southwest of England. You knew the Ushers years ago, and have kept up correspondence with them sporadically. A local family, the Ennis family, lost a son, Colin. He was a sailor killed late last year when his ship ran aground…on the island where Roderick and Madeline Usher live.

Mission: Find a way into Roderick’s room and look for family papers.

Mission: Explore the island. You all took ship to the island from Whitby, Yorkshire. A man also staying at your lodging and hearing of your destination, said “there are spirits and secrets outside that old house, and riches too from…pirates in the olden days.”

Mission: You are interested in shipwrecks. You heard about the wreck of the Grampus on this island late last year.

Mission: Explore the Ushers’ book collections. You know that the Ushers own many rare books, and you collect old books yourself and make a tidy sum trading and selling them.

Mission: Find what you can about the medicines Madeline is taking for her illness.
Special thanks to my students and the actors in the role of Madeline! Back to grading...

House of Usher: Motives & Missions for Online Roleplay

 
Location: Ready for Final Exam

When you play a traditional MMO, there's killing stuff, roleplay, and "leveling up." So in educational roleplay, with only the middle element, how to motivate participants?

I would love to have the time to commission a HUD for Nevermore Island in Jokaydia Grid, but it was enough to get a House of Usher "up from the ashes" of the Second Life build in 10 months time. Students in my "Invented Worlds" course opting to do the take-home final begin exploring and interacting with Roderick and Madeline tomorrow.

When I last tried this with one of my classes in Second Life, I chose to give each student character a roleplaying goal, such as "find out if Roderick is giving Madeline any medicine" and a beta-test goal of evaluating some element of the 3D build.

This time, that last goal gets moved to the exam essay, due some days after trip to Nevermore. Meanwhile, I came up with an appropriately gamelike metaphor for each student: a motive, either  benevolent or even hostile to the Ushers, as well as a mission to discover or recover something from Nevermore.

This approach will be fun for me, in the role of Roderick, because I will assign said motives and missions randomly from two hats passed at the start of each session. Neither the actress playing Madeline nor I will know what each student gets, and I will not comment on them if asked. Moreover, I will encourage each student not to tell the one or two other students present in the lab, where all of us save Madeline will be for the expedition.

Were Linden Lab to cut tier drastically, and let me bring in an OAR file (my requisites for returning this work to Second Life) I could merge this pedagogical approach with one of the combat-system HUDs available in SL. Some include effects for drowning, fire, or falling.

I don't want the experience to turn into a violent game, but having a working pistol or sword about could add to the fun considerably. After all, folks die in Poe stories all the time, and student mistakes could then become fatal.  I'd also want to add some scripted non-player characters such as a hermit, a ghost, and perhaps a couple of hostile wolves in a remote corner of Nevermore Island. Those will wait for OpenSim to catch up with SL's technology. I'm excited by the promises Rod Humble has made about gaming feature coming to SL's default interface, but the cost for a robust sim-wide build are too steep.

After April 2012, I may have to decide again about grids. Reaction Grid has not updated its OpenSim software, and I want features available on newer grids such as reliable hypergridding. I'm hoping that Jokay and her customers can put some gentle pressure on Reaction Grid to make the move, as they seem more intent on support Jibe, a lovely 3D technology but beyond my coding-and-design skills at present. Please don't suggest I move to Jibe: given the weight this work gets in my annual evaluation, I'm not going to take time to learn new 3D apps. I get more credit for an article or new course than for any immersive 3D work, and that's unlikely to change.

Wherever the build goes, after this semester Nevermore will be open, by appointment, for groups or individuals who want to RP in Poe's setting.

Jokaydia Grid Orientations for Nevermore

 
Location: Virtual House of Usher, Nevermore Island

Of seventeen students in my "Invented Worlds" course, fifteen opted for the "take-home exam," consisting of a one-hour orientation to OpenSim and then a ninety-minute "expedition" to the House of Usher on Nevermore Island.

Officially, it's my fifth time in a virtual world with a class, and only my second with an OpenSim derivative.   Time required to set this up? Twelve hours for setting up avatars and orientation, sixty for building and scripting in Jokaydia Grid since we left Second Life.

I'll just post a few pictures today, since no one was in-character as a participant in an 1847 adventure based on Poe's story. I was surprised, and pleasantly so, by the students' adeptness with level-one VW skills. Moving, finding and opening notecards, IMing and chatting were no barriers. I also showed them how to capture chat and take snapshots.

The orientation sessions also helped me add immersive elements to the simulation, such as invisible prims under the Tarn so avatars could not go diving in over their heads.  I also got ideas, watching over students' shoulders, where I should hide more clues and more atmospheric elements to the build.

Many thanks to Jokay Wollongong, who did a quick sim-restart and provided advice for this large group...not to mention a quick list of account names and passwords!  She's even working on a few accounts, individually, where student avatars would not rezz for other participants.


Though I kept wishing for some of Second Life's bells and whistles, I did at least see that in either virtual world, small-group orientations accomplish a great deal in one hour.

Mesh & Educators

Location: SL with Mesh, OpenSim Without

The new meshes for SL, in some quarters, get depicted as the savior of the virtual world.

Um, okay. That's worth its own post...I don't know that Linden Lab will see tens of thousands of new and tier-paying users just because their world looks better. But educators, busy with so many other things related to their teaching, may not even know what the fuss is all about.

So here are a few premises for those new to Mesh, before I moderate next week's VWER meeting, entitled "Mesh In SL & Education: Boon? Bomb? No Big Deal?":

• We've always had a mesh system in SL. The new one simply provides more realism such as clothes that move with the avatar better and, mostly, fit well
• The new system requires a new viewer and, for developers, new out-of-world tools for making 3D content
• Gradually, viewers based on the 1.23 code will not be worth using, as Mesh content will be invisible. I saw this last week at VWER, where an early-adopter's mesh cat avatar remained invisible, except for her sculpted head and tail
• Prims, sculpted or Euclidean, won't vanish. Nor will our clothing layers, unless there's another nekkid-avatar bug like those in the early SL Viewer 2 code
• SL Viewer 3 is not the only option. Thank God. I'm biased against the Linden product after the lag-fest I've had with Viewer 2. I downloaded the Firestorm Viewer 3 Beta, and it permits seeing the new meshes
• Overall lag with the new viewers remain to be seen; I need to test Firestorm against the crowd we get at VWER.

Now for a short editorial. I just finished more building in Jokaydia Grid, using in-world tools and Photoshop. With Mesh, however, I cannot do collaborative builds in-world with a team, and acquiring the skills-set for the new content isn't worth my professional time. In this pic, I used a cylindrical prim to put a rotten corpse into a tomb, the sort of thing that could look downright terrifying with the new meshes.

But I doubt that my students will spend more than 30 seconds at this particular spot. What price in time and energy to take the next step to more immersion?

My evaluators could care less about mesh, and to be fair, why should they? For assessing educational outcomes, they don't need to know a sculpted prim from a Slim Jim. My colleagues working in virtual worlds will need to ask themselves some hard questions, unless they work at a school where students have the skills to create items using the new meshes.

Another Usher Ghost

 
Location: Nevermore Sim, Wandering

I hope that by the time I'm done, this island and House will feature about a dozen apparitions. I've yet to figure out what the couple of malicious ones might do.  Ideas are welcome!

Mostly, the helpful spirits will provide a clue or a warning.  Here's the latest one, just after Roderick rezzed her for the first time.

An Illusion of Distance For Immersive Learning

Location: Nevermore Island, Jokaydia Grid

Immersion in a roleplaying setting means that, while exploring a doomed family's mansion and grounds in the year 1847, one should not glimpse Tesla Coils and trees the side of skyscrapers. When I did, I realized that raising some mountains would be in order.

My neighbors in Jokaydia Grid have some well conceived builds. I just don't want my students to see them, as they take on the role of Poe's narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher."  Unlike what I did in Second Life, here I'm not interested in having them experience a world: I want them to experience a closed simulation. So I began to raise the borders of the sim; gradually the Mountains of Nevermore got very steep.

When my geomancy was finished, the result amazed me. The borders of the sim now seem very far away. This too will become part of our roleplay.

Parts of the island are now very hard to navigate, and the difficulty increases as an avatar walks toward the mountains that ring all of the island except near rocks where the shipwreck of Grampus rests. That hulk contains some important clues about the dark history of the Usher family.

I've been playing with the idea of having several ghosts near the ship and on the land, instead of simply in the house; most of these spirits will help the students by giving them hints and clues. I may have one or two who are malicious. I've also hidden clues in the swamps and woods near the mountains.

When we run the simulation, I will turn flying off on the island. In the end, I hope we have a place where avatars who leave the House will get lost in a space that seems larger than it really is.

When I ran the Poe build in Second Life, in theory anyone could come by the site. My fears were that some exotic-dancer avatar, in pasties and g-string, would burst in using IM-doofus text chat during a crucial moment of the roleplay. I suppose we'd have pretended she was the ghost of some mad Victorian harlot.

Second Life users are mesmerized by the coming of more advanced mesh items to that grid. I am curious on several levels, but in particular I wonder if the added complexity won't slow to a crawl any systems save for high-end desktop computers. That would be a terrible outcome for educators who remain there. In leaving SL for my work, I've given up many things--namely, the loss of great inventory available at very low prices. But going back, at Linden Lab's rates for tier, is simply not an option.

And, gradually, as the Jokaydia Grid sim comes to life, with content mentioned in my prior post, I think we'll have ourselves a wickedly immersive time in our new home, even without the bells and whistles SL can provide to those with very fast computers.

Mr. Wild Frontier Man, Roderick Usher

Location: Jokaydia Grid, Nevermore Sim

Okay. I get it now. It only took a friggin' hour to make my AO work. I now know how an AO script works.

But I am giving away barrels, darn it. This is the joy and frustration of working in an OpenSim grid. In Second Life, I'd run to some store or the Marketplace. Here, if you want something, you either turn to the wisdom of the community or you learn to DIY.

In my case, being a somewhat experienced builder but the worst scripter in history, at OpenSim Creations I found what I needed for some interior bits for The House of Usher.

Then I gave Vanish and his buddies a copy of my House of Usher barrel.

Admittedly, this frontier trading-post is rough and ready. It's a place where we belly up to the virtual bar and slap down our coon-skins in exchange for local knowledge and a bottle of rot-gut. Even a guy like me, who never got better than a C+ in a computer-science class, can at least offer a few objects and some witty descriptions...if you cannot blind them with brilliance...and so on.

I was telling my literature students in my Invented Worlds class that some peoples define themselves by the presence of a frontier. That's the lore of Americans, Aussies, and perhaps the Russians who brave Siberia to make a life for themselves. For lots of other folks, however, a physical frontier is not as necessary.  They find that thrilling encounter with the new online, making things.

I suppose that, as a greenhorn, I'd have "died" out on the OpenSim frontier already, without the experience of the other pioneers. But so far, with two months to go before the students rezz in Jokaydia Grid, I'm thinking that the frontier may be opening up at last.

Poe Flies a Kite in Kitely

Location: Writing Annual Report (grrrr)

AJ Kelton has planned a field-trip to the on-demand virtual worlds host Kitely, and to test how it works we uploaded an OAR file from Jokaydia Grid. Not everything has rezzed yet, but that Kitely can support OAR uploads from other grids is a game-changer.

The picture is of AJ's avatar on Kitely.

What a timely application for educators. For a very low cost for a few avatars, we can run simulations when needed. Most of the work I do now does not require a persistent world that is empty when no one logs on.  And I don't plan to send students into large social worlds since my current assignments do not envision that sort of engagement.  I do, however, want them to use premade avatars for literary work in an immersive setting.

Special thanks to AJ Kelton for experimenting with this. I will provide a full report on my work in Kitely next month.

Turning an OpenSim Bug Into a Feature

Location: Falling Into an Abyss

One side-effect of "lifting the skirt" of Nevermore island to make mountains has been to reveal an OpenSim bug. I have not encountered this in Second Life for a LONG time: falling off the edge of the earth.  I've asked Jokay Wollongong for a history of this fascinating bug.  If you know more, share in comments.

The avatar steps or falls into a space that is no space, a void that gradually darkens as the Z coordinate races into the negative. Soon, the screen grows black and still the avatar falls into infinity. A teleport or logout solves the problem. But why waste such a delicious doom?

With the flaw in mind, I have found a way to kill unwary student-explorers who venture too far in search of hidden knowledge. If a student falls into the abyss, we will assume that the simulation has ended for that participant, and the team must venture on without that person's help.  Roderick may even wish to lure one or two meddlers to their deaths.

Of course, hints and clues abound, as do stone markers near the verges of the island, inspired by an actual warning sign I saw, a decade ago and more, in rural Wales:

While a quotation from Poe himself might be best for this situation, something from "Manuscript Found in a Bottle" or "Descent into the Maelstrom," I think I'll leave the evocation of mood to Poe's literary descendant, H.P. Lovecraft:

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. from "The Call of Cthulhu."

Just remember on your journey: mind that gap. You have been warned.

And in the Vault...

Location: Usher Boneyard

When you Google "headless skeleton," you never know what you'll find.

Now that the Mountains of Nevermore are nearly done, I'm returning my attention to the Island's interior and the crypts beneath The House of Usher.

As Madeline Usher grows ill, her brother refuses to place her body in the family graveyard, to avoid "certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family."

Well, what might have happened to other Ushers in that forlorn graveyard? Of such voyeuristic horrors are Poe's tales woven.


The tomb was easy to build, and I found a very nice stone-on-stone sound at freesound.org. The lid image is a modified photograph, as is the headless skeleton inside.  The mystery, noted in the tomb, would be how a recently buried person (the Ushers' mother, in fact) became so weathered and lost her head.  Seek in the cemetery and you may find out!

Nevermore, The Wiki!

Location: Google Sites

I'm pleased that a grant from my university permits faster work this summer on the Virtual House of Usher's rebirth (or perhaps "return from the crypt," to be Poesque). The project will be ready in Jokaydia Grid by summer's end, with some finer touches added during the fall term. In late fall, 20 or so students will explore the simulation as they read Poe.

A first step involves setting up a better wiki than the one used previously, so student assistants and actors can collaborate to add clues and other materials to the site. We could, of course, design some brooding Gothic masterpiece of a Web site, but my preference is a piece with multiple authors and an easy-to-master interface. If any dropping to HTML code is needed, I'll shoulder that tedious burden.

Have a peek at the new Google site. Potential actors, as Fall approaches, let me know if you'd like to step into Roderick's or Madeline's shoes.

The Mountains of Nevermore

Location: Doing Geomancy

"So I can move your island," Jokay Wollongong began.

"No, let it stay as-is," I replied.

It's not as though I dislike the idea of a giant Tesla coil visible from my land. Not at all. At the same time, that's not very 1847.  It also blunts the immersion I want on this space.

So I decided, from right behind the Usher family cemetery Poe briefly mentions in his tale, to raise some mountains. The Mountains of Nevermore: sounds like a lost Yes recording from 1972.

The OpenSim terrain-edit tools, just like those in Second Life, remind me of the good old days in Sim City 2000, right down to the bulldozer icon.  They lack subtlety at the strongest settings, hurling needles into the sky much like a Lovecraftian landscape where mad gods flop about to the discordant music of eldritch flutes held in nameless paws.

There. I got to use "eldritch" for the first time since college, when in my D&D game we had an artifact called "The Eldritch Cleaver."   My snark has a long history...

So to make the island of Nevermore more immersive and interesting, I massaged the land ever upward, then put a line of dark pines into the passes between the hills and at the shore's edge. Soon the sparkling coil could not be seen, even by an avatar who wanders into the water at the shoreline. When I'm done, there may be NO shoreline beyond a few rocky inlets. I want that Poesque feeling of claustrophobia and depression to haunt my visitors.  I've enough prims to make things difficult for them by providing no long vistas of the space.

With luck, I'll hide some clues on those eldritch slopes for my fall class that will use Nevermore.

Meta7 Virtual World to Close

Location: IP Pondering

Reading a response by Ann O'Toole to a New World Notes post, I visited a forum notice for the Meta7 virtual world. I'd heard enough good press about it that I'd planned a short visit for a future issue of my "Gridnaut's Journey" column at Prim Perfect.

After April 30, however, Meta7 will be no more. Despite the somewhat snarky graphic I chose, I'm sorry to see an OpenSim world that had good press close.

It seems that an IP conflict lies at the heart of the legal proceedings that led to the shutdown:

Another company, that has trademark rights to the use of a similar logo used by us and the name 'Meta7' is forcing the company behind Meta7 to stop using the trademark commercially. . .Meta7 has been opposing this until recently, but does not have the resources in time, people and money to battle this action against it.

Content creators have a grace period to back up their items but no region-wide OAR file can be provided, "as we can not verify the ownership of all the items in the region."

Nike Japan seems to be the other company noted. I found this about an advertising campaign:

Illustrator Paul Huang, creator of Nanospore, teamed up with animators Chris Riehl and Sean Starkweather to create this playfully original, yet oddly familiar spot for part of Nike’s new viral campaign to promote the Nike Free Trainer 7.0, which gives you the power of flight and exempts you from noodle-bowl lines.

We have the power of flight without special shoes in virtual worlds, but the reach of lawyers is long, like the arm of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.

The lesson is, I suppose, know your small-grid provider well. I never thought I'd have to do a Google search before choosing a provider, but I think Jokay Wollongong, no stranger to cease-and-desist orders, chose her grid's name well.