What Educators Want in a Virtual World: All

Location: VWER meeting, Aug. 2


Late in July, I published my lists of wants for in-world features and technical features for a educational virtual world that I would build, had I time and money enough. Then I put the issue before 23 members of the Roundtable. Here is their list of wants:

• Cross-platform & mobile friendly
• Non-mesh build options
• Cross-world travel and inventory control
• Accessibility for users with visual and hearing impairments, such as easily visible icons, as well as text-to-speech and speech-to-text support
• Media on a Prim (MOAP), including Flash support
• Integration with Kinect & similar interfaces
• Ability for students under 18 to access content (with my caveat of "freedom of, and from, adult content)
• Better system for notecards
• Working economy where content creators can be paid for their work but as JeanClaude Volmar warned us, "Just don’t make the economy so tightly coupled to the creator to render objects useless like it is in SL."
• Avatar puppeteering and webcam support
• Better permissions systems to allow more flexibility with collaborative builds

It seems we do "want it all," and many VWER members want a virtual world as a primary tool for teaching.

As readers know, I tend to agree with VWER participant Alan Sandalwood, who noted "I worry that we would try to do everything in VW; It’s a tool to be used judiciously."

My own students say a version of this: "what's the point? Our parents pay high tuition to be taught by a PhD in a classroom." For them, VWs are worthwhile for limited simulations or a field trip to see content otherwise unavailable. Other educators will use the technology differently and, in many cases, in transformative ways.

To read the Aug. 2 transcript, click here.

A Favorite Merchant, Rediscovered

 
Location: Second Life Marketplace

I'm not fond of Second Life Marketplace. It makes the virtual world less a world. I do use it for last-minute purchases as well as window-shopping for a visit in SL. I salute creators like Laufey Markstein of Trident, who keep a storefront going. I like to stroll through 3D objects and not simply look at photos of them.

The closing of Morris Mertel's in-world store, some time back, saddened me greatly. But there is good news of a sort.

Back when I was first building the House of Usher,  Morris was kind enough to supply it with a nice fireplace! After sitting on a few demos and buying items from Morris, I blogged about the good designs and let him know. He reciprocated with some nice gifts. I don't know that we'd have "met" in quite the same way had he not possessed an in-world store.

Linden Lab made a mistake in forcing so many creators to abandon in-world commerce. After all, the Marketplace commissions are paid in the money the Lindens themselves mint. That pricing scheme only means that merchants earn less.

But at least Morris maintains a Marketplace storefront. So visit 3D Dreamworld Studios for your medieval and renaissance furnishings, including the rats I have so enjoyed using at the Virtual House of Usher.  If Morris does not have it, I bet Laufey does. So go do some shopping!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Across the Great Divide: Four Months in Jokaydia Grid

Location: A Foot in at Least Two Virtual Worlds

I realized an anniversary had just passed, from a post here in late October 2010 that marked my first prim rezzed in Jokdaydia Grid.

Now I am preparing my presentation, "Lessons Hard and Wonderful From A Faculty Member Pioneering in OpenSim," for the upcoming VWBPE conference. This post also lets me organize notes for tonight's VWER meeting, where my colleague Kali Pizzaro will lead us in a the discussion "Across The Great Divide: Sharing Across Grids."

What have I learned as an OpenSim pioneer that can apply across grids?

• Travel before deciding. I made a mistake of rushing a class into Second Life in 2007 without enough time spent exploring, attending events, meeting other educators.  This time, I avoided the mistake by visiting a few education-friendly grids before signing a lease.
• Friends can make a grid. I opted for Jokaydia Grid because some friends and colleagues were already there, and that made sharing content very easy.
• Hair and skin do not make a grid vital. I love the inexpensive content in SL that makes educational work go faster, but let's not blind ourselves to what makes a grid vital. SL was vital, after all, and perhaps more inventive in the days of Linden World and Primitars.
• Study how different OpenSim grids are from Second Life. Here a post at the VWER site may be useful. In it I share the lessons as a new builder on a new grid.
• Build to share. I want my content to be free. That means making everything myself in a way that can convey across grids for our emerging constellation of hypergrid-linked educational spaces. It means releasing any scripts I manage to make, or photos I take, or assignments I write, to the community under Creative-Commons licensing.
• Read all of a grid's fine-print. I love the (for now) closed Third Rock Grid, InWorldz, and what I recently found in OpenLife, and I'd considered opening the Usher simulation in one of these grids until I found out hypergridding to be a fast-maturing technology. Then I limited my search for a post-SL home to grids that are not closed.  You will need to make a basic decision: closed grid with vendors, such as Inworldz? Open grid with mostly other educators and limited content, such as my home? Other fine-print items will include the tier fees. Are they fixed or an introductory rate for a grid's beta-test era? Can you lock in a good tier as a pioneer?
• Backup is key. Here I mean literal backup of files and regions. Not all grids allow OAR backups, something I insisted upon for my new virtual home. Most, including SL, will permit Imprudence to export items made by an educator. That was important as I began exporting content I made from SL for Jokaydia Grid.
• Share outside your new grid. I am planning to open Usher for tours soon, and part of that will involve a Web site were source files may be downloaded for importing into other compatible grids. It's easier to download from a colleague's site than to travel to a grid to look for content.  I'll issue all of it under a Creative-Commons noncommercial license. 
• Burn no bridges. "Iggy said that?" you may well ask. I've been venomous about Linden Lab's treatment of educators, and I regret that (a little). Now that the lab has a new CEO, I'll follow his actions but also very much remain part of SL. It's still the best place to meet educators in large groups. That may well change, and SL will be "the old country," to use a term Lalo Telling. (mostly of InWorldz) mentioned some time back.

Wherever we travel, and whatever direction this technology takes us, the lessons of our old grids should convey. Good luck as a pioneer, settler, or happily settled resident!

Mixing Fact and Fancy in The House of Usher

Location: Usher Graveyard

In building the simulation for Fall 2011 and my group of students in the English course "Invented Worlds," I decided that I'd use both Poe's story and the history of North Yorkshire as templates to expand the House of Usher tale.

After all, Poe's own works are full of intertextuality.

Playing off my knowledge of North Yorkshire, from a prolonged stay in 2009, I have begun adding local color.

I only wish that the village of Ravenscar, near Dracula-haunted Whitby, had that name in 1847, when we decided to set our simulation. That date lets us bring onto the scene a few new anesthetics that might explain Madeline Usher's malady.

Or might not. One goal of the simulation, as in a good Poe tale, is to keep characters guessing at motives and forces at work behind the scenes--human and, perhaps, supernatural. When, in setting out free content, I discovered several standing stones, I had a new subplot not available to us in the Second Life simulation, where the House was everything and any grounds beyond it were merely suppositions. Thus students may run across this letter to Roderick in the course of their visit:

My Dear Lord Usher,

I really do think that you have been overwrought by the decline in Madeline's health. It would be terrible to fall prey to ancient superstitions about the righteous souls who pulled down the heathen stone ring to build the Usher graveyard.

The stones are, of course, of great antiquity and any cultists who may have celebrated dark rites in their precinct have long vanished before the light of true wisdom and the power of our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

I have, however, endeavoured to look through our parish records, as you requested. The stones, it seems, were somewhat dispersed as early as the 15th century, and during the time of the Godly Protectorate your ancestor Mandrake Usher, who had fought alongside Cromwell, was noted by my predecessor as "scattering to the four winds the bits of Satanic filth and other such from the grounds of the ancestral castle."

Thus we have an answer. At some time in the early 17th century, any remaining ring of stones was taken down, and rightly so, by your family.

I remain, Sir, your humble and obedient servant,

Giles Rammage, Minister, St. Stephen's Chapel, Robin Hood's Bay

Nevermore and the Hypergrid

Location: Usher Burial Ground

Madeline Usher gets laid to rest in the family crypt, a Medieval location, instead of the more modern graveyard because her brother Roderick fears grave-robbers.

The reader of "The Fall of The House of Usher" gets robbed of something else: the chance to have Poe write about a burial ground. On the other hand, it gave me free play to design the first of the buildings, a structure I pattern after columbariums I've seen in old cemeteries such as Richmond's Hollywood.

Instead of ashes, however, the structure will hold a hypergate so visitors to the grid can appear in just the right spooky locale.  I hope the results are Poesque enough. Now I need to figure out how to embed the codes and get the gate working.

Roderick will figure it out, with lots of help from Jokay.

Hat-tip to V, of TGIB, for the free portal. 

Iggy & The Crypt Rats: Adding Sounds At Jokaydia Grid

Location: hiding virtual oil can

No, I'm not starting a virtual Punk band. But I do need to record a rat squeaking.

Old doors creak. They simply must. And one of the most wonderful aspects of Second Life's House of Usher simulation was its sound: doors creaked, screams filled the air at opportune moments, rats squeaked in the family crypt. Clumsy props-handlers shot themselves with virtual pistols when an actor called for a distant gunshot...we won't go there.

Unlike that cacophony, Jokaydia Grid's new House, until today, has been silent. I'm not a sound wizard or a scripter, but thanks to a UK site I found, I've gotten a few good sounds to begin making Usher more immersive an experience.

First hat-tip (in a week full of them) is to the blog Three Guides in Byzantium. John Lester put us on to this site at a recent VWER meeting, and in checking the validity of the links for a transcript, I hit the blog. Post at the top when I checked? No, not the one about sex in OpenSim, silly.

How to make a creaky door!

This was a large moment for me. I copied the script, visited the site referenced, The Freesound Project, and downloaded several .wav files of 10 seconds or fewer. Both the script and sound file are under creative-commons licenses for noncommercial use, so I wrote an attribution notecard for the script & sound, then added it to Usher's front door.

Sound has been missing for me, and when the door creaked for the first time on Nevermore, I felt that magic sensation of immersion. Now, without overdoing it, I'll make more squeaky, creaky, crunchy, clunky, and squishy sounds suitable for Poe's world.  Rat-sounds were not to be found at the Web site, but I may drag my recorder to the lab of a colleague in Neuroscience. He has lots of rats.

How do you make them squeak for a visitor?  Maybe I should start a band.

Furnishing Usher: The Haunted Desk Drawer

Location: Nevermore Sim

Getting over the loss of SL's House of Usher is easy when I have a new house to build. The outside has been mostly finished for a week.  Little details such as gargoyles and gutters remain to be added; the downspouts got imported from SL a few days back.

I want to build some furniture that has sliding drawers, so explorers of the simulation can sneak around behind the actors' backs and find hidden clues. I began with Madeline's writing desk. It features a desk body as one set of prims, a sliding drawer as another.

Finding the drawer-open script was not too hard. Modifying Bob Sutor's script, licensed under Creative-Commons for non-commercial projects, was not hard. All that needed to be done was changing the X or Y vectors after the desk ended up in its final location.

I built my desk out in the open, so I would not accidentally select parts of the house when linking or moving prims.  Then I took the desk into inventory, as two pieces, and found my spot inside.

The ghost appeared as soon as the desk was in place.

I clicked the sliding drawer and "BLAM!" it shot through the wall and ended out outside the house near the position where I'd made the desk. I rezzed another drawer, clicked it, and "BLAM!" off it went.

The exorcism was simple. When I rezzed the third drawer I reset the script and it worked beautifully. I'll soon give away full-perm copies at the Newbie Dome in Jokaydia Grid, with a note containing a link to this post and Bob's Web site, as well as a note about the conditions of his CC license. I'll toss in some TGA images of Victorian clutter: letters, envelopes, and invoices, for the right effect.

I have aggregated my posts on building in virtual worlds here. Happy home improvements!

Home Improvements: Random Prim Drift in a Large Build

Location: Caulking Seams

It's ironic that I talk about this on a day when, in real life, I need to caulk a seam between our house and a not-so-well-made addition. The building settles unevenly, and mortar joints love to crack. Good-quality exterior masonry caulk stops those cold drafts.

But there's no HGTV for avatars (though Prim Perfect comes closest). Even that fine magazine focuses more on style and design and not repair and renovation.

Renovation? In a fake building? Should be as simple as deleting prims or moving them, right?

Viv Trafalgar and I were touring the Second Life House of Usher in the guise of Madeline and Roderick, in order to shoot Viv's machinima I featured here a few weeks ago. I noted a rather large gap in a wall, and Viv, ever the master builder, noted that large builds do that. Elements creep apart over time. I don't know the reason; perhaps it's an infinitesimal rounding up or down when linked prims overlap ever so slightly. There's a JIRA at the Linden Lab Web site about this.

Torley Linden, who cares and knows a lot about technical issues in the code, asked a resident to give examples or reproduce the problem so Linden Lab could investigate. Here's a technical but vexing reply from Khamon Fate:

 It's a floating point error that is seen nearly every time one edits a prim's location, rotation, cut et al by the numbers. Type 35 degrees Y rotation into a prim and watch it magically adjust itself to 34.97 degrees. Doesn't seem like much really, but when that same calculating error occurs as the sim places, and replaces prims, they seem to drift. Those same miscalculations cause textures to be suddenly offset. The list goes on to include misplaced telepoints, odd ground configurations and really just anything the server has to manage mathematically.

It's a deep, fundamental problem in the server code and really must be fixed for these types of problems to be resolved.

I have not noticed the math error in our SL or Jokaydia Grid build, but I'll try an experiment of noting the position of some prims and then checking with my next log in. And, yes, it happened at Jokaydia Grid too. I found that a linked set of prims for Usher's interior walls had crept away slightly from some unlinked parts, including doors and "headers" over them.  Fixing that was easy--I had to realign the doors' headers and match the texture to the main wall's settings. Then I linked them.

As I did this, I was reminded of another "101" lesson: don't link scripted items to the linkset. I know that when I blogged about making a fireplace; the scripted prim needs to be the root. So I left doors and chimneys unlinked and floating free, as the rest of the House drifts.

My fix is to link the entire House in a few segments: roof, interior walls, exterior walls, crypt. I can then tweak each one a few hundredths of a meter to re-align the ancient manse.  If only it worked so well, on a cold December day, on a brick-and-mortar home!

My posts on building in virtual worlds are aggregated here. Happy home improvements!

Avoiding Boredom and Needing Solitude: Why We Build?

Location: Fixing a Virtual Roof

When I am social, in either my physical or virtual lives, it tends to be with folks as smart and, believe it or not, broadly learned as my colleagues in the sciences. I'll party with those wild-men from our Physics Department this weekend. Woo hoo! Pass the tortilla chips and don't ask me to do any integrals!

I eat lunch daily with them, and a sampling of mathematicians and chemists, every day.  Otherwise, I don't "hang out" too much, go to virtual or brick-and-mortar clubs, or get too involved in in-person or virtual forums beyond the handful of blogs I follow and the events at my UU Church.

So Robert Hooker's post about identity in Second Life and his feelings that it does not capture one tenet of Postmoderism, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg" from her famous manifesto, got me thinking about what virtual worlds do mean for me.  Sometimes I'm happiest when there's not another avatar in sight, as has been the case for my SL road-trips (I'm considering continuing that little series, since I rather miss it).

I discovered a connection that I've been trying to articulate for a while in two articles, one in press and one about to go to the editors, about collaboration. Here's what I said in reply to Robert at his blog, as Hiro Pendragon and I both sought clarity about some of Robert's claims:

I'm not in Hiro's league as a builder, and I cannot script, but whenever I get bored with virtual worlds, I build. If you want social-constructivist epistemology that's at the core of Postmodern pedagogy in my field, writing, do a collaborative build with others and then make an immersive simulation.

That's a pretty Postmodern move, appropriating the tools a corporation provides to make something new, even subversive, and ephemeral, one of Hakim Bey's TAZs.

So I've begun to focus less on the avatar and more what avatars (and the users driving them) create.

I had been bored in SL for a long time before I moved my educational activities to Jokaydia Grid, where I'm building everything almost from scratch.

At the Virtual House of Usher, I've done little with the avatar of Roderick Usher, other than making his hair messy and giving him a nicely "Roman" nose. He is bone-stock. Instead, the build has been the identity I'm crafting. Poe's House appeared to be sentient, and its "leaden" presence influences the fate of all three characters in the tale.

I've never been bored, even once, while making things. Next week I'll be helping to build a cedar closet in the physical world and sticking the final bits on the exterior of Usher. Both will be nearly solitary pursuits and, like writing itself, rewarding only insofar as they lead to more creations.

Sprial Staircase! The Strange & Twisting Case of Roderick Usher

Location: Jokaydia Grid, Virtual House of Usher

As the interior walls rose in Usher, I realized that not only do I have a generous prim-allowance, but I also have a book that I've rarely cracked: Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Content Creation in Second Life.

SL made me lazy. I could just buy stuff. Now I have to make it. So, I opened the book!

I thumbed through the text in search of good tips for building components we did not have, or did not know how to make, in the Second Life House of Usher. Then I hit upon it...the visual element from all classic film noir, the spiral staircase. It's also the title of a wonderful thriller from 1945.

Given Madeline Usher's afflictions, I thought I'd have her isolated chamber atop a spiral staircase. So I made one and here's my cautionary tale.

Lazy-bones take note: there's a free staircase-generator script at SL's wiki. I've not tried it.

Lesson 1: Watch the rise on the stairs.  

My manual method, culled from the book, went slowly the first time but now I think I could generate new sets very quickly, once I found the necessary rise from stair to stair; .1 or .2 meters worked; .3 for each stair's "riser" was far to tall for the avatar to climb. The instructions were clear but too complex to repeat here. You can read them at this Google Books page.

I made individual steps and attached a "pivot point" to each, colored red so I'd be able to unlink all but the bottom point when I was done.  That final pivot gets turned into the column to which the stairs attach.

Suffice to say that the pivot point, as a root prim, becomes the point on which each stair rotates a set number of degrees. I started with 10 degrees of rotation and that worked great. I then made a ton of stairs that way, coiling like the shell of a Nautilus.

When I tried to climb them....oh oh. Maybe the stair dimensions work in SL, but in OpenSim Roderick could not get up the first step. I'd copied the staircase into inventory, so I played a bit with the original, shortening the rise to each stair's "tread" (the part of the step you step on) and lengthening each tread. My final staircase was half the original height, but it worked!  I stretched the Z dimension of each step to overlap the one below, to get the effect of the stone stairs I have seen in castles.

Whether the effect desired is open-air Moderne or dank and spooky Gothic, I'd recommend making a few stairs first, then trying to climb them. There's an advantage to in-world building that way. I could take the avatar up the stairs, into a room, under a ceiling to check it's height and what that did for the camera. With off-world tools like Blender or Maya, can that be done?

Lesson 2: Place the stairs carefully.

I had many bumbling adventures trying to climb the spiral and falling off. Luckily, once I placed walls around the stair, the results gave a mysterious peek at the spiral and kept the avatar from tumbling down. In castle turrets I've climbed in England, the spiral stair winds that way nicely, leaving one guessing what might be around the next bend. Although I used a square rather than round enclosure, the effect in OpenSim was similar. I also found a small opening at the bottom of the stairs, a perfect place for hiding clues.

Stairs consume lots of space in real or virtual buildings. Spirals and multi-landing stairs conserve space while providing places to meet, fight in a combat simulation, or hide clues in simulations like Usher.

Lesson 3: Randomize the Look.

My finished stairs, shown in the first picture, looked awful. The stone textures, while impressive on a span of wall or floor, looked cookie-cutter on duplicate stairs. I so chose another more uniform texture of flagstones, tinted it dark, then made sure the repeats for the textures on the top of the pillar and visible sides of the treads looked good. Here's the final result. All I need is a mournful statue for the top of the pillar supporting the stairs and some a tapestry for the wall.  Since I took this shot, I went back to place a tapestry on the far wall, and I tweaked the horizontal offset and flip direction on a few treads to add more variety.



This process educated me in several ways. First, I learned about the builders' grid and some of the useful features such as planar drag-handles that let me quickly duplicate my steps and keep their Z-axis distance right.

Finally, it also helps that I'm redoing a physical set of stairs at our farm. We have too steep a rise there, too, but we're going to live with it, and our new oak treads are much harder to shape than prims. For all the fuss over building in virtual worlds, it's much easier than shaping and cutting actual wood.

Prometheus' Other Sin: Stealing Fire

Location: Virtual House of Usher

"Stealing" is a bit harsh, since I did locate scripts licensed for non-commercial use from FoxSan and The Online Script Library.

Making a fireplace has stymied me for a while. Jokay Wollongong kindly provides Azzura Supplee's excellent heavy smoke script at her Newbie's Dome, so the top of each chimney was all set. But what about the fire? Even when I had the scripts in hand, there was the problem of putting it all together.

This account is for you novice builders. Pros know these tips. I still fumble somewhere in the middle.

1) Root-Prims are Just That: This prim is the one to which others get linked and, when linking items, is the last one to be selected. In my case, I wanted a prim containing the fireplace script, so I made a small prim, put the script inside, and textured the prim to be transparent. My fire-box, chimney, and logs (a few with a little particle script to make sparks fly) got linked to the root.

Here Roderick links a smoke-emitting prim to the top of the chimney. he clicks the newest prim first to edit, shift-clicks to the already linked chimney, then links them. This preserves the root prim's primacy. I found on some objects that I'd otherwise lose the root-prim's primacy, a very important feature when, say, the root has a script that activates on touch.

The next image shows the root prim in the center of the fireplace's linked-set.


2) Texturing Tricks: Viv Trafalgar gave me a hard time once about getting my builds properly tinted. I didn't know what she meant, and though I still may have it wrong, I found that having my one-prim hollow "firebox" tinted slightly orange inside have the illusion of reflected firelight. You can see it in the image above, at the inner right face of the firebox.

Since the firebox was a prim hollow at each end, I also noticed another problem that a tinted prim solved. I placed a charcoal-tinted fire-back inside and at the back of the opening. That avoids the common issue of how the OpenSim and SL clients render transparent images that intersect. Without my fire-back I'd lose part of the fire...just as in in real fireplace. Instead of heat escaping up the chimney, however, in the virtual fireplace parts of the fire would simply vanish, depending upon the camera's angle.

My Promethean sin will be complete when I box up the Usher fireplace and put it at the Newbie Dome at Jokaydia Grid. I hope the gods are kind; they have been to all of us who make our virtual people: Prometheus' other sin.

I'll be content as long as vultures do not come to feast upon my liver. I suspect a few will flap around, perhaps in the comments section of this blog, but pesky and nattering carrion-birds are part of life online and in new spaces such as virtual worlds.

Roll Out The Barrel (And Give it Away)

Location: In the Hold of The Grampus

Poor Arthur Gordon Pym. He had to face hostile natives, starvation and forced cannibalism, the death (and rapid decomposition) of his best friend, and the not-so-deft hand of would-be novelist Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's one attempt at a novel is interesting, but hardly a coherent work. Like the poor man's mind and personal life, Pym is a mish-mash of chaotic events and violent outbursts.

At least the long-suffering Grampus, one of two sailing vessels wrecked and ripped to pieces, in an almost pornographic manner by Poe, can get some good flotsam and jetsam when I rebuild it.

In a tip of the hat to Yadni Monde, who made so many freebies that I used in the SL version of The House of Usher, I made a barrel for the wreck and the cellars of Jokaydia Usher. The process was easy, using two half-spheres streteched and "dimpled," with prim tops and bands. I'm not a cooper, but it was fun making them. Next I'll do some one-prim crates, another greatly appreciated gift of Yadni to SL residents.

To what end? I'm envisioning a terrible family secret not in the story, part of the experiments in intertextuality that my colleagues and I began in Second Life. Howard Usher, the father of Roderick and Madeline, knowing that the family was near bankruptcy, revised an old crime from his ancestor's past: Sir Howard became a wrecker, leaving lamps near the most treacherous spots on the Yorkshire Coast, then plundering what remained after the "accident."

I don't know how poor Pym will fit the expanded story spun on Nevermore. Perhaps someone or something devoured him!

The mystery will be solved, for the curious and persistent explorer. At seven prims a barrel (I know, I could probably get by with three and good textures) I could not resist putting barrels here and there and leaving clues in or under some of them.


When I had a barrel done, I took one to the Newbie Dome at the grid's Welcome Area. It's free to copy, as are the ones at Nevermore. The nicest part of this new grid is the sense that we are all building things and giving them to colleagues for their projects.

A 3D Trick of the Eye for Novice Builders

Location: Counting Prims

I'm writing a longer post for the VWER Web site about the lessons learned from nearly a month in Jokaydia Grid. Here's a tip I learned as I rebuild a superior version of the Virtual House of Usher.

Roderick has many familial heirlooms noticed by Poe's narrator, "sombre tapestries of the walls. . .phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode." The tapestries are easy. What about those trophies?

I could MAKE a suit of armor with my 20K prims, right?? Um, no.

Instead, I did this Shadow-box trick, until I got some mesh armor for Roderick’s family collection! As a drawing teacher told me not so many years ago, "trick the viewer's eye." Here's my technique:

1. make shadowbox of two prims. The back prim is a flat rectangle; the top prim is a hollow cube aligned to show the back prim.
2. color the inner surface of the box black and give its outside a wooden texture.
3. put your “model” (some armor, a skeleton) on the front surface of the back prim at the rear of your box. I used Photoshop to simulate, in the 2D .jpg, the 3D interior of a box.
4. I'm still playing with how to tilt the back prim inside the shadow box to make the 3D effect most realistic. From close up, of course, it vanishes.

If you try this technique, send me the pictures! If you are in Jokaydia Grid, stop by for free decor. Both suits of armor are full perm so help yourself to a copy.


Extra credit awarded if you put the shadow box behind an archway. I made one of those with a single prim as well, using alpha-layers and other geeky Photoshop tricks that require their own post, if not a full-on tutorial.