MUV601 - Robin Le Couteur - Assignment 1, blog 2 - 2018

MUV601 - Robin Le Couteur - Assignment 1, blog 2 -2018

Blog 2 MUVE Platforms - Second Life

The MUVE platform I’ll be talking about in this blog is the MUVE used for this course: Second Life(SL).

Second Life was founded in 1999 by Linden Labs. It's a massive virtual world where you can go to a variety of different locations and do various activities. SL provides a platform for creativity, education, socializing, work, gaming, just relaxing, and many other things.The amount of different things you can use SL for is up to the imagination of the user.

Functionality

Looking at the functionality of SL, it has a wide range of features. 

Avatar

First off, lets talk about your avatar. When you first join SL, you chose from a list of default avatars. Once in world, you can then create whatever avatar you want by making your own body, clothes, and other accessories. What you can do is almost limited to what you can create so you are free to design your own avatar that will be your personal expression in the world. You can also download various free and paid avatars and accessories.

My avatar:

Creating

Second Life offers a few different ways to create things. You can use in-world tools to create prims (primitives) and manipulate them with various tools available to create some fairly complex shapes, or you can import meshes from external modelling software. These imported models, or sculpties, can be made much more complex because they are not limited by the in-world tools, but by the modelling software and the creator.
Creating a simple prim:

Scripting

Normally, everything in the world is fairly static, but scripts enable you to do some fancy stuff such as animating objects, animating your avatar, setting custom actions when interacting with objects, adding sounds to objects, and much more. You can make driveable vehicles, teleporters, and interactive signage. There's many things that you can do with the scripting tools available in SL. All scripts in SL are written in the LSL(Linden Scripting Language) which is mostly based of Java and C.

Owning land

In SL, all land is owned by Linden Labs and is leased out people and organisations. Sometimes there are also middlemen that act as real estate agents who subdivide and rent out smaller chunks of land. This is something that is different about OpenSim. In OpenSim land is generally cheaper on hosted systems, or you can simply host your own land for free. This makes land ownership fairly expensive in SL.

Communication

Second Life offers multiple channels of communication. There's chat systems for chatting to nearby users, or you can chat to groups or individuals over any distance. You can also use the inbuilt voice chat to talk to people, or you can use avatar gestures to communicate.

How Well does it Run?

Now how well does SL run? If you are used to highly optimized games with super graphics and intuitive controls, it's not as good, but if you have a decent computer with decent internet, there aren't many issues, though I've found that sometimes the different viewers can have issues. SL is maintained by an organisation so it is much more stable than OpenSim, for example, which is open source and community developed, but it isn't perfect and you will need to tweak your settings for the best experience.

How it is used


SL has a number of uses. It really depends on how the user wants to use SL. Some examples include education, entertainment, and socialization.
You can learn languages in online classes, or learn about science with interactive activities, you can play games with other people, or just relax in nice places, or you can talk to interesting people all over the world. If you can think of anything interesting, you can probably try it in SL.

Exploring in SL:


Comparing SL to OpenSim

There’s a huge number of differences between SL and OpenSim. SL differs from OpenSim quite a bit in that it is one massive, closed grid. Everything about SL is managed by Linden Labs vs how Open Sim has different grids managed by different groups and people(See the blog on OpenSim for more details on how it works and for more comparisons)
I think the main difference between SL and OpenSim is that SL is ready to go and you can just go there and have fun or use it for what you want whereas OpenSim is more of a development platform for trying out stuff.

My Impressions

Upon opening SL for the first time I was disappointed at the initial graphics, but when I used my personal computer and tweaked the settings a bit it wasn't so bad, especially if you go to a nice location. This is to be expected though since SL has been around for a very long time it is actually quite impressive that it is as good as it is. The scale is quite impressive to as there are a huge number of people using it and there is a massive amount of locations. From what I've learned about it, it seems to be a great learning platform and social platform, but I feel that if people start to rely on it for social purposes, it starts disconnecting people from real life as with any social media. I think it's cool, but I believe people should still make an effort to get out in the real world and keep SL secondary and to use it with moderation. I also don't really feel like I would really get into SL as it's not really my thing. Still, the learning benefits that it provides can be very useful in many aspects, and I appreciate how SL can be used in other ways.

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