MUV601 - Robin Le Couteur - Assignment 2, blog 3 -2018

Join and participate in a community within a virtual world.

The community I joined was The Velvet(Found here: http://secondlife.com/destination/the-velvet), which is a music venue. I chose it because as a musician and music lover, I felt like it was a community I would appreciate.

The purpose of this community is to provide entertainment in the form of music and dance. The Velvet hosts different performances by different DJs and always has some music playing for the enjoyment of its visitors.

 

Interaction 1

The first time I went to The Velvet, I was greeted by a dancing bot and a myriad of signs to let me know what was on.

Lots of signs and information:

 

The dancing bot:

 

 Something I immediately noticed was that there was no music playing event though there was a sign saying that the radio was playing music.

I decided to work that out later as I didn't have much time for this visit before I had to go somewhere in real life. I then went and had a little look around. I found some funny things like this human hamster wheel and even a silly airplane ride that you might see in a supermarket! There was also an animated sheep in one corner that did funny things and walked around occasionally.

Human hamster wheel:

Airplane ride:



Sheep:

There was also lots of room to dance if you wish as well as plenty of places to sit down and enjoy the music. There was also an upstairs area to get a good view of the place.

Upstairs:



There was a few different signs around that said "Touch to join The Velvet", but they didn't seem to do anything, so I don't know if I missed something there. Otherwise I think it is fine to just turn up to events.
On the subject of events, All of the performances coming up were very early in the morning for NZ so I decided to pass on that and just enjoy the venue.

Interaction 2

On the second time I went to The Velvet, the first thing I did was figure out why I was getting no sound. I googled around and figured out that I had to change some settings in the Sound and Media settings found in the Preferences to allow media streams and to allow in-world scripts to play audio. Can't remember exactly what settings I changed, but I just switched on everything that seemed like it was relevant. 

Obviously what I changed had worked, because I got this dialog:

I clicked 'Allow' and it brought me to this dialog:

I clicked 'Always Allow This Domain' so that I didn't have to go through this process again and bingo! I started hearing the radio.

The music was pretty good so I chilled out to the music as I looked around some more to see what I would discover. Something I noticed was a large disco ball up on the roof. It was labelled 'TIS Hybrid Dance Machine' so I figured that it  must have some AOs that I could use to dance with. I was right! After touching it I got a dialog with a huge amount of different dances that I could choose from including couple dances and single dances from many different styles.

The dance machine and some options for types of dances to choose from:

After I chose a dance I started to jam out to the music. Here's my avatar having a good time:

My avatar dancing:

As you can see the controls for stopping or changing the dance are up in the top left.

As I was dancing and listening to music I suddenly got this message:

Sadly it seemed that the region would be down for a bit. I stayed around until it shut off, then I joined back after the restart was finished.

As I was getting to the end of my visit, I noticed a staircase going up to the very top of the building. 

After a bit of a struggle and some flying, I managed to get up the steep stairs to the top area. There wasn't much there apart from the view and this little monument which reads, The Velvet, EST. 2006, "Because things shouldn't have to suck"