Second Class Learning

My second class meeting in SL was more fun than the last one – still some technical difficulties (why do I seem to have more technical difficulties during class sessions than I ever do when I’m on my own?) but we ended up going to some really great places. The first sim we went to was a giant dollhouse, with an alien theme going on (they were called “greenies”). You entered the giant dollhouse through another dollhouse, so that when we first walked in I thought it was just a regular house – not a dollhouse within a dollhouse – or was it a dollhouse within a giant house? Whichever it was, the play on different realities was pretty cool. We roamed around for awhile, and I found a giant ashtray with giant rolling papers (Sizla brand vs. Rizla brand), a giant cigarette pack (they were “Whatever” brand cigarettes), and a giant joint (surrounded by stoned-looking greenies) sitting behind a giant framed picture on a giant shelf. It was fun.

After we finished with the dollhouse, Kamran teleported us to a 3D Van Gogh museum, which was pretty amazing. The landscape of the sim comprised a 3D version of well-known Van Gogh paintings, and then there was the museum itself which had paintings on the walls. The architecture of the museum was pretty cool too. I thought of my RL experience at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam (and actually, many of the paintings in that museum were reproduced at this museum) and it was interesting to compare the experiences. On the one hand, it was much more impressive to see the paintings in RL – they have the whole physical artifact thing going for them, they are “originals” – but ultimately, it was the visual quality of the SL versions that made them inferior, and naturally affected the viewing experience for me. On the other hand, you do get desensitized from the reproductions you’ve been exposed to all your life and, unless perhaps aided by some Amsterdam-quality mushrooms, you can’t really roam around inside the paintings like you could in the SL museum, which was a really novel experience. In terms of the 3D paintings/the environment, this sim was pretty top-notch graphics-wise. I immediately recognized the 3D version of “The Café Terrace at Night” and it was surreal and fun to explore it in a spatial way.

We all stayed in the Van Gogh museum for awhile, and then Kamran teleported us to what he called the holodeck (I think) which was a simulation room that gave you a choice of environments it could simulate (represented as photos on a wall). It took awhile for the environments to render, but when they did, it was like being inside of a photograph (unlike the primarily animation-like imagery that comprises most of SL). I kept on wanting to walk into the walls in order to explore further, which probably means that it was a good simulation. A classmate had introduced us to a person in SL, and he or she took us to a sim called the Cloud Chateau. I ended up having technical difficulties at this point and lost sight of Kamran and the others, so I never really got to see how cool this place was (until later). Our final destination was an airport/beach. Underwater at the beach there was a lot of information about tsunamis, and apparently there was a way to trigger a tsunami simulation – which is why Kamran brought us there – but we were unable to get it to work. Naima and I were the only ones left at this point, and while we were waiting for Kamran (who was looking for a way to trigger the Tsunami) we heard alarms signaling the tsunami which never came, and oddly enough I felt a bit alarmed. It reminded me of how I can get scared when I play certain video games, and how strange it is – having cues that trigger instinctual fear, whether virtual or real, produces the same results.

We finally gave up on the tsunami, and just as Kamran was leaving another classmate (Loran) showed up. I ended up showing her some of the places we went to during the class meeting, and afterward it felt like we had actually kind of hung out together for awhile and gotten to know each other a bit better, even though we’ve barely spoken in RL – which was interesting and kind of strange. In fact, I’d say with pretty much anyone in the class, I’ve spoken much more in SL than I have in RL. All in all, was a good class meeting. Some random notes: I’m going to try to be more social in SL and meet some new people, since it is probably an important part of doing research here and I have been really bad about it; this means I will probably have to go to more commodified areas since they seem to the most populated and social. Also, I was just thinking about how limited in movements our avatars are – we have to run scripts in order to do most of the actions that are social (but transparent and unconscious) in RL – which really brings your attention to how much body signals contribute to communication and social interaction. I wonder if they will make avatars more flexible in the future – it would be cool if you could control your facial expressions similar to the way you control bodily movement (or to have facial expressions at all, for that matter). Finally, something Loran brought up that I had been thinking about – why do so many people dance in SL / why is dancing such a prevalent activity? Does the physical (and often personalized) movement of dancing help people validate the “reality” of their avatars? Is it because they want their avatars to do something when there isn’t much else to do i.e. a virtual version of being unable to stand still? It’s definitely an interesting virtual phenomena – and I wonder if more capabilities in avatar expression would change this.

~ by glycerine517 on October 10, 2007.