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As I navigated the Blade Runner-like cyber city Insilico, it struck me.
I was using stairs and ramps as second nature, through the interface. I was able to make decisoons on how to move through the world without ever feeling the familiar disconnect of “I am using a program on my computer, or a game in my console.” It was like I was walking to my own bathroom or kitchen, completely oblivious to the immersion in the world.

As we move through real space, we know the relative position of each step we take. We realize how fast we have to step, to keep balance. At any minute we know exactly how our hands are positioned, and where they are relative to our body. We adjust in such slight ways: a quickening of the pace, a swaying of the arms, or even a gentle shifting of our body weight. It’s incredible, really.

As I move through this virtual space, I know how each step will work from one moment to the next. I have a series of gentle adjustments ready to navigate the pitfalls of the virtual world: Lag, psychics issues and tolerances. I don’t think about the world as a game space, but an place of spatial relationships, much like my house. I see the ramp leading to the Reakt0r night club and I know it well. I walk towards it, adjust for a minor lag, hit it at the perfect angle, adjust once more, and am up it. I don’t think about any of the actions I just did, and I press on.

We’ve reached a day and age where we as humans can interface with a virtual world on such powerful levels. The spatial awareness in a MUD or a MOO is comparable, considering the times. Knowing which pathways took you where in a MUD/MOO felt sexy. It felt damn good to have an awareness of navigating a space the same as we walk around our homes and worlds. And now we have a world like Second Life. But why Second Life? Why not MMOs like Azeroth or Warcraft?

It’s because Second Life is both flawed, and perfect in a way. Hear me out.

Second Life is flawed, thanks to its relatively low-end graphic capabilities, and its reliance on streaming information leading to rampant latency issues. It hiccups often, but more or less runs fine. Its imperfections make it like our own world. We know how to compensate for tripping, for skipping or accidentally encountering an obstacle. Those little adjustments count! They are constant adjustments for life’s unexpected. We do it automatically, and in Second Life, we do it there too. This hits home even harder because Second Life’s “imperfections” are far different, and out number real life’s (barring things like disease and gunshots ending your life, and submitting time stopping and starting and the world teleporting from beneath your feet for Second Life’s troubles.)

Second Life is perfect, because it changes. Humans built Second Life. A free population of them though. The GMs of MMOs have ultimate control, and though the Linden’s rule in SL, they are far from “Creators,” in a physical sense. They govern with absolute rule, but the things that have been built in SL are testament to its inhabitants states of mind. Sci-fi landscapes, galaxies, shacks, castles, caves, night clubs, strip clubs, posh dancing clubs and ballrooms, lakes, rivers, volcanoes, malls, slums, cyberpunk cities, steam punk cities, art galleries. I could go on. The people of SL are creators, just like in real life. We all contribute to the world around us. If we want to make something, we do it. We can buy houses, change them, knock them down. Build businesses, hire employees, fall in love, play games…and strangely enough (in its own fashion,) so does SL.

Alright, some have just pegged me an SL addict. But I can look at SL and see that the people who are addicted to its life-like qualities have reason to be. It’s dangerously similar in many, many ways. And at least I can recognize them. Besides, I’m too busy being addicted to Video Games to care.

So I suppose I concluded this: We have advanced as a species into a new age of technology, that we are able to develop sense of “place” to an previously unthinkable degree of the uncanny. With this, we can look forwards to a future of increasingly incredible moments where the life we live attached to reality is f*cking the life we live attached to the grid.

Amen.

If you get this, I love you.

Building Challenge
Hosted by I AM Columbia and Hibiki Ochs.

Bring your best, most open and expanded mind and try your hand at building something fresh! Every Tuesday and Thursday at 6pm SLT!

Twice a week I’ll be picking the freshest new inspirations for you to build off of. Keep it under 50 prims and keep it incredible! Bring your friends, family, enemies, etc.

If you’ve never done a build challenge, here’s what we got going on:

I post a quote onto a billboard at the start of it.  You have 50 minutes tops to make something based of that quote, and then the onlookers vote on their favorite.  I’ll have a voting board, I’ll try to get some side games going for people not building (SLopoly or otherwise), and there’s always the island to explore!  Once the winners have been decided they will get ribbons, and their creations will be lauded until the next contest!

Hit me up in world anytime with questions and such, and while you’re here check out the freshest island in all of SL, the I AM Columbia Island!

-Hibiki Ochs

So I’m putting together some weekly events on the island.  What’s the island?

This is the island.

Once a week on the I AM Columbia Island we’ll have a fun event for all to enjoy.  If you have a computer that runs Second Life come join in.  The events will be fun as I can make them and sometimes even educational.  The events will happen every Wednesday night, at 5pm Central standard time and go for one to two hours.

Some event ideas I have include:

-”How to RP” classes, hosted by my friends at Insilico and myself.

-Second Life Sojurning, going to lovely places in SL as a group and enjoying some of the niftier corners of the world.

-Genuine Second Life Dance Party- Streaming live music over the internet is always fun when you have friends.

-Gaming of some kind (Slopoly maybe?  I may buy some games for the island…)

Stay tuned, residents.

Also, if you WANT to learn more about SL but don’t know ANYTHING about it, come find me.

I work in the Open Lab:

Monday and Wednesday 12pm-5pm

Tuesday and Thursday 5pm-10pm

and I’m online in SL A LOT, so add me as a friend: Hibiki Ochs

Peace out,

Hibiki

So one of the things I do to amuse myself during downtime is role-play a character in the cyberpunk city Insilico.  The way this works is I created a profile on Insilico’s hub website for my character, Hibiki Ochs.  There, I post pictures/blog entires and message board posts and interact with the other denziens.  In Second Life, we interact in the city itself, playing out scenes in dance clubs, on the street, in reactors, in offices…etc.  It’s a large and very fun world to play in, if you enjoy FICTION WRITING.

Why all-caps?  Roleplaying is primarily done through the form of fiction writing: through the blogs, through the message boards and pictures and through Second Life.  We write large passages about the characters and have them react to other people’s situations.  In Second Life things are a little more real time, but here’s an excerpt from a character blog on the Insilico website:

—————————————————————————-

The rainclouds delivered nonstop water.
The awning was dripping wet and the runoff was coming down like a sheet, untouched.
I was holed up at Buddha’s Bowl, business to do. I normally walk in the rain but I had a nice jacket on and didn’t want to look messy where I was going.  Not entirely sure why, the Bowl is a dump, there’s no one to impress there.  Just ratty cooks and the occasional doe-eyed street walker.

“Maybe it’ll pass,” I said.

In that amount of time, I’d already checked the weather. I send a tight beam rBAND Encoded signal to my base station, which checked in with weather satellites all over the globe. It triangulated my location and gave me a current conditions readout, which I read. It compared current conditions all over the globe and gave me the path of the storm. I knew down to the exact second when the rain would slow and stop, I knew when the clouds would be over the other side of the world. I had in my mind a 5 day forecast. I knew the dew-point, I knew the humidity/temperature/air pressure/air composition and wind direction (without the satellites, I have all these sensors on board.) For fun I had a vocal synthesizer read me the forecast in a sexy female British accent. I changed what channel of music I was listening to on the live streams. I synchronized with my back-ups at the safe house and I made a reminder to ask someone out to dinner.

“Just maybe.”

When I have the tools at my fingertips, I can solve the small problems, the little questions. Who said what? What was the last thing I said to you 23 days ago? What time of the day did I do this? Who is logged into this node? What’s happening in the world? My mind keeps updating and archiving and cross-checking and organizing, without me even asking. I know your body heat, your heart rate. I can hear your heart beating in your chest. I know how much life is inside you.

But I’m not going to tell you any of that.
I’d like it better if you didn’t realize the power of my mind.

————————————-

If you want more information on Insilico, or how role-playing works in Second Life, send me a line anytime @ joemasaki@gmail.com

“Why do I need a Second Life?  I’m fine with my first one.”

“Nothing but a load of furries and sex on Second Life.”

“It’s stupid.”

“It’s ugly.”

“Second Life is a crappy game.”

“Second Life is a waste of time and money”

These are all common thoughts shared when I say that my job involves working with and teaching in Second Life.  It’s what I do here at Columbia, primarily.  I work with Second Life.  What does that mean to you?

I’m going to write an impassioned blog entry about why people shouldn’t rag on Second Life, if they don’t know the facts about it, or the people in it.  Passing judgment on a population is juvenile and draconian, and I think we as a community are above it.  I’m going to address each of the criticisms above in order, and hopefully when I’m done I will have at least laid it on the line.  I don’t want to sway the hearts and minds, but I want people to understand why we have Second Life on every computer in the department, and what you can do with it if you choose to explore the possibilities. (more…)

SL Workshop Flyer

So I’m running a workshop. ^_^

Second Life is that trusty little application installed on every machine in the IAM department.  “Why?” I hear you cry, “What’s the good of Second Life?”  Well I’ll happily tell you.

If you’re an artist looking to get your work into a new medium, or out to hundreds of people, you can do that using Second Life.  If you’re a modeler who enjoys making and building vehicles, clothing, buildings…anything at all, you can use Second Life to create and sell your constructions.  If you want to dive into scripting, and work with a scripting language that’s fun and easy to edit, Second Life is for you.  If you want to play a FREE online, massively multiplayer game, Second Life has dozens of combat/roleplay simulators to enjoy and explore.  Countries (Mexico, Switzerland and more) have virtual embassies in Second Life.  Your favorite DJs spin live sets in Second Life (and so can you).

The goal of this workshop (which runs from now until school’s end) is to introduce and familiarize anyone with even the most fledgling interest in the program to the program.

So come on by, stop in for a bit, or stay a while, and learn about why we put this program on all the computers.  Because like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere or even Word, Second Life gives you the power to create what you see with your mind’s eye, and share it with the world.

The workshop runs Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Tuesdays @ 4pm

Thursdays @ 1pm

Room 133 in the IAM Department building, 1000 S. Wabash.

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?Second_Life_sex_causes_divorce&in_article_id=402338&in_page_id=34

Second Life is not a game, but I still find it important to keep tabs on what’s happening in our favorite virtual world.  But it’s not all flying penises and millions of Lindens, sometimes people get hurt.

The lovers assemble...

A real life couple has broken up due to one of them having relations with another avatar in Second Life.  The lovely Laura Skye caught Dave Barmy, her online and real life husband, knocking virtual boots with the fire-maned Modesty McDonnell.  Here’s a photo of the now seperated couple as they exist in Real Life.

Reality bites.

Yes, yes yes yes there’s a tad bit of schaedenfruge going on with this post, but here’s my meat:  This is an instance where we see the true impact of an avatar, and the inseperable realtionship it has with the real world.  It’s hardly every a one way street, especially in Second Life where people spend hundreds of real world dollars to modify their avatar to look a specific way.  I myself spent hours making sure I am represented in the virtual world as accurately as I pleased, which of course resulted in me looking like a cyborg ass-kicker.  But, if my avatar were to have choppy, poorly animated and honestly pathetic looking recreations of sex acts with another avatar, could that ruin a real realtionship I was in?

Yes, yes a thousand times yes.  This couple, bless them, had a relationship that began in Second Life.  I can only imagine them, at home, on seperate computers logged in at the same time, I know it happens because I’ve met other couples who practice that same thing.  It’s an intense connection between a world that only has true value in the social interactions it generates, and the “Real World”.  I brought up the point that in Second Life I am a club manager, and people look to me for answers.  If Second Life went down…would they in the Real World still look to me as their manager, or as a person of any sort of authority?  I say: Yes.

Some people, NOT ALL, fall victim when toeing this line.  It’s tough when they do, because suddenly each and every little interaction in a purely social world has the depth of ten actions in the real world.  If you have trouble toeing this line to begin with…you’re going to have trouble disassociating connections in Second Life with real world connections.

I am by no means condoning this man’s actions.  He’s a royal ass for cheating on his wife, even in a virtual setting.  And it’s precisely that the virtual setting has so much social weight that my, and indeed his ex’s criticisms have weight.

By the way, here’s a picture of my avatar, Hibiki Ochs.

Hibiki Ochs.

http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2008/09/911-commemorati.html

Second Life represents a world apart to me.  I can’t navigate it very well and I feel sort of alien to the whole idea.  I don’t have a cool av I don’t know how to build and I don’t have a single Linden dollar to my name.  This is solely based on my lack of time spent in the game world, and I want to expand on that to be sure.  But this article stood out to me.

Second Life gets a bit of a bad rap from people not involved in the world itself.  It is a furry infested world of maddening advertisements, a playground for the middle aged.  But this article shows it’s not just commerce, not just business and pleasure.  Second Life citizens, despite appearences can be very VERY world conscious.  The name of the program itself belies a sort of escapism, but the issues of the real world tend to pervade even a virtual world.

Avatars sitting in silence, two ghostly towers, soldier avatars, fire engines…it’s something to be said that a virtual world can just as effectively affect it’s citizens to recognize real world tragedy.  The online world is one of noise, color, images and advertisements.  In Second Life, it looks like its citizens have transcended the neon dream and fiber optic neverland for a little while, in order to show the rest of their world that the real world is just as important.

Andrew begins his program of study in Electronic Visualization for a Masters of Fine Arts degree in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago this month. In August Andrew will show his thematic exhibit “Illinois History 1600-1699″ at Philatelica, a virtual world sim based in Alges, Portugal; details and opening party to be announced. Also in August, Andrew gave a motion capture demo to staff members of the IAM department, and a virtual world demo to Roosevelt Univesity faculty where he will guest lecture in October. In July Andrew spoke at the Collectors Club of Chicago on early 20th century network communications in Ukraine. In June, he created a virtual world build entitled “River Ecology Project and Mermaid Grotto”, dedicated to pioneer environmentalist and marine biologist Rachel Carson. Also in June Andrew created a character animation for the Orc Torque Volleyball project for the IAM department under the direction of Jeff Meyers and Tom Dowd. In May, Andrew was involved in the Manifest ‘08 virtual Spectacle Fortuna and the semester-long public transportation simulation on I Am Columbia sim in Second Life along with students Josh Copeland, Scott Hacker, Dan Rosas, and faculty members Patrick Lichty and Janell Baxter.

Our SL5B exhibit is in progress! We will continue working on it this week for the launch on June 30th. Even though our exhibit space isn’t officially launched, it is open to the public. If you have Second Life installed come by and see our progress (if you don’t have SL you can download it for free at secondlife.com).

The view from the road on the west side.

Information about the IAM department, and part of the Virtual Public Housing Museum mini-exhibit.

The view from the road on the east side. On the left is Ti Mosienko’s Women’s History Project and on the right is part of Man Michiniga’s Empire State building.

More screenshots are online with close-ups of some of the exhibits.

Exhibit coordinator avatars: Man Michiniga, Ti Mosienko, Mira Runo, Talus Nemeth, and Prijian Toland (two faculty, one staff, one alumnus, and one student).