Second Life Happenings

Do you have a second? Need a second chance? Are bad puns second nature to you now? Okay, I'll stop, but by now you probably guessed that Second Life is today's topic. More specifically, there are two items of interest.

First, Drew Harry and Dietmar Offenhuber -- two MIT graduate students (which implies the "first" student and the "second" student) -- from the Sociable Media Group in the Media Lab have won MIT’s Second Life Design Competition. The challenge was to design and create within Second Life campus living spaces, represented by clusters of "Pods" that would let any student join Second Life and, with little foreknowledge, create and add their own Pod to a cluster.

The pair proposed an extensible cellular building structure, in which each Pod in the system is a flexible space owned by a single person and used for a range of purposes -- an apartment, workshop, gallery, store, classroom, storage closet, or whatever. To start new Pod owners off, cutomizable templates were provided.

Each Pod displays information that describes its contents, and users can browse for Pods that contain specific search terms. Each Pod also features a data collection system that records visits to the Pod so you can see how many people are currently in each space and how many people have recently visited; this data is shown on the Pod itself to make it easy to gauge popularity.

Secondly (you could see that coming), folks around here are gearing up for the second (there you go) Dr. Dobb's Life 2.0 Conference, a four-day event on September 15-21, 2007 on Dr Dobbs Island in Second Life. The program will commence with a two-day, eight-hour weekend bootcamp on Linden Scripting Language (LSL) application building, SL-to-web integration, open-source client (libsecondlife), developer tools, and new SL features.

Don't waste a second! Sign up now (it's free) and we look forward to seeing you -- well, if not you, then your avatar -- on Dr Dobbs Island.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:06 AM  Permalink