Collaboration in SL

As we move in to our Final Project, I'm really excited to be working on a project with a real life application. The topic of metamorphic rocks I feel really lends itself to Second Life. With it, I think that we can truly do some cool things such as creating the grand canyon or some other famous metamorphic rock, and perhaps do a simulation of some sort. A lot of this will depend on our building and scripting skills though.

Even with all of this excitement, I am concerned with what it will be like to collaborate in SL. I believe my group will be having all of our meetings in SL rather than F2F in RL. From past experience, I know that it can be tricky to build together. If you need help, time has to be spent explaining the problem, or objects/scripts have to be deeded to your group members so that everyone has editing privileges. Hopefully, all will work out, and we'll have something great to show for our work.

Building in Second Life

Building in SL is probably one of its greatest features. While building is a frustrating skill to learn, once you master the basics, almost anything is possible. This was really emphasized when we were playing primtionary in class.

Since this is my second time learning about building in SL, I'm feeling more confident about my building abilities. Enough so that I thought I should embrace building and use it to model something I'm thinking about building in real life. Something that I've been trying to design recently is cake for my sister's baby shower. On the invitations, there's a pictures of a bear and an umbrella, and I wanted to try recreate that on the cake. While there are many ways to achieve this, I had difficulty imagining it in my mind, and drawing it on paper. When I switched to building it in SL, it amazing how much clearer it is, and I can see why this would be such a powerful learning tool.

Ultimately I probably will not use this design, but check it out in the picture below: