Virtual Greg

Tonight I took part in a lecture in the new University of Melbourne breadth subject  “Internet Meets Society”. Pete Benda is coordinating this subject, it’s running for the first time this year and they’re trying out lots of interesting delivery formats. The lecture was about virtual worlds. We ran it as a panel consisting of Pete, Adam Nash (RMIT) and I, with Pete and Adam in the UM lecture room and me appearing via Second Life. We discussed some pre-defined topics and took questions from students. At one point we went for a walk to one of SL’s rough neighbourhoods, with interesting results. To illustrate identity issues I logged in simultaneously as two avatars and pretended they were two different people for half the lecture. We’ll write up a lectures notes handout soon and I’ll put it here.

It was a big day – in the morning I trained up to the Mission to see the Rock Make Street Festival – several bands and lots of arts and crafts. I put a few snaps on Flickr.

On 23 Aug I went to a street festival in the Mission called the Rock Make festival. They blocked off Treat street for about 100m. They had a stack of indie bands playing on two stages at either end, and a bunch of arts and crafts by local makers on sale in tents. It’s logistically hard for me to see bands late at night in the city so this was a good oppotunity to sample Frisco’s indie wares.
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Here is my draft for the PARC poster day …

Postscript: the poster went ok, but these things should have stood our more clearly:

* Second Life

* it’s a usability study (not a software development etc)

* groups

Today I hired a car and learned how to drive on the right hand side of the road. I’d booked a cheap small sedan but when I arrived they were out of stock and gave me a bright blue convertible at no extra cost. I’m not sure if I’ve even ridden in a convertible before. I suspect the manufacturer intended it be driven faster than I did.

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With the help of the rest of the PlayOn group, Nic and Don, I’m fine-tuning the project I’ll conduct at PARC. It’s a study of how people collaborate around complex 3D objects in virtual worlds. I’m getting groups of people to build things together in Second Life, to find out how they handle things like coordination and reference.

For taskideas I’m looking at previous research into shared-video environments, where researchers did things like time pairs of users doing virtual jigsaw puzzles and the like.

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