Education in Second Life

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Virtual reality/worlds have extensive possibilities for education and training, we all know that, I think we do… But, I suspect most are like me and think little on the problems educators have using virtual worlds as their classroom.

SLeducate - University of Western Australia (UWA)
SLeducate – University of Western Australia (UWA)

If I think about it even a little I realize the first problem is just getting a student into the world and to the right location. The University of Western Australia (UWA) has an article up about those challenges. See: Eliminating a headache faced by all SL virtual educators!

Experience has taught us over the years that existing Learning Islands in Second Life™ don’t really get people new to Second Life to a level of usability needed to take a class. Often people are still figuring out how to use the viewer rather than focusing on the lesson. 

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Bits of Second Life

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Second Life™ Market Place

Hamlet has an interesting bit up in the article Update, Emily Short’s Blood & Laurels: From Linden Limbo to New York Times Feature in Four Months. Have you noticed he likes long titles?

MistyMountains_020
Misty Mountains – 2013

The Market Place has seen some odd happenings. This was announced:

[Posted 3:46 PM PDT, 07 July 2014] We are performing unscheduled maintenance on the secondlife.com maturity filters that is causing some Marketplace listings to be listed under the wrong maturity rating.  It is also causing event creations and Classified ads to fail due to the maturity filter. Please check back here for updates as we have them. 

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Experience Tools Update 2014-28

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Today Dolphin Linden was at the Scripting-Server User Group meeting answering questions about the Experience Tools (XP Tools) and how they will work. The made for an interesting meeting. I posted about this meeting’s coming Q&A last week.

Dryland Mado - 2014
Dryland Mado – 2014

The current request for Beta Testers is for experience creators, Madpea or Loki Eliot type people. Latter they will be asking for experience participants (users) to join the beta testing.

There is a knowledge base article up: Experiences in Second Life. This is mostly for users not scriptwriters. We are told by Oz and Dolphin Linden that wiki documentation is in the works. The current draft is being reviewed by those Lindens that do the reviews. Scriptwriters check the last line of this post.

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Second Life News 2014-28 #2

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Servers

Late yesterday Maestro Linden posted the Deploys post. The main channel is rolling this morning. The new package contains the changes in LSL that allow us to control Materials via script. See  llSetLinkPrimitiveParams and llGetLinkPrimitiveParams. Look for the new perimeters in those named; PRIM_NORMAL, PRIM_SPECULAR, and PRIM_ALPHA_MODE.

Forgotten City 2012
Forgotten City 2012

RC Channels

Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get a new maintenance package tomorrow, Wednesday. This package has fixes for :

  • Temp Attachments are sometimes not removed on the viewer when detached from a region change event.
  • BUG-6466 – Numbers expressed in scientific notation and include a plus sign in the exponent are not parsed as json numbers by LSL.

New in this release is a feature: L$ transactions from llTransferLindenDollars or llGiveMoney now include a “Description” field with the object’s name in the L$ transaction history section of the website.

The Magnum channel will continue to run the Experience Tools package. It will be updated with the changes going to the main channel. There may be some updates to the Experience Tools too, bu they don’t say what.

Viewers

The SL Viewers are unchanged from yesterday.

New Blender 2.71 Weight Painting Video

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Medhue, of Medhue Animations, has a tutorial video up on weight painting for Second Life using Blender 2.71. The information in general works for any modeling system. But, is specifically for Second Life and Blender w/AvaStar users. While the ideas are transferable to any system, the button presses are specific to AvaStar users. He does not get into Fitted mesh, but for a button press or two it is the same.

[youtube h4-h-cVCPP0]

There is a commercial in the middle if you watch on YouTube. Its short but it is a surprising burst of sound.

This tutorial is based on Medhue’s work flow, which is very much like the workflow pattern I use. The basic idea is to make one master weight garment or body and then use that for all future weighting. Medhue shows how to do that.

You can discuss the video with Medhue in the SL Forum here: Tutorial – Rigging & Weighting in Blender  2.71 with Avastar for Second Life. (I modified the title a bit…)