For the last few months we’ve been running the Metaverse Friday “theme” every week here at Musematic. By now you’ve probably gotten the idea – virtual worlds are something to keep an eye on. But they certainly aren’t the only thing that’s creeping over our horizon. After this week, Metaverse Friday will be moving to a bi-weekly schedule in order to spread it out a bit and make some room for other pressing issues.
Last week Stephen Taylor, Director of Academic Computing at Vassar College, opened a Second Life representation of the Sistine Chapel. (SLURL). Having visited many other sites in SL, I have to say this is one of the better quality recreations I have seen. Often images transfered into SL slowly interlace before fully resolving or never fully resolve into a clear picture. At the SL Sistine, images are crisp and clear.
Linden Labs maintains a listserv for educators that exploded with interesting discussions around the Chapel. “Nude” avatars were spotted cavorting in the chapel (and not those depicted in Michelangelo’s work….), which led to the institution of a “Code of Conduct.” The Code asks all visitors to respect the space as they would as visitors to the RL chapel and prohibits certain kinds of activities. On one hand this underscores the sometimes sad state of affairs in virtual worlds, at the same time it demonstrates that the only way things can change is by making them change.
The chapel also raised a lot of good questions about IP issues in virtual worlds. “Michaelangelo’s been dead 500 years, how could the images be copyrighted?” (in fact, the images were licensed for the project) Was Vatican permission required? What’s the difference between photography in public and private spaces. These are all questions that we struggle with as museums or visual resource providers. For some questions we can provide clear answers and others will forever be lost in the murkiness that is intellectual property.
I also think it raises questions about transparency and how we document what it is we are doing, whether it’s in SL, on the Web, or in RL. If the purpose of these simulations is to educate, more is needed than just a good experience. During my visit to the Sistine Chapel I was fortunate to run into one of the builders who acted as a “cyberdocent” to explain some features of the build. Otherwise I would have been left on my own to seek out more information about what I was seeing.
In an earlier post, I mentioned meeting scholars working who have worked on archaeological modeling for years. Long enough to have published a set of principles for the creation of 3D representations of cultural heritage known as the London Charter. Not every visitor will be interested in the nitty-gritty details, but the transparency and documentation principles included in the charter can be useful for educators and other builders who want to evaluate the simulations they find in SL. (was it built to scale? are textures from the real thing, or just approximations? where is the line between fact and fiction?).
See you again in two weeks!
July 6th, 2007 05:03
While the Sistine Chapel is nicely done, I was even more impressed with the way Vassar has used their sim to market their college — with lots of excellent information about Vassar all around the island, including links to websites for additional information, and two very well done 3D immersive reality 360 degree views of Vassar’s campus — perhaps the best method I’ve seen yet in SL for recreating specific spots in high-resolution graphics. Worth a look if you get a second! P.S. Along these same lines, check out Drexel’s island if you’ve never seen it — some very cool terra-forming there!
August 31st, 2007 05:34
[...] Of note is Hillary Mason (slmetrics.com) and Eric Hackathorn’s work (Maya Realities/NOAA Metroea) to bring some basic metrics into SL spaces. While both of these give us a better sense of what happens in SL spaces, there is still lots of room for improvement. We can see where people go, how long they stay, and other things that we’ve grown used to with web metrics. It can tell us that students spend more time in a SL classroom, work longer on an SL project. But the work needs to be done to connect that to students learn more, and students learn better.I would still argue that there is a great opportunity here to see how what we’ve learned from vistor studies translates into virtual spaces in way that it doesn’t translate onto the web. For one thing web metrics tell us the who’s and what’s, but doesn’t tell us with who we did it or why we did it. In SL I may be co-visiting or I may have motivations that aren’t clear from simple observation. Do avatars have virtual tethers that keep a couple in the same gallery together, just as you often see IRL? And if you haven’t seen it yet, the Second Life build of the Old Masters Gallery at the Staatlische Kunstsammlungen Dresden hit Wired. Like the Sistine Chapel, another breathtaking example of the possibilities here – at least for replicating the architecture and artifacts we have. This is success on one level – but is it the success we want? [...]