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Sunday 31 August 2008

RL skies in SL telescopes

Recently, while I was completing the material for Septembers edition of the Astro_Park , which by the way covers the Aurigid meteors, the constellation of Aries and the planet Jupiter, I had a thought on a further implementation of the Sky-Cam board; If you have yet to visit the facility, then the Sky-Cam board features web-page on a prim, the web page in question being a minute by minute snapshot of the sky above Cambridgeshire England courtesy of Paul Beskeen at http://www.beskeen.com. I must admit to being somewhat surprised as to why the thought had not occurred to me before, but why not have the live sky image textured onto the lens of a telescope? On your next trip to the Astro-Park you may like to take a walk into the observatory and there in the eye-piece of the telescope you will see the invitation to Touch for live image, RL skies through SL telescopes, maybe a first?

Thursday 21 August 2008

Second quarter survey published

The second quarter visitor survey results for 2008 are now available at the Beach House on shimmer-Island. This is raw data and is gathered directly from visitors who are invited to take a simple two-question three-option survey on attending virtual classes at the sim and its aesthetic appeal. If you are considering setting up a learning space, a browse over these results may prove useful for you. If you would like to stay in touch with the work here then please feel free to visit anytime and look around and maybe even join the Shimmer-Island group, its open enrolment and free.

Saturday 16 August 2008

New Learning Space, New Interface

If you have visited Shimmer Island before (slurl) then you will have arrived at the beach house and no doubt ventured to the first floor learning resources, which have been in place for a couple of years now and continue to prove popular. In creating these I wanted to produce a learning space with access to materials that allowed us to return to a more intuitive and tactile experience like books as a means of accessing information; when you think about it, asked if anyone would rather use a new library of operating system to get information, you can hazard a safe guess as to their preference.


Just lately though I have been thinking about the way we associate form with function, not just Oh its book and therefore has words to be read, but also, this looks like a library so it musty be full of books! So I began considering breaking with the traditional associations, form from function and explore the possibility, advantages and preference of creating a learning space that appeared to be more in keeping with a relaxing chill-out space, populating it with learning / information resources whose appeared would be more in keeping with their immediate environment rather than function or purpose. For a location, I bought in a new sky platform “Secret garden in the Sky”, which seemed ideal for the project.


To access these new resources an avatar simply approaches close enough, within 2 meters, at which point a label appears telling what it is, if you are not interested in the content then simply move out of range and the label disappears. Should you wish to open the resource however simply stay in range and the object will morph into a screen, retexture its surface to the opening page? At the moment until web-page on a prim achieves more functionality, I am still employing the use of pop-up windows.




There is I feel a more ambitious project waiting for me here though in the production of resources that respond to avatars, rather than avatars having to make all the selections and choices, but as I say that’s a further extension of the project. Please feel free to come along to the main beach house anytime and take the teleport to the sky garden and let me know your thoughts and impressions.


Bye for now Skipper

Monday 11 August 2008

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

Hi, like how the place is developing

Flame Firanelli