Rice University’s experiments in
Second Life
Philip Montgomery
Archivist/Special Collections Librarian
Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library,
Rice University
woodson@rice.edu
November 12, 2009
Stepping off the edge:
Virtual World Project
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Perceived interest in virtual reality for library
Created an ad-hoc university-wide committee
Created a white paper on need to explore
Approached Provost with request to create
alternative virtual campus
• Bought an island in Second Life
• Made a committee decision to build campus
• Ran two-year experiment for teaching and
learning.
What is Second Life?
• Networked Virtual Environment (NVE)
• 3D modeled terrain inhabited by graphically
rendered actors known as avatars
• individuals build, interact and exchange in a
graphical format
• owned and operated by Linden Labs, a leading
developer of NVE technology
SL facts
• 1,363,000 avatars logged in Oct.-Nov.- 2009
• 50,000 to 60,000 logged in at one time (a
small number by gaming standards)
• SL has its own economy based on the
exchange rate of L$120 per US$.
• The participants own their content.
Milkwood Library
Macbeth
Rice’s Owl Land
Fondren Library’s presence in SL
• Rice University’s Fondren Library posted
several image & text based exhibits in the
library space in Owl Land. Images linked to
digitized items in Rice’s institutional
repository, scholarship.rice.edu.
• Access to the Fondren Library catalog via SL
was explored.
Educational opportunities
in Second Life environment
• Some universities have explored using Second
Life as a virtual classroom for distance
education
• Some have used Second Life as a research lab
/ community
The gist of SL
It is about human interaction through:
• Emotions
• Creativity
• Community
• Relationships
The primary tool is the avatar, a
representation of a sentient being.
Pronoun problems
“… my pronouns get a little mixed up
when I'm talking about Re or myself. I
have occasionally settled on "we". I
know my avatar (Re) has done many
things in her three months of life that
the real me wouldn't do.”
Lisa (ReneeIlene Spiritweaver in SL)
Mind if I sit here?
"... one of my favorite oddball things
about being in SL... If I'm at a meeting
with a friend, I want to sit next to my
friend - even though we are not really
"there"! I don't care about that
dimension in chat rooms or discussion
threads! <grin>"
Ilene
Look at me when you talk!
• I always turn to face a person I’m
talking to in SL
•Awareness of body language
• Finding the right look and feel or not
• I react “inside” when my personal
space is treated in a different way than
normal.
• What does this say about me?
Rolig
I don’t mean to be rude
“I am guilty of the not-always-facing
folks when I chat. One reason is that I
am usually doing three things at once
…. So I forget to move Rocky to face
folks.”
Rocky/Bill
Personal Space in SL
Nature News
Sept. 11, 2006
Psychologists find real-world social rules mirrored in
'Second Life' interactions.
“some quirks of how people interact in the real world
have survived the digital transition. ”
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060911/full/news
060911-3.html
Replicating schizophrenia
University California, Davis
October 12, 2007
This UC Davis psychiatric clinic is nothing but pixels, part of
the online, virtual reality environment Second Life. Based
on the psychoses of actual patients, it was created by Dr.
Peter Yellowlees, professor of psychiatry, and colleagues at
the School of Medicine, to help medical students
understand what it is like to have schizophrenia.
http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=9787
Learning to Save Lives
From BBC News
October 27, 2008
Paramedic students at St George's
Hospital, University of London
and Kingston University use
Second Life to aid their
learning.
"When they make a mistake, they
are always keen not to make
this mistake again." Dr Ahmed
Younis, principle lecturer
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/healt
h/7686595.stm
Screen shot of student avatars attending
a drunk in Second Life for paramedic
students at St. George’s Hospital in
London.
Body and mind: a study
Source: Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems.
This paper looks at how and why users customize their
avatar and how easy and satisfying the existing avatarcreation tools are. Full PDF available on line.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518877
Emily
• Image Metrics, creator of
Grand Theft Auto
• The aim was to overcome
the traditional difficulties
of animating a human face,
for instance that the skin
looks too shiny, or that the
movements are too
symmetrical.
• http://technology.timesonli
ne.co.uk/tol/news/tech_an
d_web/article4557935.ece
Emily is one of the first
animations to leap a longstanding barrier known as
'uncanny valley' - the
perception that animation
looks less realistic as it
approaches human likeness.
Be Mindful of Future
Technologies change how we do projects.
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3D-visualizations for personal devices (HUD glasses)
Artificial worlds in gaming environments
Artificial intelligence
Robotics
Quantum computing
Mobile computing
Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and beyond
Epilogue, 2010
• Rice decided to halt the experiment in Second
Life for the time being, due to staff time
constraints in the current economic
environment. However, it was a very
worthwhile experiment and we look forward
to future experimentation in new arenas to
fulfill our educational mission.