Second Life?

jondog · #1 10-19-2010, 05:56 PM

What do you know about Second Life? Can/does it have any useful purpose?

L-A · #2 10-19-2010, 05:59 PM

Cheap labor. Buy in-game currency and exchange it for real work with the players there. You can have a 3000 words text translated for about two to five dollars.

That's all I know about it

Muaguana · #3 10-19-2010, 11:31 PM

I used it off an on for a couple weeks at one point (at the request of my girlfriend). Completely pointless and a waste of time, IMO, but evidently there's a way to make money from it if you have too much time on your hands. The currency used or earned in the game can be exchanged for US dollars (I believe the exchange rate back then was either around 360 to $1USD or 3600 to $1USD or some other ridiculous number) and some people find ways to get users to pay them for virtual goods and services.

Most of my time was spent sitting on the heads of badly scripted animals and seeing how many angles I could smash into the ground at after disengaging the "fly" function mid-flight. And no, it wasn't as much fun as it sounds.

Kwesi · #4 10-19-2010, 11:38 PM

After seeing what I've seen in Second Life... I don't think I'd play it, lol.

jondog · #5 10-20-2010, 05:31 AM

An organization I work with is proposing having a virtual meeting there. We're geographically dispersed, and webinar models seem to promote minimal genuine engagement, so they said Second Life might be cool because avatars fall asleep when the person is not engaged in the conversation/activity. At least you can see who's paying attention and who's not and ideally this would get more folks involved. Any opinions? I have no experience w/ Second Life yet.

Auzzie-Phoenix · #6 10-20-2010, 08:59 AM

Well, if your organization's virtual meeting is over 35 people, then they're out of luck. Sims are limited to 35 visitors at a time, and most computers tend to have lag issues once the count gets to about 15-20 people in the viewable area.

To top this off, the client software is prone to random crashes, though most are usually caused by a memory leak with the outdated cache memory handler that they used for the software. This is only the tip of the iceberg as it could also be used to abuse work time later on such as what you see with employees playing farmville on facebook when nobody is looking. And then there's the time you would need to spend training employees how to use the software and navigate in the 3d environment.

To that effect, I would say that while someone was trying to think out of the box, simple video conferencing would probably be a more effective use of resources and time. With fewer chances for abuse later on down the line. Plus the "sleeping" away animation only works if the organization members don't know about anti-idling devices (they keep the avatar in a non-away status).

Cosmo420 · #7 10-20-2010, 09:01 AM

All I know about it is that it can quickly suck you in. And, seeing as how easily addicted I get to things like that, I know to stay far away from it...

jbaird · #8 10-20-2010, 09:29 AM

Second Life manged to really hype themselves up to be the next big online thing but I think that's largely bunk.
I saw an article a while back that estimated their user base was very small, their numbers being largely a total of everyone who had ever signed up, regardless if it had been months/years since they logged in and how much they ever played. Theres the odd person that made money there but you're probably way better off selling your services in the real world or playing something more geared towards gaming.

KeithBMI · #9 10-20-2010, 10:00 AM

When I was young, I played a game called Activeworlds. You could build anything you wanted and play a bunch of different games with people, but it was still just a glorified chat room. It was fun back in the AOL days, but probably not so much now.

Pilgrim · #10 10-20-2010, 10:08 AM

As far as I'm concerned it's the answer to a question that no one asked. Lots of work to set up a site, minimal function. I'm in higher ed and haven't found anything we need to do in Second Life. They're about to eliminate educational discounts so most institutions will be seriously re-considering any sites there.

Strat-Mangler · #11 10-20-2010, 11:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jondog

An organization I work with is proposing having a virtual meeting there. We're geographically dispersed, and webinar models seem to promote minimal genuine engagement, so they said Second Life might be cool because avatars fall asleep when the person is not engaged in the conversation/activity. At least you can see who's paying attention and who's not and ideally this would get more folks involved. Any opinions? I have no experience w/ Second Life yet.

What's wrong with using multiple webcams?

jondog · #12 10-20-2010, 11:34 AM

The organization has an explicit ethic of freedom and equal access. The idea is that anyone with a local library could create an avatar and participate but that video conferencing requires more expensive resources.

Also we'd be lucky if we got more than 35 attendees at a meeting so crashes are probably not a problem.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Strat-Mangler

What's wrong with using multiple webcams?

L-A · #13 10-20-2010, 11:38 AM

I'm afraid the process of creating an avatar and familiarizing with the dynamics of Second Life is not a step forward from Skype conference text-messaging.

Auzzie-Phoenix · #14 10-20-2010, 12:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jondog

The organization has an explicit ethic of freedom and equal access. The idea is that anyone with a local library could create an avatar and participate but that video conferencing requires more expensive resources.

Also we'd be lucky if we got more than 35 attendees at a meeting so crashes are probably not a problem.

Yes, crashes would still be an issue, as those are usually software related. The 35 people thing is in reference to lag, meaning that it would end up looking like stop motion animation if the avatars even rezzed (loaded).

And I don't know of any libraries that would allow you to install second life. It's bandwidth and resource intensive. You can log in from any pc that has second life installed, but I doubt there are any public facilities that would allow you to install the software.

Jazz Ad · #15 10-20-2010, 12:38 PM

It's he kind of stuff I've heard about for as long as I've been online and never even stumbled on the site.

Strat-Mangler · #16 10-20-2010, 02:27 PM

Exactly. I really wonder why anybody would ever even consider 2nd Life as a business tool considering how many resources it'd need to run. Couple that with needed troubleshooting to make it work on everybody's PC and that'll just make things painful for everybody.

Skype is a good place to start IMHO. There are other applications that'll give you the ability to conference with multiple people as well.

jondog · #17 10-20-2010, 03:29 PM

We've used Skype for one distant person speaking to a co-located group, how many distant people can it realistically handle with any sense of real engagement?