Second Life Gym Evaluation.

Our idea was to create a workout space, which would directly appeal to our target audience - people that use SL. It seemed pointless to do something that, though good in the real world wouldn't appeal to the people that use it (The government department responsible for attempting to use second life to communicate to pensioners and indeed much of the computer literate public is deluded).
So with this in mind we have worked on exercises that are important and accessible to people prone to spending many hours at a computer screen. You don't need equipment for any of the exercises in our zone, and many of them can be done without even leaving your chair.
We built the space to appear professional yet welcoming. It's strange how difficult it is to ignore conventional rules of architecture - such as gravity. We had several ideas for the space - such as floating islands held aloft by birds and giant spheres with their own gravity. Interesting as it would have been to try these ideas out, they were not suitable for the client and target audience - what any public service like this needs to be is simple, clear and accessible. We hope we've achieved this, we've tried to make navigation and immersion as intuitive and clear as possible (with large signs, easily identifiable entrances and easy to use assets.)
The project could carry on or a long time - we outlined many ideas in our presentation - live workout events, dietary advice, menus, timed reminders, more exercises, forums. We are all really excited about the film project though and are eager to finalise this, and without some serious networking and government permissions, there seems little reason in pushing this any further. it's in it's infancy, but it's got legs.
We work well in a group. We all pulled our weight in and out of the studio, with different skills and expertise brought to the group. So no complaints.

I think we all learnt a bit, even about other programs such as photoshop/illustrator/avimator. There's some coding in there too.

Tom, Rob, Szymon.

SLurl

Second Life Uses

Although I have a general lack of interest in Second Life as a virtual world/community, I can see uses for it that would be beneficial to areas I have greater interest in, particularly video. The ability to create characters and objects, then photograph them from any possible angle and distance makes it a very usefull tool for storyboarding. Add in using screen capture software and you can create a pretty good feeling for how a scene is going to run through time wise. This also gives you a lot of freedom to experient with different shot framings and camera angles. You can also test build sets fairly quickly and easily, enabling you to get a better impression of what's going to work and what might need changing, without having to invest money and time into buying mateials and creating a set only to find its not going to work out quite how you'd imagined. I can also see it would be useful for creating an animatic for 3D animations. Having used flash to create an animatic for my maya animation I know it isn't the greatest way to do it. Whereas with second life I could've made a model of my character really easily, then taken different shots of it, which would reult in something much more similar looking to how the final animation is going to be.

Second Life Action

We've been learning a few basic principles of second life, how to model objects and attach animations, scripts and sounds to them. So far I've made a staff (which I hear is this seasons must have accessory for second life avatars) and attached an animation to it so it sits properly in Reg's hand instead of skewering him, and a sound file that makes it emit an irritating droning sound for everybody in close proximity of my character to enjoy. I've also created an object with animations atttached to it, namely a chair that when clicked on allows you to sit in a thoughtful/vacant pose. Splendid. I missed the sessions on applying textures to objects and adding effects like wind, so I've got a bit of playing around to do before I'm up to speed.