Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

TIP: If you want to be hip these months, throw in the words 'second life' in your conversations. Adidas sells virtual shoes on SL. Last week my company IBM hosted one of the largest events ever on their island, the Global Innovation meeting. This week a major radio station Q Music organises its first Q parties in Second Life, including avatars of all major DJs. As a result Second Life is all over the radio all of the time and new Belgian SL accounts are booming. Many people I talk to don't want a second life because they lack the time to live their first live properly. A newspaper article two weeks ago mentions that like in real life, SL is all about sex and money. You even need to buy genitals to have sex in SL :-)

So I had to give it a try. (Not the genitals, the general SL experience)
In this post I'll tell you about my first experiences. In a later post I'll cover some pro/cons on usage of virtual worlds such as Second Life for educational purposes.
Your first SL encounter should take you about 4 hours.

How to get started?

1. Go to www.secondlife.com and register. Your first account is free. You can select your SL first name, but your last names comes from a predefined list. Take some time to select a good name because it is your unique identifier in your Second Life and cannot be changed. Select some basic characteristics of your avatar such as male/female and basic body shape. Don't spend too much time on this now, you can change everything later. For the free account, don't give our your paypal or VISA details. You will also be asked for e-mail and other details and you need to agree to Second Life's code of conduct. For example, virtual harrassment or violence is not OK in public places. And you can't discriminate in SL because somebodies bits are old, fat, buggy or blue.

2. On the same site, download the Second Life client program to your machine and run the installation program. You need to have Quicktime installed too because SL sounds and video come via QuickTime technology. To run SL properly you want to have 1 GB of RAM memory and a good graphics card in your computer. If you have a firewall enabled make sure the SL is granted access to the network.

3. Now for your first almost-second-life experience: launch the SL client on your computer, and log on. All first time users are automatically 'teleported' to Orientation Island. This is not Second Life yet. Your avatar will be visible (sometimes first naked, but your clothes come on in seconds, don't worry) between 4 gates where you will learn basic SL skills such as communication, moving around (including flying lessons!), changing your appearance, paying, etc. Use the up and down arrow keys to move around and find out how to use the SL program. Follow the signs. When you are done you can click a board to go the another island: help island.

4. After Orientation Island, you are teleported to another almost-second-life place: Help Island. Move around and learn. Be sure to visit the store where you can get all things for free! I got me a free house (but no land because that costs), tshirt and salsa moves :-) .

5. When you are ready to move to the real Second Life, follow the link (green beamer) on Help Island to teleport you to Second Life. Have fun. You might go to Time Square. I did. It was deserted.

After the orientation I explored the IBM islands. IBM has created 4 public islands that are all one after another. The Almaden island is public, so teleport there. They have a great orientation section as well that repeats some of the stuff in the general orientation, but also extra information such as how to sit, take and move objects, view yourself from another camera angle and talk on different channels. After that I took the train for a tour of the IBM islands. Somehow I managed to fall of the train :-). The picture shows my virtual me (Bert Handrick) at the LotusSphere conference building where the first virtual LotusSphere conference was held last january together with the real one in Orlando. (If I had a choice I'd prefer Orlando in my first life anyway :-) )

That wraps up my first encounters on Second Life. As in first life I don't like driving around so luckily one can fly in SL :-).
I regret there is no sound in Second Life, all chatting is through typing. When you are typing, so is your avatar, which is a funny sight.
You will often be alone in Second Life, because it is a big place with only 20000 people in the world simultaneously. So as in FL, you need to find out where to go when. And you probably need some Linden Dollars (the Second Life currency) too.

Labels: IBM, Second Life