Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I Was in the Holodeck

If you were an educator, wouldn’t you dream of taking your students on exciting field trips but the location is across the country, or even across the ocean? How about a holodeck in a virtual world where, with the click of a mouse, you can be in New York, Chicago, or visiting Chateau Villandry on the Loire river?

I got an invite to check out some new technology within SecondLife and had an interesting experience. I've blogged and complained about this before and it applied here as well. Any space within SL that has more than a few avatars is simply useless. Too many people, laggy performance and usability issues galore. Add in that anyone who felt like it could click and change the scenery and it was pretty much madness. Gotta lock down the user experience here!

All that said.. cooool! After the different environments rezzed, it looked pretty slick - with a caveat. Images like city scapes looked and felt real, but anything that had objects that were within reach failed badly to impress. The restaurant/diner scene in particular was off - tiny little men standing on huge tables - I thought I had climbed the beanstalk!

I wished there were fewer folks and that I could try my hand at Battle School, but it's still early!

Either way, virtual worlds technology continues to impress and create new opportunities for learning, experiences and of course, fundraising.


City

Diner

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home