Eloise's thoughts and fancies - SL Builds

Some recent work

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:50:47 -0600

Lots of my work has recently been covered by non-disclosure agreements and the like, or is not exactly easy to blog about for other reasons. Websites running on heavy AJAX under the hood and then hidden behind a firewall are... well dull to write about.

However, I recently finished a couple of projects that I can talk about.

In reverse order, I have just about finished these builds for OSU and Doug Danforth. They're builds inspired by the real life hospitals, to be used on a project for training medical students in Second Life. I am, as you probably know, a strong advocate of not recreating real life builds in Second Life, particularly if they're geographically close by. These builds, however, strike me as an excellent example of a reason to have something close to real life built in Second Life. Medical students, obviously, work in hospitals a lot. Hospitals have a distinct look and feel, and the students are clearly not here to learn how to build and script in Second Life. Something that's close enough to the real buildings whilst modified to the use expected - and internally there is no attempt to duplicate the buildings, rather to provide a series of spaces fit to purpose, and also something that does not slavishly follow the minutiae of the real life builds strikes me as a good plan.

Second, I undertook building and scripting a couple of games. The irony of producing games which are based around audio-matching when you're as deaf as I am is not lost me, but the games were aimed at letting people learning English as a Second Language practice their skills. One game would play two sounds and ask you if the vowel sounds match. Pin and Fan... no, Pine and Kine, yes etc. The other was similar, but they had to match the vowel sounds from memory rather more - they were presented with two pictures and had to say if they contained the same vowel sounds. Same as above, but they have to look at the pictures say to themselves "pin" and "pine"... no. It was quite good fun to discuss and develop these - trying to work out with the client the best way forward to match up both pedagogical value and robust implementation in Second Life. This client was actually a student who recently contacted me to thank me, as her project and the work I'd helped her do had helped her achieve a First class honours degree. Congratulations to her for all the rest of the hard work she'd put in, and all the best in her career.

I'm waiting for three more projects to start, and actually waiting for their NDAs to show up, so there might be a bunch of silence to come again - but I'm still working away, mostly in Second Life despite rumours of its demise.

Immersive Educational Environments - roundtable

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:23:31 -0700

On 14 Jan 2010 I hosted a roundtable discussion for Bluesky Larkham at the University of Worcester sim.

The theme of the discussion was immersion and immersive environments. As you might imagine, this was a fairly wide ranging and a very fast discussion with a lot of topics raised and discussed across each other. With the permission of the contributors I am reproducing a notes version of the discussion here.

The discussion was nudged by a few questions from me at various points. These are used to separate the threads somewhat. Because many of the notes are combinations from several contributors they are unattributed.

Those present: Eloise Pasteur, Mari Asturias, Kattan Hurnung, Christal Chrome, Kali Pizzaro, Gann McGann, Mustbe Thursday, LadyJane Plympton and Nonny Writer.

What is an immersive environment? What is immersion?

Immersion is a sense of “being there” of being “in the world” but it is not restricted to virtual worlds - for example people can immerse themselves in film worlds or books too.

Embodiment is a sense of being physically present, able to touch and move, to affect the the world around you.

These two are often connected but not identical.

Not everyone can immerse themselves easily, possibly not at all. Most people agreed that it became easier to immerse yourself as you gained expertise with the viewer/technology/interface.

Being immersed in an educational setting often requires context and purpose. Generally we, as educators, are used to creating both purpose and context for our classes and did not think that doing so for Second Life was particularly different in that sense. However, there was a strong element that felt that it was important to give students time to explore, to play, to shop: a virtual acclimatisation period.

Classes that are not given this time to explore and work tend (in several people’s experience) to be less productive than those that get the opportunity. However, it is also possible to give too much time to play and have the class lose focus and cohesion. There isn’t a single answer and we don’t really have the experience to judge that blending yet.

It was noted, several times and in different ways, that just about everyone tweaks their avatar’s appearance. Some considered the time and attention spent in creating your avatar’s appearance might be a strong indicator of how well you are adapting to Second Life. Often those who are the best students for this course seem to initially spend an inordinate amount of time playing with the environment.

What would you teach them to help them immerse more easily?

There is no clear answer here. People generally felt that teaching “click on things” (something only gamers tend to have learnt to do) as well as how to get around and communicate was good. Camera controls were definitely mentioned. Some start their class off with reflective and/or emotional journals and discuss their hopes, fears, anxieties as part of the class.

There was support for the idea of a distinct “Second Life Basic Skills” course to allow students to learn the basics and explore without the pressure of exams and the like. That is obviously not necessarily currently practical at most places (although presumably the University of Texas is doing something similar). People have used activities such as treasure hunts, spending 10 minutes playing on bumper cars and the like to give a fun setting in which to practise Second Life skills. All the suggestions (save shopping) tended to promote a sense of playful competition - something to consider for future times.

Students require individuated avatars to feel immersed according to most. It’s not only students - no one attending the meeting was in any way close to appearing as Ruth, in any of her current or historical variations. You can tell when people are immersed - they refer to their avatar as I. Those resistant to this maintain a sense of their avatar as character. However, many people have multiple avatars and usually (not always) only one of them is “I” the remainder are characters or tools for specific activities. (Banker alts, a “character” that is a patient for role-play with students etc.)

Many people (possibly non-gamers as a generalisation) become concerned that their avatar will suffer while they are not in Second Life. One person recalled how she had always sat her avatar on a bench before logging off so she wouldn’t fall over. A fair number of people joined in with this reminiscence.

Steven Warburton (King’s College, London) presented a paper about this.

Even if the class also meets face-to-face, Second Life allows for a degree of anonymity that enables some to immerse more easily and can help the class integrate better.

We didn’t discuss this fully - it would easily have been a topic for another several hours of discussion - but we touched on the sense of social presence that Second Life gives. We weren’t sure if this is only true for those that immerse comfortably but many of us feel a sense of having met someone through Second Life that is not present in webinars, IM chats and the like.

Tied in with presence - one group of students found the most immersive thing was taking visitors around their builds in Second Life.

There was support for students being encouraged to create communities - set up a home or similar in their space.

What are the pros and cons of setting up immersive educational environments?
Cons:
Time;
It probably requires immersion before you can learn well and some students just “don’t get” immersion (about 25%?);
Requiring students to build in-world takes longer than the teachers expect and allow for.

Pros:
Flexible learning with multi-modal communication;
It is often easier to get the students to do something, drawing on their knowledge and adding to the environment - which we all hope encourages deeper learning;
There was division about the need for a tutor to be present - either SL or RL or both. Some felt this was essential, some felt it added to certain situations, some felt it was unnecessary. VLEs such as Blackboard were mentioned as alternatives for 100% asynchronous learning - whilst they can be used in this way it was generally felt that they do not have the richness of environment to replicate asynchronous learning in Second Life - although for some things it may be easier to learn in a VLE.

Not clear which side this is on but it was generally thought that students might need a bit of extra support to handle the new modes of learning that they are expected to use in Second Life. This prompted a reminiscence about resistance to reflective journalling until a mode or voice that sat comfortably was discovered. How can we help students discover their “voice” for articulating their learning in Second Life? What does that mean? However, we universally (unsurprisingly given the setting) felt that there was value to the students in learning in this way.

What are the features of an immersive educational environment?

This was an attempt to uncover common features rather than specific tools, things that worked for a given class etc.

An engaging and appropriate environment came out strongly. Some felt this had to be attractive but a large number of counter-examples were produced and we didn’t finally settle but we were heading towards well-designed, appropriate, well-built and emotionally engaging.

Things that stand out and are unusual tended to score well and stick in the memory.

Being able to explore was important.

Generally having things that react when you click on them or otherwise interact was felt to be important (although there are counter-examples such as Virtual Hallucinations).

It was suggested that “interactive” should be broadened to include “engaging emotions” which VH certainly manages.

Other bits
Will the Habbo Hotel generation grow up more comfortable with immersing in virtual worlds than the current generation of students?
If 25% don’t immerse in VWs is that worse than the proportion that don’t immerse in lectures?
Although this was clearly set up as a discussion group rather than a social meeting many of those in attendance also attend social events. How much did having a discussion topic and a moderator lead to a more focussed discussion? How much did the literal (virtual) roundtable aid this?

Further reading:
Warburton levels of engagement chart
Steve Warburton on slideshare
Heeter, C. (1995) Communication research on consumer VR. Biocca, F. and Levy, & M. R. (eds.), Communication in the age of virtual reality (pp. 191-218)
ReLIVE08 Conference report
The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places (CSLI Lecture Notes) by Byron Reeves (1996)

A farewell to SLEx

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:02:39 -0700

Thank you Linden Lab. Not.

According to this lovely post from Colossus Linden and the Commerce Team the customers demand that they not be allowed access to free and cheap items and that even more expensive items aren't charged enough commission on sales.

I can continue to sell my numerical best selling items - each of which are dollarbies - as long as I'm willing to pay Linden Lab L$2/sale net. I think not. In addition, every item L$1 and over will cost L$10/month to list. I list about 100 items. OK, paying £2.50 per month or so to have those 100 items available isn't dire and I certainly shift more than L$1000 in sales every month BUT I already 10% commission on that. Now they're going to add an extra flat fee and they're going to punitively charge on anything less than L$60 that you sell. That is actually a lot of my sales that are about to be punished for not being expensive.

I shall be moving my items to Apez.biz since I already use their service for some items. Having looked at my sales over a few weeks with Apez I coughed up the L$3000 up-front for a commission free service. If Linden Lab decides to alter its current policy and charge such a flat fee, I might reconsider. I shall certainly be looking at other alternative ways to make my items available in-world via the web. I believe there are a couple of other competitors already.

I am not the only person to take umbrage. Ordinal Malaprop for one has already stopped all her listings. It will be interesting to see what the ultimate impact of this is. I suspect a fair number of "dead" items will remain, because their account holders no longer use Second Life and won't care that their account balance becomes negative. In the meantime, Linden Lab is nicely moving out at least some people who do well items via their service - if they move a sufficient number of them they'll end up with the lovely effect of concentrating the deadwood rather than their avowed intent of clearing it out. Way to go!

Second Life College Fair 2009

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:18:23 -0600

Late October (the weekend of 24th and 25th) will see the 2009 Second Life College Fair.

Not being a representative of a college I won't be there in any official capacity... but if you'd like to know a bit more, sign up to be an exhibitor and the like can I suggest you head over to the relevant Google Groups page for the #SLCF09 event and find out more about what's going on, how to sign up and who else will be attending.

The trouble with sims

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:27:30 -0600

You may or may not recognise the picture to the right. It's one of the latest Facebook crazes, Restaurant City, in which you run a restaurant and try to balance customer service, profit, keeping your workforce happy, designing the interior of the restaurant and somewhere in there, there's meant to be some fun too.

It adds some elements of social networking and level-based game play that, quite clearly, make sure it's not a real simulation of the restaurant trade but it still reflects some good and some bad points of simulations. I'm going to use it as my example really because it's NOT a serious simulation and so the things I'm going to raise are really critical of it, but might help you think about your more serious simulation.

The game uses some sort of agent-based model. A potential customer walks in to your restaurant and looks around to check the floor is clean. If it isn't they walk out in disgust. Then they look for somewhere to sit. If there is somewhere they head over there, otherwise they pause in the door for a little while and if not seat comes available they turn around and walk out. If there is somewhere to sit they make their way over, then check if there's a table and if there is, if it's cleared. If there's no table, or it's not cleared they complain and wait a while. If a table seat becomes available they head over there, and check if it's cleared. If the table isn't cleared they complain and leave. Once all of that is done they choose items from your menu, place the order and wait to be served. If they wait too long they complain and leave, otherwise they eat or drink their item and leave, possibly giving you a thumbs-up which translates to both improved customer rating (the 50.0 in the top right, maximum rating) and to "experience points" towards the next level, and always paying you, which lets you buy more ingredients to improve your menu, or to decorating your restaurant, or to blinging out your avatar or your wage-slaves. That is your friends, not wage-slaves, honest. Some proportion of those who leave give you a thumbs down, which decreases your customer rating.

The chefs take a set time to prepare a meal, which depends on how happy you keep them. A glass of water every 36 minutes keeps them totally happy - not even wage slaves! The waiters take time to walk around, to serve food and drinks, to clean the table and the like. The cleaner does something similar but roams more widely.

The customers, particularly those complaining about something, tell you clearly what they're not happy about with little icons over their heads.

So far this all sounds quite reasonable. If you were going to design a sim for a restaurant you might include all of these features. You might want to tweak the "waiting for a table" code a bit after a little while watching it, but fundamentally all the elements work and are there.

So why does my very popular and fairly successful restaurant look like almost NO restaurant I've ever seen? There's a long (and it will be longer probably) barrier in there by the door. Why? It slows the customers down, means the waiter has a bit more time to try and clear the table for them. Without that it's fast food to the extreme as customers charge to the nearest seat as soon as it's vacant and there's no way for the waiter to get the tables by the door cleared.

Additionally, all customers are single parties (single covers I believe the restaurant trade calls them), but they're all quite happy to snuggle up close to strangers in the seating arrangements. I'm not sure what the breakdown of sizes of parties is in a restaurant and I suspect it changes by culture, trade, position etc. too but restaurants aren't laid out like that in most places, because if you're alone you usually want to eat alone, if you're a couple you often want to stare across the table into each other's eyes and not sit side-by-side with strangers on either side of you.

This layout is great for cellular automata that just look for a seat and don't stop to think about who is sat next to them but real people aren't usually like that. It's also great for the waiting staff - they have very little distance to move to serve everyone, although the HSE might say something about the diagonals where they lean over the stoves and the customers might say something about the diagonals where they loom over one or two adjacent customers.

The menuing system is designed to try and make this a social game - it bears no resemblance to RL systems. My top rated restaurant serves one starter, one main, one dessert, one drink. Even the local hot-dog stand has more variety, although the local market stand that sells doughnuts doesn't, it sells only 1 item. OK, that's a choice made to make the game social and depart from simulating the real trade but I bet IRL you wouldn't get such a good rating from such a minimal menu!

Although Restaurant City really isn't intended as a serious simulation of a restaurant, it is interesting to note that it contains quite a lot of the rules that would make it work as such a tool. However, those critical missing rules, or rules deliberately suppressed to enhance game play, suddenly change it to giving a really quite unrealistic simulation. It's a point to remember - you've got to make your simulation complicated enough to make it work close enough to reality in order to be able to test things. And it's also worth remembering if you do change something, stress a condition, you need to consider if the results you get would translate to a real situation or if you're exposing a fracture line in the model. Most of the time they're valid and valuable, but you do need to remember they might not be!

University of Oxford Anthropology build

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:46:29 -0600

For most of this last quarter I've been working, on and off, on a build for the University of Oxford. A graduate student is using Second Life to look at memory and has had me build a load of display cases full of things to test what we remember.

Some of them are pictured here:

It will be interesting to see how they work out. There are a mix of "natural" and "non-natural" things - a ball that bounces off a wall or a ball that passes through a book for example. The idea is that the non-natural ones are easier to remember because they jar you into laying down that memory. Except, of course, those of us that are used to Second Life will look at a ball passing through a book and say "Oh, it's phantom" and treat it as "natural" (well normal for Second Life anyway).

I can't give a SLURL yet: although my part is essentially done, the surveys and tools for the actual research (happily not my side of this particular system, although certainly something I could do) are not set up yet, but look forward to an announcement soon.

Autoplay System upgraded

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:01:05 -0600

The autoplay system that I produce has just been upgraded in the light of some feedback.

To the existing system I have added two features:

Access control - determine who can touch the player and start it running. It defaults to all, but can be set to group only or owner only

Pause controls - you can either pause indefinitely or for a fixed time. Either pause can be overridden by an authorised person touching the display

What do these changes mean?

The existing system was designed really for unattended displays; even I sleep sometimes! You would set the system up and when people walked past they could touch it and it would read out the information on the card, present the pictures and the like. This system can still work exactly like that.

However, if you want to use the system as a "talker" at a lecture - to present your slides say, and read the script for those with hearing difficulties whilst you talk, or text, on other details, you probably want the presentation to stop until you're ready for the next slide, particularly if you engage your learners and have variable amounts of chat on each slide. This new system lets you do that too - the lecturer controls the slides and their advancement, and the talking can take place as you go. As an added bonus, although this system is relatively stupid (it won't scan for the next slide in order to save memory and give you a freer system) because the screen talks to the students after a new slide is shown (at least it does if you let it), the students have something to keep their attention whilst you and they wait for the slide to rez fully.

Because the old system is copy, no transfer I can only upgrade if you catch me online at a convenient time (i.e. not when I'm teaching or otherwise occupied) and I can come and see your system. Once I've seen that, I will happily replace it with the new system.

If you want to buy this new, it is for sale in all the usual places (in my picks), and via XStreetSL and Apez - you can find links at my products index page.

New Skills for Second Life content

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:41:13 -0600

There is now a page on assessment within Second Life in the Second Life Skills section of the EPED website which includes a couple of different assessment rubrics for student work in Second Life.

One is aimed more at assessing a traditional class which has some presentation of the work in Second Life. The other is aimed much more at a fully in-world assessment where the students create a fully interactive build and are assessed on all aspects of it. It also forms a useful check-list for educational builds of all types!

If you have comments, please feel free to add them in the comments here. If you would like to add additional content, let me know and I will add it for you.

Training at Solent University

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:58:37 -0600

Yesterday I provided a day of training at Solent University. At pretty much eight hours solid - I chatted and shared ideas over tea breaks and lunch as well as in the formal sessions - it was a long, long day, and my voice hasn't really recovered yet. It feels like my brain never will, although I know that will change.

There were some wonderfully chaotic moments. I had discussed in advance the areas I would be covering, which included and started with teaching. Owing to some last minute changes and other commitments none of the teaching staff who were attending could be there for the start of the day, so having said let's start here, suddenly there were no teachers to discuss it with! But, I'm adaptable and was more than able to throw the timetable away and I think that most of the contact time was useful for most of the attendees.

One thing that Solent University do, that I wish others that plan to use Second Life would do, is they include some official training time for their students. It's only an hour, but they have people that teach the students how to fly, how to teleport, how to IM, how to change their clothes, how to log in and so forth. Most universities give training on using the library, why don't they give training on using Second Life?

The people who provide that training are different to the main course lecturers. There was a tension between these two groups, because the lecturers obviously want their students able to use Second Life early, but the trainers were feeding back that perhaps it is too early and the students are still going "WTF is this university thing? What do I do?" and Second Life becomes lost in that confusion. We discussed the idea that the staff use Second Life to demonstrate things in class for a while, and then send the students for their training, telling them that they'll be using Second Life next week for their work. Whilst a small number of individual students were keen on using Second Life, and did some good project work in Second Life, quite a lot of them weren't motivated for the training and possibly struggled more than they might have done if they'd clearly understood why, and for what, they would be using Second Life.

An afternoon that had been intended to be split across scripting, building and texturing became largely a rather impromptu building class. Why? Most people there didn't pixel-push in any meaningful fashion so (unlike Nottingham for example, where they had three graphic designers in the training), an in-depth discussion of formats, pixel sizes and the like was probably not useful. In a building environment though, whipping out some good textures to show some of the tricks was a good use of time. Similarly, scripting was out of the window - people there were largely not interested in scripting and don't have a coding background. I whipped up a couple of scripts to help the library get some feedback from their dispensers and we discussed the limitations and powers of scripting in Second Life, and hooking it up to Moodle (Solent's VLE of choice) and other PHP/MySQL entities and the like, but other than that, it was very superficial.

However, everyone had fun creating prim objects and experimenting with them and seeing what could be done to some extent. As anyone that's tried to teaching building can tell you, two hours is far from long enough to let you acquire the experience to become a good builder, but everyone at least saw how to do something for themselves and got some idea of the skills involved. I finished, rather unexpectedly, demonstrating building in Second Life, and building a handbag. Although it's not a completely detailed set this parameter to that value type work through, I've written up creating this bag on my Second Life Skills pages and added a camera controls page too.

Individuals, or smaller groups sometimes, got some attention too, with time spent discussing their individual needs. I think I worked around everyone that way - I left my contact details and said I'm willing to offer some help over the coming weeks too. Some of that information should be obvious to most of the readers of this blog, things like if you need help the SLED mailing list is a good starting point, and googling their archives is even better. Some of the rest of it was so specific it's probably best not shared here.

A successful day though, and it will be interesting to see what Solent University and the Solent Life sims do in the next year. They are, to finish on another very positive note, evaluating their work over this last year and working out how to improve for next year. They've made, and acknowledged, their mistakes - but unlike a number of others who come, try it once and give up, they came with the expectation that it would take time, they would make mistakes as well as have their successes, and planning to be here for 2-3 years before deciding if they're going to cut their losses or build for even more students in the future strikes me as a very sensible way of exploring Second Life.

Three short comments

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:00:24 -0600

Three comments, because they're largely from elsewhere, that have crossed my desk and I want to both store here (and bookmark in Diigo of course) and share with other people that might not have seen the originals.

First up, remember the "dream job" advert - managing that nature reserve/island in Australia? I hadn't really thought about it, but as a commentary via Stephen Downes' blog points out not so long ago almost no-one would have been able to make the one minute video application, now it's a common skill although not one that you're necessarily taught. Don't we as educators need to change to support both the ability to create and the ability to study and critically evaluate this emerging communication medium?

Then a pair of comments about meetings in Second Life. One about why it sucks and one about why it rocks. These really need to be read together - although doubtless the detractors will read the first and say "See, it's terrible in there" and the fans will read the second and say "See, it's great"

One thing that really should be asked, though, and that is missed in this format of posting, is the comparison to other ways of running meetings. I don't believe there is a perfect solution - all ways of having meetings have their drawbacks and benefits. When thinking of running a meeting in Second Life, you shouldn't just assume it will be perfect, or terrible, you should compare the pros and cons to the other ways you can run the meeting. It would be interesting to see how often it comes out as a better place to have your meeting, and how many times it comes out worse. But it will be the right answer sometimes.

Quizzes on graphs, data capture and more

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:18:01 -0700

If you're a biologist you might recognise the shape of these graphs in a shot. If you're an endocrinologist or a reproductive biologist or similar I would hope that you do. The curves show the cycle of hormones in a normal menstrual cycle.

As becomes more obvious when you follow the big red arrow and squint at those few sandy, blue and tanned pixels at the bottom - they're DrDoug Pennell standing talking to me (if you squint really hard you can see a few pale pixels that are me, but my dress blends almost perfectly into the platform we're on) - these are the hormone graphs writ huge.

This is the latest highly visible project I've delivered in Second Life™ and it is a project that combines the ability to stand back and look at the graphs (which are hosted inside a giant ovary along with other materials to support DrDoug's teaching, location to be announced later, when he has finished building) with an ability to explore the graphs up close and personal as you walk/fly along their tracks and ideally take part in the quiz en route. What is not obvious in this picture, is that near where we're standing is a start button. Pressing the start button will make the graphs vanish and show the starting quiz question on each of the four hormone routes. Answer correctly and the quiz panel vanishes, the next section of track appears and you can walk along it to the next question. Complete all the questions and reach the end, race your friends... have fun.

There's more here than meets the eye - if you want to know some of the problems and solutions keep an eye open for an update to the Eloise Pasteur Educational Designs project pages coming soon.

This hasn't been all I've been doing since my last post about my work, but I've been working on a number of activity capture systems. Things that record where avatars spend time, what they touch and the like. It's good bread-and-butter work, but it makes for very dull pictures - here's a script I've been working on, here's another script... and fairly dull reporting, because once it's got this long, you've got the whole report. I've also been working with Ramapo on the Teen Grid but the work there is also, so far, unphotogenic - a security system that is part of the school's requirement to keep students out unless teachers are present.

Over the next few weeks, there are some interesting projects on the way. They're varied in size and impact mind. I'll be making a ruler to test numeracy skills and let people practise that skill, making yet another quiz tool, and making some magic tricks. More on these as they roll off the line.

Memory game/Pelmanism game released

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:26:21 -0600

Today, from Eloise Pasteur Educational Designs, a memory game/pelmanism game tool. This game is set up to be easy to use, and easy to alter.

It uses one texture per pair of cards, so there's no messing around with texture sheets if you want to change a texture or two. It is also modifiable, and the script will cope with more or less than the 24 cards it comes with as standard.

It gives you a simple option to record the number of turns taken each time, and there's a simple option to change the back of the cards if you don't like my picture (although it will default back to this texture - a girl's got to advertise after all!).

If you'd like to read the help card, that's available on my wiki. Feedback is via Get Satisfaction or in-world if you can catch me, and you can buy this game through On Rez, SLExchange or all the usual places in-world.

The power of design?

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:16:45 -0600

Channel 4, a UK-based TV station that specialises in slightly off-beat television, has just completed a short series looking at the potential of urban design to regenerate a declining town. The town they chose was Castleford (hereafter Cas) a roman settlement that had been a thriving mining town until the 1980's when the government of the time more or less destroyed the mining industry. Cas was dying where it stood: the city centre was abandonned, the out of town shopping centre getting all the trade, the open spaces were the home of vandals and drug users and most young people with any get up and go, were getting up and going somewhere else to get work.

Channel 4 themselves put up a small amount of money, and the council, Yorkshire Forward (the Regional Development Agency - a government agency with funds to develop or redevelop anywhere in Yorkshire) and similar agencies put up a much larger amount of money - about £12 million ($25 million) to develop Cas with several aims:

To attract yet more money from commercial ventures to re-engage the economic heartbeat of the town

To strengthen and rebuild community spirit within the town or the parts of the town

This was to be done through the transformative power of design - a grand phrase that kept being rolled off the tongue. The designers were, supposedly, brought in to work with the citizens of Cas as the clients, to listen to community champions and deliver great design based around the needs and wants of the community. In practise:

One project had a designer that was parachuted in and took all the decisions and imposed her will;

Two projects had the Town Council as the client;

Three projects had partnerships between the designers and the community that worked fairly well, if not always smoothly from the offset;

One project had a very strong community champion who largely imposed his will on the designers.

Sliced another way there were:

An essential footbridge joining an island in the Aire to the town centre,

Three parks,

The city centre/market,

An foot underpass into the city centre,

A residential area in a small area

Was the concept a success? It is too early to tell for the medium to long term, but the investment has introduced a further £200 million (about $0.5 billion) of commercial investment and lot of new industry has moved into the area. From that point of view, a definite success. The building of communities has been patchier - it would appear that all the projects with strong community engagement, even where they, not to put too fine a point on it, flung the designers' concept out in the rubbish, have developed fairly strong community roots. One of those supported by the council seems to be well liked, the other has been an improvement but could have been much, much more. The design from the parachuted in designer is not well liked. Its strongest supporter, the only person willing to be interviewed about it at the end of the 5 year development cycle was of the opinion "'S alight I s'pose" - talk about damning with faint praise.

Perhaps we shouldn't really be that shocked that community regeneration worked best where the community was involved. I think it would be fair to say that the three projects where the community and designers worked well together were the best three projects of the lot by just about any metric (except possibly attracting external money, although in proportion I suspect they probably got great returns for the money invested in them). The fourth project, where the designers were essentially chucked aside managed to move on and attract significant additional funding to extend the theme the community chose through that area of town and also worked well. It was far from cutting-edge radical modern design, but it did the job it was intended to do. The council got one partially wrong (the one that they interfered in) and one largely right (ironically the one where they let the designer run free). The last project, the one where the designer was given free rein was, you would suggest, by far the worst of the projects.

There's a point to all of this beyond reviewing the series, entertaining though that this. In Second Life™ I work in a design process, building, terraforming, scripting and the like. Whether you're working with me, or with another designer, you need to be prepared to work with them. Designers, if given completely free rein, deliver what they like, not what you like. It may be wonderful, but if you don't like it, you will feel you've wasted your money. But, in a good relationship the designers can take what you like and improve it, make it more than you thought at first, so throwing the designer's work out completely is probably not the way forward either. Of course changing design in Second Life is far cheaper and easier than changing design in real life - the poor designer working on the underpass had to wait for someone else to find the £500,000 to fit a new underpass, and then pray that they could install it on Christmas Day and Boxing Day when the train lines that ran over it would be empty - a challenge we don't face in Second Life. But you still want the best from your money don't you?

As a complete aside, I would say that probably the town centre was the worst bit of design that came to pass - although the original plans from the designers were much more interesting. The park where the designer ran riot was ugly. It was certainly transformative, but it left a nasty park behind. The modern design for the underpass looked great while the modern design for the residential district (that was thrown out) might have worked, but I'm not sure it worked with the existing housing whereas the design from the champions did. The other two parks were great, but very different, and the bridge was (and is, I've seen it in real life) beautiful and really is an example of just what can be done if you get the right people in the right places. But, they're based on my tastes which is why I left this part until the end.

Scorecard/Game scorer tool

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:13:04 -0600

I was asked if I made a scorer tool and the answer was, sadly, a no. So, I made one. I quite often make things in this way - simple requests for items that are generally useful so I stop and make them and sell them at Linden Dollar prices.

This score system features:

You, or a nominated scorer, can easily keep track of scores in games and contests up to 999.
The colours can be set to any of white, red, blue, green, yellow, cyan and purple. This affects the front and top of the panel as well as the colour of the numbers.
There are three different scoring buttons so you can set different scores easily. This will handle penalties scores too.
There is a system to let you nominate the scorer so the owner can play games without affecting the scores directly.
The scorecard is copy and modify so you can resize to your hearts content, apply logos to the sides and fronts if required etc. You can rez as many as you like - one per team maybe, or different scorers at different places for different games.

This tool is available in world in all the normal places, and on SLEx and OnRez

The Get Satisfaction page for feedback is up too.

Two new items (with lots of packs) for sale

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:54:51 -0600

Today I have managed to put up for sale two new items.

Item one is a texture organiser HUD. It features:

49 possible categories of textures
7 X 7 display area
Easy to use
Name Categories
Simple Hide/Show function, works for any HUD position with basic building knowledge
Powerful search tools for phrases within words, at the start of words and across all categories
Zoom mode shows tiling as well as larger texture
Accidental delete prevention: you will be offered copies of deleted textures and categories in case you click the button by mistake
Options to display category names and texture names
De-duplicate tool
Sculpty display tool
Retrieve texture key (UUID) tool for scripters
Delete textures that are not full perms
HUD is provided as copy/modify (although the scripts are all no-modify)
Built in update tools

You can read more about this tool at my wiki page and soon in my products section. This organiser is ideal for the serious texture user: builder, photographer etc. as it allows easy access to so many categories. It is also suited for the educational user who can group student work or separate projects easily as they prefer. This item costs L$1000.

Also released is the long awaited movie screen and HTML-on-a-prim screen with category storage. This system allows you to custom create up to 8 categories of movies or 7 of movies and 1 of webpages and by simple to use controls access any movie or webpage saved to your bookmarks. There are access controls so you can create stand alone screens for asynchronous viewing or control the screen personally in a classroom setting. You can read more about this screen on my wiki too. This comes in 3 different sizes (4m X 3m, 10m X 7.5m and 20m X 15m) and in multi-packs at a 10% discount to the single pack price of L$500.

These items are available from all the normal outlets:

Thank you to all my beta testers!