Losing Sleep

So the other day I decided to try out Second Life (SL), here is the Wikipedia article. It was a mostly good, interesting experience although there were some graphics issues that spoiled it a bit for me. I’ll review SL in this blog post and then give a few ideas for how it could be applied to libraries, although I don’t have too many ideas.

First off I should let you know what kind of system I was running SL on. I have an iBook G4 1.2 GHz with 1.25 GB RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics card with 32MB VRAM. I do meet the MINIMUM system requirements but not necessarily the recommended system requirements.

So I went to the (SL) site and clicked the “get an account” button. I had to fill out the usual info (name, email, age, “I agree to terms of service,” etc…) the one thing that I was a little annoyed about is that you could type in a first name for your avatar, but then had to choose from a list of last names. I don’t really understand why you can’t just type in a last name rather then choosing from some preselected names… If anybody knows why please let me know. When I was done I downloaded a 50MB file. When it was done, I dragged the application into my apps folder and fired up SL.

SL came up just fine and I logged in with no problems. The first place that I popped up was a place called “orientation island.” It was pretty straight forward, there is a path to follow with signs and little floating green hand icons along the way. The hand icons say “click me.” When you click one, they give you a little pop up text window that tells you how to do different stuff in SL. All in all the orientation worked out really well. I got my bearings and my SL legs (so to speak) and I was on my way.

I should note here that there were a bunch of other people around me also getting acquainted with second life. When you first create your account you can choose from several different basic avatars. Once you log in you can go the edit->appearance and actually edit the way that your avatar looks. Most of the people around me were doing this. I have to admit that I was impressed with the apearance editor. There was a LOT of stuff you could do with it although it seemed to take a long time to load each charactistic. I edited my avator to look somewhat like me and then I proceeded through the orientation.

Getting around in Second Life and doing stuff is fairly easy. The arrow keys move your avatar, holding option while clicking allowed you to look at stuff, holding control while clicking an object allowed you to manipulate objects with a matrix like telekenetic power (remember, there is no spoon). It’s kinda of funny, when you control click an object your avatar actually points his hand at the object and a magical stream of translucent… magic… shoots out of the avatar’s hand and raises the object off of the ground. (size matters not). Did I mention that you can fly? There is a fly button, you click it and your avatar spreads its arms and raises off the ground, you still control movement with the arrow keys, moving is just much faster.

Once I got to the end of orientation island I entered a “transporter” and ended up on help island. At this point I was ready to go do some exploring, so I opened the map (there is a map that gives you an overview of the SL world and allows you to search for places) and searched for library. I actually got a list of several library locations but the one I was looking for was info island, so I selected it and hit “teleport” (you can do that too). I instantly appeared at the library. The place seemed deserted. There seemed to be two to three other people someplace on the island (according to the map) but I couldn’t see them. I wandered around a bit and another visitor approached me and said hi. “She” (let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and say it really was a woman. She was wearing a female avatar… although the name was sexually ambigous, “Sam”.) turned out to be a college student who’s professor had talked about SL and how there were colleges that were offering classes in SL. (I’d like to mention that anytime somebody is typing a message, the avatar “air types”, like air guitar only with a keyboard.) We “talked” a bit and then I had to get off line to do some homework.

All in all it was a good experience.
The Bad: The graphics seemed to take a long time to load. When I first appeared in a place, the “world” would apper as sort of abrstract shapes. As time passed, the shapes would fill and eventually you would have a 3D world, but it took awhile. The graphics in general seemed choppy with low frame rates. I messed around with the video preferences but they didn’t seem to really make any difference on my machine. If anybody knows how to set preferences for my machine to get a smoother experience, please let me know. Would I get back on SL again? Yes, I would if I had something to do there, I might go back to explore a bit more but I don’t see myself spending much more time in there.

How could libraries use SL?

This is a tough one. If a library wanted to use SL they would have to make some pretty big assumptions. they would have to assume that there users have a computer and that the computer is powerful enough to run SL smoothly. Some people might get fed up with the graphic hinderances and just give up. The library also has to assume that the user has an internet connection that is fast enough for SL and that the user is computer savvy enough to figure out how to use SL. It’s one thing to get people to use blogs, flickr, wikis, IM, etc… SL is a different kind of story, there is spacial reasoning involved and a certain amount of 3D video game literacy that is needed to navigate the SL world and interact with it. This might be a real stretch for some users.

After you get past all that stuff, a library could set up a virtual space in SL for people to visit and interact. Perhaps a librarian could be staffed there working SL reference while working real world reference at the same time, they would have to switch between the two. It would make great PR. I suppose you could have virtual terminals in SL that would give you access to the libraries catalog (I don’t know if that is possible in SL) or other reference sources. Then again a user could just go onto the libraries website and use the catalog there. The library could ask authors to do virtual visits to their SL space where patrons could go and have chats with the author.

I’m not sure exactly how this technology could be used by libraries. Anybody have any ideas?