Second Life

10/10/22

Week 1

This week was our first introductory week to Second Life. Our lecturer Dr.O’Connor assigned us with a task to download the game onto our devices and develop our profiles along with our characters.

I managed to log in a little before class, so I had some time to play around with character development. I enjoyed the fact that there were plenty options already available such as clothing pieces, gestures and other accessories present in the inventory. I chose the outfit I liked most and headed upstairs in the TUD base house. I was greeted by Dr.O’Connor, he instructed me to sit down on one of the available seats in the room, which originally posed as a challenge, but I figured it out after trying several attempts. We waited approximately 30 minutes for everyone to arrive and get settled. Then the class commenced.

Dr.O’Connor introduced himself to everybody and told us a bit about the Virtual Environment course. How it will be run and what the assessments consist of. He let us know that we will be meeting and working alongside Turkish students next week, which I found very intriguing.

When the class finished, I went ahead and explored a few different locations I thought might be interesting. Japan – Hiroba, Firestorm Gateway,

I think I found Hiroba to be the most interesting location I have visited as it contained many objects and props from games that I enjoy, such as the King Boo from the Super Mario games, as well as interactable objects such as mountable horses. The area was nicely laid out. There was an accessible Ferris wheel which I decided to get on which was interesting. This location allows you to build, so I attempted to do and managed to figure out how to place shapes, move them and rotate them on the grid but I could not figure out how to make the object larger.

Character Development

Firestorm Gateway resembled a natural park with several interesting attributes. It had a landing strip with several different planes, I tried to use one of them and received a notecard with instructions but unfortunately, they were hard to interpret, and I never successfully took off. They had an area with many free items, so I decided to take a few and update my character. This area also had a circle of labelled teleport portals that you can use to travel to another area.

I felt like gathering more free items to see what things I have not come across, so I decided to go into the portal labelled Freebies & Shopping, there I got the general idea of how transactions work. The area also had a corner with different animal species which I thought was intriguing.