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The Second Life Hypermedia - A brief explanation. The Second Life Hypermedia is a self-generated conversation about the world of Second Life, its possibilities and its flaws. It's a compilation of texts written by students at the School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
1. Introduction to Second Life Second Life is an online world inspired by the “Metaverse” defined by Neal Stephenson in the 1995 science fiction novel “Snow Crash”. The world of Second Life consists of the “main land” and an archipelago of private islands surrounding it. There are three ways a user can travel through Second Life; on foot, flying or by teleporting to different locations. Vehicles can be constructed or bought but are not very useful for travel. Instead they function mostly as toys to the residents of Second Life. Perhaps the most characteristic feature of Second Life is it’s economy. Everything in Second Life can be bought or sold. Especially land. Some people actually make their living (in real life) by buying and selling objects, scripts animations and land. The way everything in Second Life is privately owned is an important part of the in-world culture. In short, people tend to be very protective of their possessions (objects, land, avatar). The creation and usage of these objects becomes the purpose of most Second Life activity (other popular activities include; sex, role-playing, sitting in chairs, conversations, sex and... Oh, did I mention sex?). The first impression of Second Life could roughly be described as MTV gone wild, with people looking like be Beyonce and living like Beyonce. Except they have bigger breasts and a much bigger TV. For more information on Second Life and it’s history see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life
2. Object creation, generation and interaction "A building in Second Life has the possibility to fly or move; still most of the houses are covered with a wooden texture and stand still on the ground. Instead of designing a world according to the possibilities of the virtual, the users of Second Life has created a copy of the Globe. The architecture of Second Life is surprisingly ordinary." (Moa Andrén)
"What is the purpose of secondlife? Is it to interact with other people, to make money or to just have fun? The most amusement I could find was to play wargames with some of my friends. War is fun but the consequences are often bad, but in a world where everything is possible let's keep the fun and make the bad in to something good." (Anders Berenson)
"'Remember me?' is a structure made out of several nodes. They form their own opinions. If you would visit perhaps some of them would like you, perhaps some would not. The nodes are tied together by memory. They all observe and react individually but their memory is shared. At some point within the life of a collective memory, its history is forgotten. Exactly who told someone what does no longer matter. An opinion has been formed out of the memory and a complex story becomes reduced to a simple matter of true or false, to: "Like" or "don't like". Reduced to an impulsive shrug upon shaking a hand, to the tingling in you spine. "The virus architecture consists of a space-producing bracelet, providing free architecture and a solution for avatars who want to change the world without owning it.
A more detailed text concearning the Linden Scripting Language (Rutger Sjögrim)
"We both searched for a space that could be used by a group of people who needed it for reaching out with information and meet the people interested in their subject. They also want a place for having discussions, events and just meeting spontaneously. These needs can be translated into different modes of architecture that could be unfolded just like the system of cores in a grid. The basic core will directly give the visitor information about the group, the place, events going on and links out to the real world. The next mode is activated when more than two people are interacting with each other in the place. This third mode is activated by the person responsible for the event/meeting and is in constant change due to the theme of it. Using scripts objects and environments in SL can easily be changed due to the situation." (Sanna Ridderstolpe/ Jessica Strandell)
3. Architectural representation within Second Life "I have studied typical elements of architecture like lighting design, floors and entrance of museums examples in real life.
"Is it possible to create rooms that stretch the imagination of how you normally apprehend space in Second Life? I also want to make the Avatars participate in the experience in the sense that they in different ways can see themselves in the mirrors. As inspiration I intend to examine reference projects of architects in real life that use mirrors, like Dan Graham, Jean Nouvel and Adolf Loos." (Jenny Eldrot) "Even though much of the architecture and landscape looks similar to that of real life, in SL the appearence of the built environment fulfills other functions; as a backdrop or scenery to the events taking place, they represent images of known environments, helping to create a familiar ambiance. Just as in real life, SL has ruling aestetic values, and just as in real life, the origins of these are not always clear, and sometimes a bit dubious.
"The representation of form in SL is what you might see as only textures, impressions and no function. The appearance of the representation of objects and space is recognizable to us from real life. You find normal houses with a kitchen and a toilet, beautiful garden or a sand beach and a sail boat. The behaviour of the representation is freer than real life since it can loose gravity, become non solid and objects can respond and act by a script.
"Why? Because the basic principles for architecture are founded on the 'pre sets' of the world; the scale of the human body, our ways and means of transportation, the centerpoint of our visual reception an so on. These pre sets are fundamentally different in the metaverses, but also different in between the different metaverses available to us today. Our research today is showing that the exterior of the building is often not the major problem in the architectonic transition, but for the interior spaces, it is very difficult to recreate their experience." (Studio Unreal) "The first shape experiment was a collection of floating platforms surfaced with a plan of a ground floor or a picture. Another design idea was a very airy cubic framework with coloured boards." (Helge Lamnek)
4. First Life - Second Life interaction/overlap "How could Second Life be used as a tool for producing performance? An existing institution, The Modern Dance Theater in Stockholm, has been launched in Second Life. Two dimensional visuals representing three dimensional virtual space becomes the interface between two worlds. MDT Second Life aims to explore space through performance." (MDT) "If the space is shaped and coloured by projections from Second Life, the visitor can get a feeling of the ephermability of the virtual world. You experience stepping into a cocoon where an overlap of the worlds takes place. The space will change depending on who and what is in Second Life at that specific moment. The idea that the virtual world will get the opportunity to create a space within the physical world for a limited amount of time. Can the space in real life become an in-between world?" (Rocky Horror Crew) "How can Second Life be used as a tool for producing performance? The economy of producing powerful spatial effects in Second Life is efficient compared to the cost of producing spatialities in First Life. The virtual audience come from all over the world and is anonymous. They are more likely to interact and participate in a production than the First Life audience. Incorporating and activating a virtual audience into a production therefore became interesting." (MDT)
"The virtual world is constantly becoming more and more a part of our everyday lives. Today we spend a large amount of our time in the virtual world. The internet and computer games effect and take up more and more of our lives. With Second Life a world has been created which is more or less a copy of our physical world but in a virtual form.
"The relation between Real Life and Second Life is also weak. These people who try to live intense lives in the parallel world are usually thought not to have first lives, to try to find there what they cannot achieve in the real world because of their social incapability, but then again, what makes some real life's better than that? What makes something REAL? The connection usually fails in both ways then and the two worlds are quite isolated." (Pablo Muñoz)
"What happens when this virtual version of the world meets the actual physical world? What happens when these two worlds overlap? What happens when you can be in both worlds at the same time? How will Second Life be affected by the physical world suddenly appearing? How will the physical world be affected by Second Life appearing in a larger scale? What happens if the anonymity of the virtual world disappears?" (Rocky Horror Crew)
"It is getting harder than ever to tell where reality stops and SL begins. After all, just about anything you can do in real life you can do in pixels, The avatar I created, Landard Swot is by nature skeptical about most matters. Instead of spending further time wandering around alone Landard set up a mission to investigate the the actual limits of this mad game, and doing a close up of the physical threshold between first life and second life. He is from now on an under cover agent with a mission to criticize this virtual world.
On Friday 16 of february Landard Swots short life tragically came to a sudden end.
It is known that he had thoughts of another life outside of SL that suited him better but this was not at all a suicide, on the contrary he was robbed his rights to live by a vicious and ruthless avatar acting on rules set up by inhabitants of the Isle. The power of the handgun was instant and Landard left the SL seconds after he was shot. "We found one unique tendency that almost every architecture student referred to when they did the presentations of their architecture projects in SL at KTH "Second life Lab". It is the connection between Second Life and Real Life. And we know that every architects care about relationship between inside and outside of architecture, private and public obviously, when they design real architecture in real life. From this point of view we could say that SL-architecture exists between SL and RL. SL-Architecture is defined only by the action. We should forget phrase by famous architect "Form follows function"." (Studio Unreal)
Building: "A building in Second Life has the possibility to fly or move; still most of the houses are covered with a wooden texture and stand still on the ground. Instead of designing a world according to the possibilities of the virtual, the users of Second Life has created a copy of the Globe. The architecture of Second Life is surprisingly ordinary." (Moa Andrén) "A new type of room must be invented. Still it is RL people using SL and we need RL symbols to understand a situation and be able to interact." (Sanna Ridderstolpe/ Jessica Strandell) "Neither the information nor the movement in Second Life is often had in mind when designing buildings or wanting to communicate something." (Pablo Muñoz) "In SL you are not trapped in a body and you are constantly able to move around your self and the environment in different viewpoints. The construction of rooms does not take advantage of this and builds a world looking like RL that is complicated to move around in and creates a lot of irritation." (Sanna Ridderstolpe/ Jessica Strandell) The result is often not what you could wish for, and most times these directly transferred buildings are a real disaster to experience for your avatar." (Studio Unreal) "Even though a new type of system of structuring space is needed it is still real life people who use SL and we need real life symbols to understand a situation. In a world without limitations like gravity, climate, basic needs for food and sleep, where you can fly as well as walk and teleport your self wherever, more then anywhere this is a place where we need to use traditional symbols to know how to interact." (Sanna Ridderstolpe/ Jessica Strandell) Interactivity: "Regarding the actual meeting of worlds; the physical world has such a strong presence that the virtual world always becomes something secondary. With the experiment of an event simultaneously in two worlds the actual event taking place in front of you will always produce the strongest experience." (Rocky Horror Crew) "The virtual online platform has a range of possibilities that could enrich a production in First Life." (MDT) "The difference is that this world is floating on top of and inside of our own world with the physical distances abolished." (Rocky Horror Crew) "It is getting harder than ever to tell where reality stops and SL begins." (Gunnar Lindstedt) "We realized that it is rather hard for people to take in too much at the same time. Instead of taking in the chaos and letting go of focus and control, people seem to choose one part of the chaos and concentrate on that." (Rocky Horror Crew)
General Thoughts: "The social norms and controls are not as present in Second Life, which is very liberating." (Rocky Horror Crew) "A great possibility of the virtual architecture is the possibility of rapid changes." (Moa Andrén) "The most amusement I could find was to play wargames with some off my friends." (Anders Berenson) "You are yourself but only if you want to." (Karin Matz)
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