LL Has Seen the Light

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

For those that may be interested

here is a link to videos

of some of the presentations at the VWBPE conference. 

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Thanks, Amethyst! I'll check 'em out later.

[Ceera Murakami]

The Rutgers Opensim grid is, for the most part, a realistic reproduction of several of their campus sites.

The largest one reproduced there - 12 sims or 15, I can't recall off-hand which - is their Livingston campus, and a lot of the builds I made there were architectural models of both existing buildings, walkways and roads, and proposed additions, such as a parking lot with solar panels built into a set of carport-like roofs over the cars in the lot.

A smaller one is their "Old Queens" campus - their oldest school site, and the 5 main buildings of that site fit in a single sim. In that sim is a detailed replica of a chapel that is at the real campus, and the details are accurate down to the stained glass in the windows and the portraits of former school presidents on the walls.

They also have a faithful reproduction of their football stadium, which I built. They use it as a sandbox for building and scripting classes, as well as a competition field for virtial games of several types.

They use the sims for "Rutgers Day" events, where students, family members, and potential students from all over the world can visit the virtual campus and interact with people at the real world campuses. For example, they could visit the "Old Queens" campus, go to the original school house, and ring the bell. They could even go into the attic and ring the bel from up there, and watch it ringing in the cupola on the roof. They can chat with professors and students at the real campus. They can visit the Livingston campus and see what it will look like when the new Student Union building and cafeteria are completed, and when several new dorms have been built.

They also use the sims for classroom training. They have classes in programming where the students gather at the virtual stadium and do LSL programming experiments. They have an orientation course that teaches people how to use the virtual world, and which also doubles and a lab experiment to study how people learn new tasks.

At one point, they were talking about making a 20-sim or larger reproduction of downtown New Brunswick, NJ, to serve as an architectural model for a downtown renovation plan that the university campus was a major participant in. It was to have a transit mall that serverd downtown, as well as several new campus buildings that were either already in the area or that would be renovated or built as part of the plan. The cost to create the virtual model was quite competitive with the cost of an architect's paper model, but could be viewed by people all over the world. That was the huge in-world plan that got scrapped when LL eliminated the education discounts last time. I don't know if they ever did that project on their own grid yet.