VRprofessor

Of course the hot new tech will get lots of attention and a the kids who always have the cool new toys will have them. But whether they catch on or not will depend on what they actually allow you to do. It would be cool if they found some useful applications. Maybe something in science education? Surgery? Inspection of bridges? Those would be great. All I can imagine is specialty apps that won't result in widespread usage. But I have a stunted imagination.

As a relative newb, and someone who brought 30 college student newbs into SL during the past school year I'll add my $L5 to the conversation, largely echoing what others have already said. College students, in general, and mine in particular, are not easy to turn into long-time users. They come in world for class assignments which makes them averse to the environment to begin with. Add in the fact that they are generally surrounded with RL social opportunities on campus and why would they hang out in SL? The purpose of my SL assignments it to get students thinking about life in virtual spaces. To gain some experience living in a virtual world. From my students I did hear a small amount of grumbling about lag and difficulty with the interface, but that was completely and totally overwhelmed by the question "what do we do here?" A fair question since I had asked them to spend some amount of time in world doing whatever they liked so that they could navigate by the time we held our first in world class. With one exception all of the students have abandoned their accounts--only the one exception has logged on in the 6.5 months since class ended. Several deleted their accounts within a day or two of completing the course requirements. For my purposes students don't need to become fully attached to SL, they just need to have enough personal experience to more fully understand the academic readings that I give them. Two things stood out from observing my students. Q&A sessions with oldbies I enlisted to help me went well and the students learned a lot--more than they had from their personal experiences in a few weeks. Last year the Q&A sessions were late in the unit--last day or second to last day. A couple of my oldbies were getting frustrated trying to describe some aspect of SL and asked if they could take my students on a short tour of places they, the oldbies, liked. Of the 12 students that went touring 6 or 7 returned, voluntarily, that evening to tour around some more. The oldbie lead tours were the best SL experience my students had. Sadly it was a day or two before finals and my students didn't return after that. The exception? She was "adopted" by a couple of oldbies shortly after entering. They helped her get some decent freebie cloths and showed her a couple of places to go that she might enjoy. The lesson? If you don't know what to do in SL, you won't know what to do. Game worlds have specific tasks and goals for you to accomplish right away. SL is whatever you want it to be--but most people don't know what they want when they enter SL. Someone needs to direct you to SL stuff you might want to do. This thread and the one on SLU are full of good suggestions for helping newbies find interesting things to do in SL or the help they need. The viewer help menu only gives me items that were covered on welcome island. For the first time in ages I went to an info hub yesterday, clicked on the sigh that promised helpful videos only to be told by my browser that the link wasn't valid. With no obvious correction I gave up. Unless a newbie runs into a helpful person, or has enough experience to start reading forums like this one, they are lost. Unless they find something they want to do fairly quickly, they are gone. I hope rodvik et al take a serious look at some of the suggestions that have been made that will help connect newbies to SL. Some will work for more folks, some for less. Follow Google's lead, implement new approaches for a relatively small random sample (say 5%) of those signing up and see what happens after 30 - 60 days.

I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one who noticed that this was soley a corporate action, not a government action. No government intrusion here. This is corporations acting together to protect corporate interests.

Attention to the customers does need to be included on the Tao, but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the philosophy IF you have the right mix of workers. As someone else noted some really important areas seem to appeal to no one currently working at LL, so they don't get addressed. LL needs to find someone (or two or three) who adore various aspects of customer service and find it fun and rewarding to improve those services. I am certain such people exist. If the company is full of coders who want to go on to the next cool thing they are lacking the folks who are bug killing experts. Folks who take joy in uncovering and repairing flawed code. When folks are allowed to persue their own strengths and interests it is management's job to ensure that there is a good mix of strengths and interests among the employees. If you hire nothing but visionary coders who are looking for the next cool feature, you will certainly have a growing body of buggy code. And when you do get around to hiring exterminators, and those with other interests, it is management's job to ensure that everyone understands the symbiotic relationship among employees. Bug killers need to be celebrated for making visionary code better rather than despised for finding flaws in other peoples' work. And the bug killers need to celebrate the coders who give them code worth debugging. Most of those doing the work they love do not need to have specific concern for the customer. If management hires the right mix of people who all do what they love, the symbiosis will result in a superior customer experience. Consider a small bakery with 3 people working there. If all are skilled bakers, who love what they do, but grumble every time their baking is interrupted to wait on a customer, the shop will soon be full of baked goods and no customers. The bakery goes out of business. Now add one sales person to the mix (fire one of the bakers or add a 4th person, I don't care). Someone who loves selling baked goods to people. Someone who not only understands good customer service, but enjoys providing it. Now the bakery flourishes and grows. The bakers get to continue doing what they love, the sales person does what they love, and the customers are happy. With the right mix of people all doing what they love, the Tao gives a superior customer experience. With the wrong mix of people, the company folds.

An undergraduate "dissertation?" Never heard of such a thing. Thesis, yes. Find a professor with an interest in the topic who can direct you to the relevant research or at least tell you how to go about doing a literature review. Asking questions on message boards is fun, but it isn't research in any meaningful sense of the word. Start with some background reading on the topic. There is a lot of research that has already been completed on this topic. Try searching "virtual identity" or "virtual self" to get get started. Check Swann, W.B., Jr. & Bosson, J. (2010). Self and Identity. Chapter prepared for S.T. Fiske, D.T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed; 589-628), New York: McGraw-Hill. for a nice overview on the current state of identity theory. You might also want to check your university library for an introduction to Social Psychology which will give you a more introductory and digestable overview of identity theory. My original virtual world recommendation is a bit too dense for undergrads. I'll have to look for something more appropriate.

I can play in my garage. I can play in my garden. Neither my garage or garden is a game. I can play games on my dining room table. My dining room table is not a game-it is a space that supports game play when I wish to use it that way. When people come into SL looking for a game, they are expecting a set of rules and objectives. Instead they log on, get instructed on how to move, use their camera, and chat. They leave Welcome Island and wonder what the objective of this "game" is since they have reached the point where in a game they would be given an objective. SL is a space, or if you prefer place. Like my dining room table it is a space that has many uses, game play being among them. I appreciate the posters who gently tell the newbies that SL is not really a game, although there are games that can be played. Being overly harsh on the point is going to be counter-productive. But if the newbie keeps searching for ways to score points and level up they are going to be disappointed--best to move them on to something else before they start bad-mouthing SL and chasing away people who would actually enjoy the place.

I looked up specs for the 530 gpu vs the HD 4000 (what I think is built into the third gen i5 chip). Do not bother to spend the money on a 530 card...it is not going to run on ultra. The passmark numbers for three chips are: HD 4000: 614 GT 530: 748 GTX 550 ti: 1886 Given my experience, and the experience of others reported on this forum, with the 550 card there is no way the 530 card is going to routinely give you any better than med level graphics in SL.

Don't know why, but when this happened to me a couple of months ago someone advised clearning out my cache. I did and it seems to have worked. C:\Users\<local user name>\AppData\Local\SecondLife

Hi, I took a look at some benchmark numbers (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/mid_range_gpus.html) and you won't be getting great performance from any of these computers. The couple of benchmarks I looked at were pretty close and likely don't represent any noticable difference in the real world. On the intel side I am pretty sure that the i3/i5 second gen cpu is what you want. I have run SL for a very few minutes, on an i3 with results that you apparently would find satisfactory. I have no experience with the AMD chips in a laptop so I cannot speak to those.

I like what you've done. I especially like the photos modeling some of the freebies. Is there any chance you, or someone else, would be willing to do something similar with a male avatar? I read rather quickly, so I could be mistaken, but I don't think you did anything specific with freebie shapes/skins. That would be a nice addition. Actually skins/shapes could be an entire post all by itself.

I think I saw a $L1 basic AO at vista. Been meaning to go back and check to be sure, but maybe you want to take a look and save me the trouble?

I just want to know where OP found the chart. I spent several hours looking for one of those and never did find it.

A classroom I can help you with. The police chief, well, I don't have a clue. What is your goal?

A lot depends on what your friends need. I took a second, slow, deliberate, walk through of one of the welcome islands when I was about 3 months old and actually learned a good deal. NCI has classes: http://nci-sl.info/education/Schedule.pdf or https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=nciclassesandevents@gmail.com&ctz=America/Los_Angeles&gsessionid=OzcfA2SQNgb9z-68wiRwCA but as already mentioned, these aren't great for the most basic of beginners. The destinations-->newcomers menu has links to at least three places that have instructional posters--White Tiger, Fairy Crossing, and Caledon. If you can navigate welcome island you can navigate any of these. There are a couple of other newbie instructional destinations that I don't think are included in the destinations link, but I have been meaning to put them into a notecard for students so if you IM me that would serve as a reminder to me and get me moving. Thinkerer's website also has some good stuff for newbs. I can't find a link right now, but I expect he'll show up and provide one before too long.

Google search "mental health" "Second life" and you should find a few things that will help you avoid reinventing the wheel.

When I look at the mirror in RL the guy who looks back at me is much too old. In SL I choose to look my felt age rather than my chronological age. Why shouldn't I look how I feel?

More good stuff. I have a second gen i5 system built on a z68 motherboard with 8gb RAM. I am already booting from an SSD using large hard drives for mass storage. My plan is to move music and videos over to a networked RAID drive using the 2x 2TB drives currently in my system. My SSD is already half full so I don't want to think about using it for SL caching. Hence the interest in a new hard drive for limited local storage. As I said earlier I generally like bigger & faster, but I am also frugal. I will spend money on things that make a difference, but dislike spending money on things that really won't matter. So, what I think I am being told is that SATA 3.0gbs exceeds the write speed of all but the fastest platter drives so no point spending $ on SATA 6gbs. A 5400/5900/7200 RPM drive will make little difference, so get the size I want at best cost. Maybe add some RAM and use a RAM drive while running SL. Learn how to enable write caching. Run SL on a guest account. Am I getting it?

Thanks for the feedback. I tend to prefer bigger/faster and just wanted to make sure I wasn't being entirely foolish. I asked about SSDs for SL caching a month or two ago and the consensus among those responding was that the constant reading and writing of SL cache materials would tend to prematurely trash an SSD. I toyed with the idea of a 10k rpm drive, but I just can't quite bring myself to spend that much on a hard drive.

It is time for a new hard drive and I might as well make a choice that will work best with SL. Right now I am looking at SATA 3.0/6.0GBs drives running at 7200rpm. Does that seem reasonable? I've noticed that cache sizes differ. Most of the drives I've been considering have a 32mb cache but some have a 64mb. Is the difference between these likely to impact SL performance? Thanks,

I won't respond to a survey that does not include some basic information on the front page: Who is conducting the survey. The name of the researcher (or faculty supervisor) along with email and/or phone number should be included. The purpose of the survey. Is this for an undergraduate or graduate thesis? Class project? Other? The name of the instituion (appears to be included in this case) and the department sponsoring the research.

Minor complaint on your new blog post....we have to go back to the prior post for a "before" photo. Would be nice to see that as the lead in to your make-over.

As a recent newbie I found the volunteer groups to be quite friendly...sometimes overly so. The self-study posters at some places provide a nice contrast to places that are simply full of people. I don't think the typical newbie knows which of these they are getting, which might be a place for improvement, but generally I found folks to be helpful.

Applause for Penny! Retention is a huge problem <thumbs up> Some of the retention problem will never be solved. SL simply is not for everyone and it never will be. But there are folks who would most likely enjoy the place if they gave it more of a chance. Every effective effort to improve the first impression experience will be financially rewarding for LL. It is never just one thing. <thumbs up> It may only be possible to address one problem at a time, and it is useful to try and identify the most important problems. But there is no one thing that will fix SL. User experience designers <big thumbs up> This is a top tier issue that needs adressing. User experience is too often brought in after code is relatively fixed and it is too late to do more that clean up around the edges. This is like bringing in an interior designer when the painter has completed most of the house in off-white. You could change the colors, but it means doubling the cost and time so you just live with it. My one question is whether there are enough UX people out there? Could LL find someone to hire?

I looked up the benchmarks for your cpu and I am going to jump straight to suggesting a new computer. Extra memory and a new graphics card will likely help, but your cpu is not going to give you much more. I am trying to get my wife to upgrade her desktop which has about 2.5x the cpu power of yours and struggles with a couple of apps that are a lot less work than SL. So we are back to your budget. How much do you have/are you willing to spend? Can you build or would you need a pre-built system? I spec'ed out an i5 system for my wife yesterday...about U.S. $750 without a graphics card....but still more capable than what you have now. (It is what I used for a few months before adding a graphics card.) Is that within your budget?

I've already bookmarked thinkerer's page for my students. I like finding stuff I can use with my students without having to write it myself so I'll be following your blog to see how it develops. I'm pullin' for ya to do good!