Aaron Parker
aaronp.mesl.
Second Life Travel: Horyu-Ji Temple, Mieum.
Here are some photos I took from Horyu-Ji Temple, yesterday. It’s an awesome parcel of land in Mieum, and home to some high quality temples and shrines, as well as store. The real-world Horuji Temple is a UNESCO World Heritage site and an important landmark in Buddhist culture. It was built in 607 by Shōtoku Taishi in memory of…
2012
Second Life Statistics for 2011.
As we reach the end of 2011, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back on some Second Life statistics for the past year. The last time I did this was almost two years ago, where I briefly analysed the Second Life concurrency statistics for 2006 to 2009. This time I’m going to give a brief overview…2011
Experimenting with Pixel Art in Second Life.
Here’s a little Second Life project I was working on over the Easter Break. Basically I just wanted to see whether or not pixel art would work in SL. Turns out it kind of does. My original plan was to just create wall, ceiling, and floor textures — but I got a little carried away and ended up making furniture and…2011
It’s not about “fear of change” — it’s about identity and control.
In a rather unconventional move of PR penmanship, Hamlet Au took to his blog last month and blamed his entire readership for the future downfall of Second Life. It’s your “fear of change” that threatens SL he wrote, guffawing at us all as if we were backwards yokels afraid that electricity might actually be witchcraft. You…2011
Meaning, prims, and sense-making mechanisms.
Last night I visited @sorornishi’s Second Life art exhibit, Transubstantiation. I’d read an interesting blog post on it by @botgirlq (who’s Machinima I thoroughly recommend you check out!) so thought I’d drop by. As beautiful as it is, one thing I found particularly intriguing was the philosophy behind it. Soror writes: “The Prim contains my body and my…2011
Suggestion: Second Life Social Ads.
It’s not always easy being sociable in Second Life. Sure you can go and accost some unsuspecting resident, make conversation, and then friend them manically before they finally give in, but this is often an awkward, unsuccessful, and extremely daunting process — especially if you’re a newbie. So it’s kind of strange then that whilst the…2011
The Corruptive Power of Knowledge over the User Experience.
You may have seen the image above plenty of times before. If not, look carefully — what do you see? At first glance the image appears to be a group of dots — but if you study it for some time an image of a Dalmatian sniffing at the intersection of some paving slabs appears. The interesting…2010
Virtual World Design Guidelines Courtesy of Microsoft.
Between 1995 and 2001, Microsoft developed and operated it’s own social virtual world. Named V-Chat, the service allowed users to create their own text-based, 2D, or 3D environments in which they could chat and interact with other users. In it’s six years of active service, V-Chat saw two major iterations, an active end-user community numbering…2010
Maybe Second Life isn’t that far from Reality.
A little while ago I stumbled across a very interesting article in a philosophy journal. It spoke about an interesting theory of reality, and the possibility that we are all actually living in a simulated world. I’ve heard about the simulated reality theory before and never really paid it much attention — the idea that we’re all just pieces of…2010
Second Life User Activity in 2009.
Given that we’ve just passed into a new year, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some Second Life stats. The only stuff I’ve analysed so far is the log-in data. For each day (in theory anyway), Linden records how many users logged during the 7, 14, 30, and 60 days, leading up to…2010
