Second Life is bobbins

I haven’t really used Second Life that much, and I don’t really intend to, but there seems to have been a real-life conference the other day which ran in parallel to one in Second Life and it made me leave a comment on someone’s writeup, which I thought I’d repost here, because what’s a weblog for if not making you look stupid?

I’m pretty cynical of SL in general (let alone in education) and the claims that Linden make, but as a tool for easily creating 3D objects in a virtual world with a global population it really is unparalleled. At XTech, Matt Biddulph gave a demo of how you can use real-life input to control items in SL. From what I understand, it should work the other way around too, giving a global audience the ability to affect say, something on your desk by ringing your doorbell in SL. Anything that gives that kind of opportunity is worthy of investigation at least.

XTech 2007, some highlighted notes

  • Joost is based on standards all the way and the application forms a single DOM
  • Henri’s HTML5 conformance checker generated some excitable debate about the inclusion of a normative (or even informative, if I remember properly) in the Atom spec
  • The W3C are crazy
  • Arduino are about to sell a whole mountain of kit thanks to Matt Biddulph
  • Alf Eaton is very tall
  • There are more Welsh speakers in the world than Klingon, but only just (thanks Ralph and Suw for helping us clear that one up)

More to come, I’m sure.