In what's turning out to be quite a week for Second Life, I went to a workshop on the subject this morning. I'd missed one such workshop whilst on leave and they'd had so many subscribe that they'd decided to rerun it.

We were in a room with a partition and an exam had been scheduled for the other side of the partition, so after realizing we couldn't actually talk, there was a short hiatus while we were removed to a nearby research office with enough computers for everyone to login.

For some reason I was unable to login as myself even though it had been working back in the office, but one of the workshop leaders, KV (another computing academic), logged in as himself and kindly allowed me to move his avatar around. [1]

I happened to be sitting next to a rather nice voiced lady with some geology background and it turned out her interest in Second Life was wanting to build a store to sell music. She had a gorgeous avatar [2] and when people commented on this (which amused me as I was desperately refraining from doing any such thing), it turned out that she'd paid for her shimmering hair, graceful movements and other enhancements. I discovered why when later in the day I looked at the URL she'd given me to check out her music. She obviously does want to make an impression as in real life she sings - semi professionally I think and with some talent. I thought her voice sounded good. She's toured a number of countries and supported Midge Ure a number of times and Marillion. I've heard of these people!

But there were two strange moments as the group of us wandered around under the advice and direction of the workshop leaders who probably felt as though they were herding cats. Firstly, we happened to stumble across a former work colleague, S, whose avatar I knew. Even in the much reduced universe of Second Life this seemed unlikely. But it was curious - my neighbour, the singer, had brought her to our attention because she was amused by the guy that was chatting to her being puzzled at meeting so many people that liked books. I mean we were outside a library. Meanwhile, S guessed immediately who I meant when I introduced myself as not my avatar but "it's me", but seemed to find it a bit odd that I should be channelling another person's body. I guess it was.

The second strange moment was when the singer suggested we visited the Star Trek Museum of Culture (the workshop leader whose body I was temporarily inhabiting rudely suggested that that was a contradiction in terms!). Once there I immediately spotted an oddly shaped portal that must have been the gateway on the edge forever. And I realized how sad I was when I walked across what initially looked like a rocky outcrop and long before I got to the other side and turned round to look at the sign, knew that it must be a Horta!

However, the odd moment was when we went to look at the holodeck and set it to be the bridge of the Enterprise. So I'm now sitting in a room full of real people as we explore a virtual world within a virtual world. I was beginning to lose the plot as regards what was real and what wasn't! [3]

A torrential rain storm (in Real Life) motivated many of us to stay exploring for longer than planned, but eventually - and with some regret actually - it was time to rejoin the real world.



[1] I'm not sure he didn't regret this at the end when the room fell into a discussion about gender and how whether you choose to be a male or female affects the reception you get from other people in SL. KV suggested I try this so I changed his avatar gender to female and then, attempting to make 'him' look more womanly, only succeeded in making him look pregnant. He said he'd keep the look for a bit and see what difference it made.

[2] I realize these are pixilated computer creations that may or may not bear any relation to their Real Life owner and that don't (for me at least) look that attractive in a real sense. However, it's the representation of beauty that I mean. And clearly the money she'd spent on appearance, skin and movements did indeed set her apart from your typical avatar that's straight out of the box as it were.

[3] Took me right back to the days of IPLmoo (a moo in the Internet Public Library) back in the 90s. All text based. But even then I remember being engaged by the whole design of the thing, and sitting one day at a (real life) enquiry desk with a colleague and showing him what I was doing as I sat in a (virtual) audiovisual suite with another IPLmooer chatting over a "video" we were "watching" of a meeting that had gone in IPLmoo the week before. Keeping track of the levels of chat going on there was really interesting.