A Virtual Guest speaker in Jokaydia

During the second meet up this week we had a guest speaker. It was nice to meet Esme who I know as Jane Wilde from a previous course. Jane has moved to Oregon from Vermont where she was teaching at the Marlboro Graduate School.

I had attend a class on Educational Technologies which she stated could be better named Educational Pedagogy. This class was packed full of information. It was not a surprise that hew presentation would be compelling.

As luck would have it the as any of you may have experience in real life there is always problems with projectors when giving a presentation.  The virtual machine seemed be advancing on its own or by an unknowing classmate accidentally. As she move through the presentation we were all not seeing the same slide at the same time.

We did get to learn about Jokaydia and its founder and how the project is supported. As an open source project we could download our own version and set up our private world. The world exists on a server and Imprudence allows us to access the world.

It was noted how we have been having issues with rezzing and how this could be a resource issue. We learned the site is hosted on a server in Australia and that the previous class had much better loading and not all the same issues we were experiencing. Our tour guide Tis commented on how we were meeting at the camp fire unfortunately we could not see the fire and could actually be standing in it.

As you can see from this image some avatars came across as a blur or ghost of an image.

We learned that the US Navy had used virtual worlds and good reasons to do so were that you could experience something too expensive or dangerous without fear of real injury.

She also discussed other platforms such as second life where there were many users online at any given time. Noting that these worlds could be for mature audiences at least in high school age.

A surprising example of a virtual travel was how she showed a drop of water and how you could enter it from a virtual world to have an inside look. A more intimate example had to do with traveling as sperm where she said there were four virtual seats to share the journey with others. I could not help but think of a scene from a Woody Allen Movie

Adding Gestures - time for cheat sheets?

We had an extra meetup in Marlboro Island. In this meetup we did not have an actual agenda. Surprisingly we were able to learn a great deal.

Many of us were a bit frustrated about not being able to use gestures and animations. We were able to check our inventory and the learned how to add the gestures by activating them and saving them.

There were choices that had to be made about how and where to load the animations or gestures. We also had to rename them otherwise you would find yourself with a lot of items titled new gestures.

After loading a bunch it got pretty confusing as you could not tell which one was which. Out tour guide went over the steps but it had been a while since learning them so it required a bit of recollection.
 In this image you can see how the visitors were gifted a box of gestures oddly they came as something to wear. For me I had access to about 20 gestures but it required them to be activated.

Once the were activated you could click on them to play them or type a forward slash /name of gesture hit enter to activate.


After a little practice we were able to float in a yoga pose, do a number of dance steps, back flips, hand gesture like waving, fist bumps, one two punches and more.

Here you can see a box of animations. Some of us did not res. I was able to most avatars. The sound from some were louder than others. When first arriving it took a while for the campfire to res which seems now to be typical.

As for learning there was good social cognitive experience. I think I would need to return again after a good night rest to use retrieval to own the patterns practiced or learned is this meeting. As there was a lot going on with many trying to learn techniques this may be a good opportunity to leave artifacts that we can return to perhaps we can create a virtual cheat sheet for visitors classmates or future travelers to build on?

Latest Meet ups

I am enjoying becoming a virtual traveler. We have had a couple of meet ups and it impressive to see how different the avatars are. It seems we are now getting to move quite a bit better. Unfortunately we had an issue at one of our meetings where Marlboro Island did not res properly. This provided interesting social interactions as we could see and not see others nor know where we were. As we were to meet at the campfire you could have been standing in it.


In the next meet up we went to the purple mats worked together as a group building items. We were able to take blocks and change their shape, color and add texture. In addition we added scripts and were able to have object rotate.

It was important to note like in the real world we should police our environment and take any objects with us. We now had storage bins as we were unable to access our portfolio boxes. The new solution seems elegant. I was able to place a chair from my inventory and have a comfortable way to sit and recline.

In the next trip we visited several destinations. The first spot had the sounds of seabirds as we appeared to be at a coastal property overlooking a landscape that reminded me of Newfoundland. At this location we could only text chat. The quiet visit was a good way to take time to read the information available where we visited.

A second visit provided a chance to test more physical skills including boxing and Capoiera. We did a bit of jumping and I found myself a top of a wall that reminded me of walking atop a construction site. This site and plenty of how to instruction and worth returning.

The last stop we were able to see the work of others especially from youth. Our virtual travels are something to look forward. I like meeting in a group and observing. I need to ask others how they are able to perform actions.

I did take more photos and was able to find them on my hard drive as my PC stored them in a folder labeled 2014, something I am trying to understand why.