The following wonderful machinima (i.e., a video made within Second Life) is by Tiara Ashley, who has a whole YouTube channel full of cleverly-made music videos:
I first heard about Tiara’s work via Wagner James Au of New World Notes. And I agree with Wagner; more people need to know about this! So I am blogging her video here.
Earlier this month, I had written about Draxtor Despres (a.k.a Bernhard Drax) and his documentary on the experiences of people with disabilities in virtual worlds, titled Our Digital Selves: My Avatar Is Me. Drax interviewed 13 people with a variety of disabilities for this film. Among the locations which Drax visited for this documentary were the corporate offices of High Fidelity and Linden Lab (the latter is the company behind the Second Life and Sansar platforms).
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the purpose of which is to is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) access/inclusion and people with different disabilities. So Drac decided to release his documentary today, instead of tomorrow as he had originally intended!
I was able to watch a preview of this documentary, and I enjoyed it very much! I think you will too.
Very early this morning my time, Strawberry Singh and Draxtor Despres paid a visit to Adam Frisby in Sinespace. I wasn’t there (still sleeping), but Strawberry did a livestream of the event:
Among the many Sinespace regions they visited was one which I had profiled earlier on the RyanSchultz.com blog, Sudin.
Another region they all visited was Race Meet – Winter Mountain, a wintertime raceway where they drove dune buggies which Adam created. The vehicle physics in Sinespace are quite good!
It’s a great video and I learned a few things about the Sinespace user interface I didn’t know before. Looks like they had a lot of fun too! They were chatting in Skype while they were in-world (there’s no voice chat in Sinespace yet).
Here’s a list of Sinespace regions they visited, according to Adam:
UPDATE March 6th: It turns out that Sinespace does have voice chat, but some regions have that ability turned off, which is why they used Skype in the livestream.
One of the new features in yesterday’s update to the Sansar client software was the ability to adjust the gravity level in your experience. Here’s the quote from the release notes:
- Gravity scaling – Adjust the force of gravity as you create or edit your scene. Let avatars and objects fly in zero gravity or crank it up to make the scene heavier.
So, of course, somebody had to try it out and see how it works! Space Sailor made the following hilarious video of his experience in the Turkey Bounce, a zero-gravity funhouse filled with 80 turkeys. Because why not!
And you can visit it yourself here! Gobble, gobble… thank you, Space Sailor!