I visited Hursley tonight. <\/p>\n
As I work at Hursley<\/a>, this might sound a little stupid – but I mean that I visited the Hursley island in Second Life<\/a>. (Depends on your point of view how stupid that sounds, I suppose! Opinion seems divided about the whole Second Life thing…)<\/p>\n I’m still at the “wandering around trying to figure out what I should be doing” stage. Unlike a more traditional game, there isn’t a particular task or mission – and as I haven’t yet talked anyone else I know into trying it out yet, my previous two brief visits in-world consisted of aimlessly ambling about trying to get the hang of the controls and cursing how slow it runs on the four-year old PC I borrow to play it… (even with all the graphics settings turned all the way down!). <\/p>\n So, when Ian Hughes<\/a> at work sent me an invite to the private ‘Hursley’ area of Second Life, I jumped at the chance. I’d heard of it<\/a> before from a few places… even The Register<\/a>, but this was my first time seeing it for myself.<\/p>\n Observations? First thing… it doesn’t look anything like real-life Hursley. Bits of it are familiar, like there is a Hursley House<\/a>-esque building which looks cool. Not sure why I expected it to look like the real-life site. I guess I’d read about a few other areas of Second Life which do look like their real-life versions, like CNET<\/a> and Reuters<\/a>, and assumed that was the norm. Not this place though. It seems to be a kind of organic collection of cool toys that people are creating. Now I think about it though, this makes a lot more sense… ‘Hursley’ should be more about the community, the people, the spirit of innovation – not what the buildings look like. And pockets of space where people are trying out different things, fits that.<\/p>\n Other thoughts… there is an etiquette here that I’m still working out. For example, I’ve read a few people<\/a> talk about the etiquette of not asking people you meet in-game about their real life. That was a bit weird – with the few people that I met around Hursley, my instinct was to ask stuff like “so what’s your real name? what do you do?” and that sorta thing. I guess that’s something you get used to though… perhaps as I get more used to the Second Life environment as a thing in it’s own right. <\/p>\n Overall, it was fun – I got to wander around and play with the different things that other Hursley people have created – some of which (like the Wimbledon area<\/a>) were very cool. I haven’t created anything myself yet… need to think of an idea for something to try.<\/p>\n I wish I’d been able to make it to the Virtual Block Party<\/a> held a few weeks ago. It would’ve been good to actually use Second Life for something – to have something that I want to achieve in the virtual world. And from what I’ve seen about how it went<\/a>, it looks like it was pretty cool. Hopefully we’ll do something like this again soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I visited Hursley tonight. As I work at Hursley, this might sound a little stupid – but I mean that I visited the Hursley island in Second Life. (Depends on your point of view how stupid that sounds, I suppose! Opinion seems divided about the whole Second Life thing…) I’m still at the “wandering around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}