Paul Woidke's Second Life

This week the BG Second Life team had an emergency build project that fell to me to finish. The Virtual Worlds Educators Roundtable (VWER) is a group of 80-100 educators and others who meet in Second Life. This group is moving to BGSU’s virtual campus, and a space is currently being constructed for their meetings and round table discussions. The first phase of this construction was to construct an auditorium for the group presentations. This task fell to me the night before a meeting with a VWER representative, so it had to be completed pretty quickly. We decided to use the space previously used to model faculty offices for the VWER build.

 

When I took over the build, there was a floor and some chairs placed, with a presentation screen at the front of the space.

The first step in this build was to create rows of seats for guests. I used the seats supplied and created rows that radiated from the center. The goal was to have enough seating for 80-100 guests.

After the first two sections of seats were built, I turned my attention to the open spaces around the perimeter of the space. This space had been left open and terraformed to make the space descend into the floor, but now I needed a way to connect the various walkways and asiles with the main seating. To address this issue, I began by constructing some stairs on either side of the media viewer.

Once the stairs were completed and joined to the floor, I put in a side asile on the side of the main seating area.

After the asile was built, I moved the wall on the other side of the space inwards. I did this for two reasons: First, I wanted to make the seating space more symmetrical and avoid a large open space on the other side. Second, I wanted to move the wall to expand the hallway on the other side. We’re still not sure exactly what this space will be used for, but it was a bit narrow to begin with and is now much more open and usable.

With the wall moved, I now had a good idea of how the space in the main seating area could be built. First, I made another side asile to match the one on the other side.

The first place that needed attention was where the side asiles connected the front stairs and the radial asiles. I needed a way to fill in this space and add some architectural elements to the space. I started by placing some triangular prims in the space to fill it in.

On top of these prims, I added tall pillars. These pillars helped to divide the space into a seating and presentation area and the asiles in which avatars could move.

Now that the seating area was clearly defined, I added additional chairs on either side of the radial asiles. The final seating area can hold around 105 guests.

Once the seating area was complete, I decided to work on the walkway on the second level of the space. This walkway goes around the inside of the glass at the front of the VWER space, and can be accessed via ramps by the entrance of the structure. In the future, we may add a second level to this presentation space, so I wanted to make sure that the walkway was integrated with the rest of the architecture. I decided to continue the walkway into the side hallway and added some stairs so that it would be accessible from either side of the seating area.

Once the walkway and stairs were completed, the VWER presentation space was essentially complete.

In the next week I’ll be working on the other half of the VWER space, which is located at the other end of the building. This will have stadium seating and will house the actual “round table” used for discussions.

~ by on April 30, 2011 .