November 2007 Archives

For our sign representing what IST is all about, Team Multivac decided to create an IST history "tunnel" of sorts.

The frame of our creation.

Me applying a texture to one of our walls.

Us posing in front of our completed creation.

Walking through the tunnel, one can see, in chronological order, a brief history of the School and College of IST through pictures. Upon clicking these pictures, one is presented with a notecard item that gives a detailed description of that particular point in history.

Creating this project, I was tasked with uploading the necessary images to make textures for the tunnel. This was my responsibility because uploading images costs $10 Linden, and, I happen to be the only one with any money. Once the textures were uploaded, I applied them to prim objects that I had sufficient permissions to modify. Altogether, the process was a lot less painful than I initially expected it to be.

Be sure to check it out, and see Steve's Blog for a more elaborate writeup on the process of creating this work of art.

After struggling a bit to get Second Life working on my computer, I took the liberty of doing a little meandering here and there to get a feel for the environment, some of which I had done previously at the motorcycle event.

And boy, what an exciting few days it's been. I was present for the prostitute onslaught, I witnessed a cursing naked potato man running around with an M60 machine gun, and I've stumbled across, and even gotten kicked out of a few locales that wouldn't be entirely appropriate to mention here.

However, I digress.

One of the more.. kosher areas I stumbled upon was through a link found right in Istania itself. I had heard interesting things about Dell's Dell Island, and, I was certainly eager to check out their Second Life presence.

Upon teleporting to the island, I was struck by the imposing Dell logo atop a rather futuristic-looking bit of architecture.

Rather intrigued, I fly my way in the front door. Strangely, it's eerily empty here. I figured there'd be more people building ridiculous $5,000 Quad-Core QX6850 Core 2 Extreme-based computers. Honestly, I think Second Life could still manage to bring such a rig to its knees.

I wasted no time in hopping on one of their customization stations.. I was able to pick all the components of a PC to build, and watch as it assembled itself to my left. It was rather cool, and, after it was all complete, it offers to take you to a website where you can purchase said configuration.

All in all, this is certainly a unique business angle. It'd be fascinating to find out exactly how many of these Second Life-to-website click-throughs result in actual sales. This may very well become a very large avenue for generation of real-life sales for not just computers, but perhaps automobiles, and other consumer goods. The ability to try something out/view it in a virtual, three-dimensional environment could be instrumental in making such a purchase decision. I find it difficult to criticize Dell's environment simply because of the sheer innovation factor here.

I then meandered on over to IBM's Second Life presence. A search for "IBM" yields tons of results, so, I headed on over to the one simply entitled "IBM", which seems to be an online conference center of sorts, rather than a direct attempt at sales. This is indeed an intriguing prospect, however, it's disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a better means of navigating the island, or an introduction to what the island offers. This could be very helpful.

They've even got this neat little scale-model of the surrounding area.

And, over here, we've got IBM's massive, almost Death-Star-like "Theatre I". This leads me to believe that there are more. Wow.

There are seats there that one can sit in, so, presumably, this is a delivery area for lectures and seminars. I've yet to see anyone, but, then again, I don't imagine most companies would do business in such an area at 11:06 PM.

I find that I'm simply unable to explore the vastness of the IBM complex, let alone a sizable portion of Second Life. While it may be laggy, slow, and inefficient, to be this successful and huge, they must be doing something right. I do prefer Dell's environment simply because of the sheer coolness factor of assembling a virtual 3D representation of a consumer item, then being presented with the opportunity to purchase said item in real life. The most important element here I think is examining these sort of business "experiments" being conducted by these two companies. Whether it's Dell attempting to adapt its direct-sell model to online virtual environments, or IBM attempting to provide a venue for online business meetings, you've got to hand it to these guys for being pioneers. For trying something new. For making that first step forward.

And, now it's time to let my video card cool down. Second Life is making it throw a fit.

Every now and then, as I randomly stumble across the vast landscape of the internet, I come across something so relevant and pertinent to IST 110H, that I simply have no choice but to make a blog post about it. This is one of those instances.

First, some background:

Jonathan Harris is a computer scientist and digital artist. He has a penchant for using these talents to attempt to make some sense of the seemingly infinite personal data that exists on the internet. Two of these projects are Universe and We Feel Fine.

Universe traverses the current spectrum of news stories, and attempts to assemble a snapshot full of entity-relationships and all sorts of other fun stuff in order to help make sense of the collective consciousness of society.

We Feel Fine performs a similar task, but, perhaps more relevantly, it scours the blogosphere to attempt to gain a barometric reading of sorts of writers' feelings, and popular writing subjects. With direct linking ability to blog posts and images contained within these particular blogs, the power of such a graphical representation is not to be underestimated.

It's simply amazing what the result can be when such distinctly different skillsets (art and computer science) come together. With this sort of graphical analysis, one can very easily evaluate the current feelings of a group of people, which, most likely, reflects on society as a whole.

Check this out.

Well, unlike all you Schreyer's people, I finally managed to schedule my courses for the spring semester last night, and you can view it here.

I assembled this schedule using Lionschedules. Lionschedules is a pretty nifty application. It uses Penn State's online scheduling system to gather the information it needs to graphically lay out one's schedule, simply by entering course numbers. It then organizes this information chronologically and graphically, allowing one to have a more detailed view of course information simply by mousing over the course entries in the schedule. I'd certainly be interested in learning more in regards to what technologies this site utilizes, which, unfortunately, isn't readily available on the site.

Long live Lionschedules.

I love classic Saturday Night Live. That show has been the springboard for a number of comedic geniuses throughout recent history, and Will Farrell is a prime example of that. At some point during the conceptual phases of this project, we stumbled on over to YouTube, and made our way to these hilarious "Celebrity Jeopardy" skits which, ultimately proved to be the inspiration for our video:

Assigning myself the role of "Digital Expert" at the beginning of this class, I sort of spearheaded the more technical aspects of this project. I took the initiative for acquiring the necessary materials for filming, and took primary responsibility for the editing of said project, using my prior knowledge of video editing to assist the group in collectively assembling the travesty you see above.

Enjoy.