SL Creativity

Initial SL Survival Skills

I initially asked if “Creative people become SL residents or SL residents become creative people.” The first part of this question is about understanding which skills people that go on to become regular SL residents arrive with.

During my conversations I asked people a number of questions about what they have done before coming to SL. Some patterns emerged that I would like to talk a little about here.

Continue reading Initial SL Survival Skills…

3D language

As a native Danish speaker it was especially obvious when the web expanded our vocabularies in the late 90ies. English words like download, email & web suddenly became a part of everyday speak. A lot of the practices around 3D spaces have been developed in recent years and new words have popped up; some I believe to be native to SL.

If these 3D space are indeed the future of the web then I wonder if it is a matter of time before my mum will tell me how she just rezzed some good looking prims or maybe even demand more frequent visits in meatspace.

Just a thought…

3 levels of experience

One recent day in my second life I had a really interesting conversation with Tateru Nino. She is a very experienced resident and the number of new residents that have benefited from her help are probably well into the thousands.

Tateru told me about the she describes the SL experience and I am wanted to share it here. The basic idea is that whilst your profile will display the date you became a resident; people’s second lives moves at different paces.
Continue reading 3 levels of experience…

Naming the child

I am still after a fair amount of time trying to put a name to what SL is. In the absence of any original thoughts of my own I will now instead attempt to question other people definitions.
Continue reading Naming the child…

Immersion or Augmentation

I had lunch today with Kyle Machulis (Cube Linden). Turns out he had also wondered if there are 2 views of SL out there. Where you fall on these philosophies impacts things like how you live your second life and view upcoming features. The two are as follows:

Immersion: SL is its own thing and should not be contaminated by anything from the outside. SL should evolve at its own pace as we continue to gain a deeper understanding of how our metaverse should and could look.

Augmentation: SL adds things like real-time spatial design tools & a stronger sense of presence through avatarization in 3D space to the existing social software on the 2D internet. SL should evolve through leveraging existing tools and practices out these as well as continue to develop its uniqueness.
Continue reading Immersion or Augmentation…

Understanding how innovation happens

If I was communicating people from the corporate world I would file this in the: “Why you should care” section of what I am looking into. I am currently reading Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel, head of of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at MIT’s Sloan School.

Some solid work went into understanding how innovation happens and Von Hippel shares his knowledge really well in this book. Basically he found out that end users usually design major innovations by just sticking something together with materials at hand.
Continue reading Understanding how innovation happens…

A call out for former residents

I have spent some great time having interesting conversations with Second Life residents and am starting to formulate some thoughts about this, but more about this in a later post. To help me see a fuller picture I would really like to get in contact with former residents. It is no big secret that a substantial number of people come to Second Life and after spending relatively time there; they leave and often never return. If this sounds like you or you know someone that did this then I would love to hear from you. See About for some contact info or leave a comment.