A College Island

I built an entire campus island for Mercyhurst College and presented a poster/computer presentation about it, “Building a Second Life on a Shoestring,” at the SUNY CIT Conference in 2008. The posters were presented both at the conference and simultaneously in Second Life. Conference attendees were able to visit the island on a computer during the presentation. Here is a view of the posters displayed in SL and PDFs of the posters and the conference handout:

There are several galleries below of the island, both finished and as it was being built, but this video takes you on a tour after it was pretty much finished. Sorry for the poor video quality, but we were working with the best available software at the time for capturing machinima, and I do not have the original footage to edit.

The island contained all the sorts of spaces you would expect on a college campus in a virtual world: an art studio and gallery, a public sandbox and building resources, a theater, office/classroom spaces, a health building, a floating learning lab, and a library. Oh, and a coffeehouse for artistic presentations.

Art Studio and Gallery

Art faculty were encouraged to send digital art for display in this gallery, as well as to design projects to be built in the studio space floating above the gallery.

Public Sandbox and Building Boardwalk

Office and Classroom Spaces

Theater

One student honors poster session was displayed in the theater shortly after being displayed on campus. One group of Intel students made a presentation to viewers in Europe.

Library

Health Building

Learning Lab

The floating learning lab was co-designed by me and Scott Kahler, an education student at the college. Scott did all the building of the lab. I built the learning stations.