I’ve not blogged about SL recently, and yet I’ve been exploring the environment more and more.
One of the things I’ve been doing when I’ve not been sure where to go next is to wander over to one of the newbies areas to help newcomers. It is pretty satisfying to be able to show people how to get started, and answer their questions. At the New Citizens Plaza there are also a bunch of free items for people to get started. I’m not around in SL enough to go as far as applying to become an official mentor, but I certainly see that as something I’d like to be able to do.
I’m still not a proficient builder. I have plans and thoughts, but no time to work on them.
I bumped into Yossarian Seattle (of eightbar fame) the other day, and he gave me the latest prototype of his translator. Within a few minutes I went off to Teazer’s university to one of the newbie classes, and met some Germans and Spaniards.
The translator worked brilliantly… the Spanish guys were talking about finding work in a casino, and I was able to follow the conversation. I mistyped some English words (were != where) and as a result my discussion with the Germans wasn’t quite so successful. Actually although the screenshot above shows the current UI for the translator at the bottom left, the monkey was neither German nor Spanish, this was from a different visit to the classroom. Yossarian is currently still working on the translator, but it is already useful, and I’m really impressed.
Another thing I’ve explored is the new Amazon-based store, Life2Life. You can read about the store on the Amazon Web Services blog. Basically you can walk into the store, search on a string (“Pratchett” in this case), and the boxes take on the appearance of the items that are found. Once you’ve done that, you can click and hold to go to the item and buy on the web. There’s much more in the latest article on the AWS blog, it looks like there is much more to come.
Note that, if you visit the store (search for “Life2Life”, or use this SLURL), you need to press play on the Movie control at the bottom of the screen, or the images won’t be displayed – that confused me for quite some time.
Pretty disappointed with the Channel 4 coverage of Second Life this week – they seemed to choose a couple of strange individuals to represent the community. Mind you, who am I to talk?
