MA Reveal: Literacy Research

As part of the MA Education in Virtual Worlds’ Designing Curricula module I presented an assessment paper that looked at the development of game-based learning to teach literacy skills. This paper will now serve as the basis for the development of a build to research the possibility of using virtual worlds to support literacy training. Continue reading »

Isa’s Thoughts Sit

A free educational tool, Isa’s Thoughts Sit is a sit that once sat on enables the user to float eight sets of text above their avatar like a cloud of thoughts. It contains a menu with a choice of sit poses and random text colouring to help individualise each user experience. Continue reading »

In Texture Heaven: Part 2

Continuing with creating a non-tileable texture from a photograph, here I look at adjusting light levels using gradients and masks and the Dodge and Burn Tools in Photoshop. Continue reading »

In Texture Heaven: Part 1

Some months ago I had the pleasure of visiting a place called Montsalvat, Australia’s oldest artists’ colony. 150 photos later I now have a huge library of photographs awaiting the metamorphosis into textures. The intent of this and subsequent posts is to share some of the tools and techniques that I use in this process. Enjoy! Continue reading »

Notes on Identity

Although virtual worlds are proving to be a valuable resource for educators, there is another, greater reason why understanding the role of identity in virtual worlds is important. Essentially, virtual worlds are not simply about the creation of a 3D computer world; the use of avatars means they are about the creation of a 3D computer-generated us. Continue reading »

Playing with llTeleportAgent

From the workshop this time where I have been fiddling of late with the new llTeleportAgent function. I had seen examples of its use in sim navigation HUDs and decided to play with the function a little to investigate its possibilities. In the process I ended up creating a simple tour guide. Continue reading »

Assembling the Holodeck

Gathering together the knowledge from the previous posts in this series, this post assembles it all into a functioning holodeck by adding the final requirement; a dialog box menu. This addition is the real strength of a holodeck, allowing the rezzing of individual scenes from a selection. Continue reading »

MA Education in Virtual Worlds

Can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Well we’ll see. Continue reading »

Setting a Rezzed Object Timer

The intent of this post is to demonstrate the last parameter of the llRezObject and llRezAtRoot functions and to show how it can used to set a deletion timer for an object that has been rezzed using either function. It also contains a script that can be used to obtain the quaternion rotation of an object for use in LSL scripts. Continue reading »