I keep finding myself bemused by the anti-slviewer2 comments in Second Life. Yes a few things are in different places, the colours have changed, but….. you get to interact with content in a whole different way with the media containers and true web on a prim. It may be that many people not being builders will not find a space to create an surface and mess with the texture settings to get access to this great addition. However I have shown a number of people some very powerful things very very quickly. For me that is all win!
Yesterday I was in world when we had the great British Airways storm the front moment as their planes headed to an ashcloud closed UK. We all became plane spotters on http://www.flightradar24.com/ watching the stacking trails as the natural disaster met health and safety met commercial pressure. I augmented my experience by happening to be in SL and stuck a web on a prim under my previously created gas cloud sculpture. It just added to the experience. Not only watching live flights and a historic moment but being logged into my favourite virtual world and embedding the data into it.
The real kicker though is how easy it is now, in particular with googles new google draw to work on shared diagrams. Yes whiteboards are just a click away. Being a web app you can also have people contribute who are not in world with you. You can leave a diagram and come back to check multiple updates later or work on it all collaboratively seeing the effect of one anothers work as it happen. You know just like standing in a room with someone doing a chalk and talk. I still prefer to use in world objects to get most points across, but sometimes, just sometimes scrawling on a wall does it for me.
I hope that if one thing good comes out of the air travel confusion it is a whole host of people asking “isn’t there a better way to work than emailing these attachments around and having telephone calls”. Of course many of us know there is, and regularly use them.
The ability to do up to 8 shared screens, so above we have both a whiteboard and my previous post and video on working differently available side by side. The option to use a forced privacy method by having the web page as a hud gives all sorts of options. I am still experimenting with how wearing the web can be used for some interesting effects too.
Its all good, give it a try.
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