Last night I was bumping around a very famous ceiling. As I hit my head on the Sistine Chapel ceiling I thought about how Michelangelo painted these works. Yep I was in Second Life at a Virtual model of the Sistine Chapel
A second life note card explains:
This is a recreation of the Sistine Chapel (Cappella Sistina), located in the Vatican City. It was designed by Baccio Pontelli and built between 1473 and 1484. The interior is decorated with frescoes by Michelangelo and other great painters of the Italian Renaissance.
In this Second Life recreation, the interior is depicted in great detail, while the exterior is an approximation. Unlike in the real-life chapel, here you can fly up to the top of a wall for a close inspection, look down at the inlaid floor, or even sit on a window ledge!
The lower tier of the chapel normally displays panels with painted draperies. On special occasions, these panels are covered with tapestries designed by Raphael. Here, you can click to show or hide the tapestries whenever you want.
The purpose of this recreation, sponsored by Vassar College, is to explore the use of virtual reality for teaching and learning about art and architecture, by experiencing the context, the scale, and the social aspects of the original.
Before you visit the Sistine Chapel in Second Life you could pay a visit to the Sistine Chapel on the Vatican Museums Online as you can examine the frescos in detail and read about them in order to situate the Sistine Chapel in a cultural and historical context.
The CSS slicing guide is a tutorial on how to slice your templates into a sliced and coded XHTML and CSS valid web page.
Unlike other tutorials that show you how to do this using Photoshop or ImageReady and taking it to Dreamweaver, this tutorial demonstrates how to do it in code. It is clearly written and each area of the web page is covered and instructions delivered in a step by step manner making it useful to beginners as well as those with a little more experience.
This looks like a handy link as dpolls allows you to create polls to place on your website. This allows your visitors to respond to questions. I have often wondered if readers would like this on that on my site now I have a way to poll them and the good thing is that it is a free service!
Joe Dolson Accessites.org of has written a brief but good article on Improving Accessibility through Typography . Going beyond the usual points made on this topic that of font size, contrast and readability Dolson points out that leading (line height) tracking (letter spacing) justification and contrast all influence accessibility.
I admit that Second Life is a very sticky platform and I have become addicted not necessarily to leading another life in a virtual world. What I have become addicted to, is the possibility of a 3D web and the idea. The idea has captured my imagination. I see enormous potential and opportunities for anyone who is creative and gets a kick out of making things. Put simply my curiosity about Second Life is in overdrive.
In six weeks or so I will be giving a presentation to our first year students on web based tools that they can use to help not only their studies but their eventual career as a studio based designer/maker. These are students in the visual arts degree and design arts degree on offer at the ANU (Australian National University).
I have started to pull together a list of links to various Web2.0 apps that are appropriate when I discovered that yesterday Josh Catone of Read/write web has done most of the job for me!
Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students covers Office Replacements i.e. word processing, and spreadsheets, note taking, mind mapping tools studying, bookmarking, collaboration tools, calendars, calculations, and some bibliographic tools.
I scanned down the list trying to frantically see what app might be left out. There was one thing I could think of that every teacher I am sure will agree with me is that students do need online spell checkers and links dictionaries and a thesaurus but these are not Web2.0 apps as such. I also will touch on RSS readers as managing reading what is online is a key tool.
Since our students are visual arts students there are also tools associated with image manipulation and preparation, video editing and tools such as colour schemers and the like. Since networking is so important for anyone who wants to survive in any arts industries I will probably include some of the social software sites that can be used to highlight future proffessional their practice. Not only to use as students but because I see many of these Web2.0 apps becoming part of the process of work and study - a mode of thinking which is best established before they leave art school rather than started afterwards. But looking at Josh Catone’s list for many students I think that there is very little I have to add!
So think as a starting point it definitely has possibilities for addressing some of the needs that distance learners express in terms of not necessarily feeling so connected to their learning communities.
But on top of that there’s a whole range of other opportunities in terms of experiential learning, so being able to get out there into the world in Second Life and actually put your learning into practice.
A great example of that is the Gipps TAFE project where they had students doing both interior design and hospitality projects where they were developing workplace communications skills and in terms of the interior design projects, they were looking at developing client relationship skills. They are just a couple of the possibilities.
Of course there’s all sorts of opportunities for exploring identity, for developing very immersive resources, and educational experiences for students to engage in, roleplaying, the list goes on.
There is also a wiki Second life in education run by Jo Kay and Sean Fitzgerald which aims to provide an overview of the educational possibilities of virtual worlds, with a focus on Second Life.
Found via the wiki is this introduction to second life for educators.
I also found this while I was surfing and since it is on the same topic I thought I would include it here. Education in Second Life: Explore the Possibilities is a short video pointing out the many ways teachers can make learning experiential in Second Life.
I am sure that within a few years there will be a well established population of designer/makers who produce virtual objects for use in virtual worlds. There are of course people already doing this but they are as yet not mainstream and often self taught.
It was the same in the early days of the web. People rolled up their sleeves and learnt html in order to make web sites. Of course their early efforts were rough and lacked visual sophistication. Some loved the process and kept doing it, learning more and developing their skill. They became the basis of what is now a recognised industry. An industry of web designers.
I can see the same thing happening for those people who love working with 3D objects. There will be some who become designers of virtual objects and environments in which to place these objects.
The virtual worlds space has received tremendous press attention in the last year, fueled in no small part by Wild West stories of fortune and anarchy in worlds like Second Life and the plight of the Chinese gold farmer in World of Warcraft. But people aren’t paying attention to the bigger story. While people preoccupy themselves with mocking the absurdities of some of these virtual worlds, the reality is that there are many businesses out there making meaningful amounts of money in virtual goods.
Read the article to see the figures which are in their millions.
Virtual worlds allow people to exernalise their imagination and as such people will want objects and environments to reflect who they feel they are. For anyone who has any form digital skill and is willing to build on those skills virtual worlds are an interesting development in technology.
Why would a visit to a 3D reproduction of a work of art be better that a 2D representation of a piece of art work? It’s all about the relationship of the body to the image.
How often have you looked at a famous painting in the flesh and been a little puzzled because you had imagined it bigger or smaller? Although the size of a piece might be described in catalogues and books you do not have a feel for the piece until you see it in relationship with your body. In other words the scale and how that scale is perceived is important. Of course seeing the work in life is the best way to view a piece but I have been quickly convinced that encountering it in a virtual 3D world is of great educational value.
The Dresden Gallery in Second Life is a sim-sized reproduction of the Zwinger Palace in Dresden, Germany. More importantly, the sim reproduces one of the world’s most famous museums, the Old Masters Picture Gallery (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) of the Dresden State Art Collection located inside the Zwinger Palace. So you can enjoy this collection in its architectural setting.
According the website the Old Masters Picture Gallery is the first museum of its kind to open its virtual doors and display works to scale. In this sim you can view great masterpieces of key importance for the history of art. Major works by artists such as Giorgione, Titian, Canaletto, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Poussin, and Watteau are to be viewed in this virtual world. By clicking on the paintings important information about each work is displayed in a note card.
The SLURL is Dresden Gallery (123,128,26).
Or in Second Life click on Search, select Places, and enter “Dresden” as the keyword teleport there and follow the red carpet.
