Well, on Friday I telecommuted for the first time, attending a conference on federal presence in Virtual Worlds. I attended from home, in “person” as an avatar in Second Life, where in a conference room there we watched a live video feed from the actual conference in real life, in Washington DC. To make things more convoluted, there were moderators present in the DC conference who were also online, relaying questions from the Second Life audience, and at several points presenters actually displayed, live, the Second Life forum (where all the avatars waved and said hi, assuming we knew how to control them at that point), so we were watching a video feed of the virtual room in which we were virtually meeting. Yeah, it’s hard to describe it in words. The recursion of this all is a little crazy.
But regardless… here’s a picture of me attending the conference (with a nifty free coffee mug donated by one of the advertisers there).
I was still in process of tweaking my avatar–I suspect that may be an ongoing process, because I’m still not completely content with her, even though she’s gone through several metamorphoses already.
While I was there (the conference was in the NOAA’s Second Life area), after the conference was over, I chatted with a couple people but spent most of my time exploring Meteora, which is the NOAA’s virtual presence. They had some fun stuff, including a tsunami demonstration, a real-time weather map displayed in 3-D (your avatar can walk across it to inspect it more closely), and a weather balloon ride.
There were some technical glitches–the feed lost audio several times, and required reloading, and there was a limit on how many people could coexist in the Second Life conference hall at once, so you had to attempt to get there multiple times before it would work, but it was a really great way to attend a conference without having to charge work the money to travel there. And having to do it at home (as all the DoD types had to) was a nice plus.
So after that, I had some info about who was online and what there was out there. I still haven’t quite figured out how you actually find a lot of the sites you know are out there… I assume that you do a standard Internet search to get the SL links from the company’s webpages, and then you can “teleport” there in Second Life. I did, however, manage to find NASA’s site, and looked around it for a little while, until it got too popular and my avatar kept being approached by people–young men, I’m assuming–who wanted to know things like “How old r u?” and stuff like that. (People–telling me my avatar’s hot is kind of beside the point! Avatars are generally good-looking–that’s how it works!) I think that I’m probably going to have to set aside my vanity and develop an “invisible” entity for when I want to be left alone. How annoying.
All irritations aside, however, I was intrigued by the whole Second Life thing and I’m pretty sure that there’s potential there we’re only just barely seeing the edges of at the moment. What an interesting time we live in!
Oh, and for vanity’s sake, here’s a later version of my avatar, after I’d done some tweaking.
Posted by Kjirstin 
