It wasn’t until I received an early morning text message from my brother in Alberta that I remembered. Holy shit! At 6 o’clock this morning, I officially turned 60 years old.
I consider myself a lucky person on this milestone birthday. Not only do I have power, water, sewer, broadband internet, a roof over my head, food on the table, and a nice new car to drive (all paid in full by me – working as a science/agricultural librarian), but I also have a virtual reality lab for the university library system. You will participate in the project (More details below), and I even ended up teaching a college class about Second Life, which I love!
I mean, hurry now. Having gone through difficult and terrible times in the past, I am now wise enough to realize and appreciate when the good times are. do wake up. Enjoy them while you can, as they often disappear in an instant! Here is some wisdom I would like to pass on to all of you reading this: thank you that much. Moment.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was invited this semester to teach a course on Second Life for a graduate-level virtual world building and design course co-taught by a computer science professor and an interior design professor at my university. professor. I’ve been very busy putting the finishing touches on a presentation to give to my students in Second Life. Students will all be represented by Second Life avatars.
For this course, I rented an entire homestead area (256 square meters) with full building and terraforming rights for students to practice building virtual worlds. Rentals are currently only available for three weeks, but may be extended if any students wish to work on a building project in Second Life for their course.
Here is a preview of the area: The homeowners had previously landscaped it and kept much of it intact, but also worked on terraforming a large, flat area for the building project (located in the foreground of this photo). I have a small area to show you how much content creation in Second Life has changed over its 20-year history. Shows examples of houses and furniture, from basic prim buildings to highly detailed mesh models!
The virtual reality lab project is progressing slowly but surely. I am a member of a committee of people working to advance the project (my role is to assign VR and AR hardware and software to the lab and support the use of VR/AR/MR/XR by faculty, staff, and students) ) in teaching, learning and research). Currently, we are focusing on renovating the space we have chosen for our lab: walls, floors, lighting fixtures, etc.
Depending on when the Computer Science Department sets up its VR lab (I heard they’re ordering a large batch of Meta Quest 3), the library’s XR lab will be the second or third lab on campus after the school. We’re a team in Nursing who are currently regularly using VR to train student nurses (for more details, check out my Mastodon post about that project).
So, at the ripe old age of sixty, my passionate hobby (virtual worlds, virtual reality) is actually intersecting with my paid job! I know how lucky I am to have this opportunity and I don’t take it for granted.
I have to go now. Today we have two different library training sessions to offer. One is this morning and the other is this afternoon. But I just wanted to write this blog post to let you all know that I’m still here and I’m still blogging. , and once the work on this process I’m involved in is finalized, I’ll once again be writing “news and views on social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse,” as stated in the blog’s tagline. And not just for Second Life, but for every Metaverse platform I can find!
60 more trips* around the sun! Woohoo! (Um, okay… Maybe about 20? 30?? 40?!?? 😜)
*Actually, I’m 60 years old…one So far we have traveled around the sun!
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