Design for Digital Media - End of Year Show 2009 in Second Life

Now open to the public - The Collective Island is host to the Leeds College of Art's - End of Year Show for the BA(Hons) Design for Digital Media course..



In the studio building, you can find examples of Development work and Screenshots from Final Year Project work, plus links to their web-portfolios.



Streaming in the second room of the studio building, is a 15 min showreel of Moving image work... on it you'll find a Personal tale about Epilepsy, 3D Animation, and Music Videos...
plus its got a nifty reflective floor... :)



The big part of the SL exhibition is the work of Jetsunami Duell ( Rob Kirk in RL ) - who's built a half sim medieval city inspired by the Discworld books. It is designed for Virtual World Community Role players, as opposed to being a game level. The work has its own distinct look - with all textures been hand rendered... giving it a cartoony look...

The Show will be up for several weeks, but once is gone - it'll be gone... wiped clean for a new semester of teaching.

SLURL - http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Collective/189/33/36

Exploring Blue Mars

Blue Mars by Avatar - is another MMORPG/VW environment on the block. Eventually giving developers a big set of tools to create a wide range of online experiences. Blue Mars creates a unified login system, allowing your avatar to move between diverse Virtual Spaces using the same tech.



Montage of the Blue Mars demo spaces, showing how the technology can be used for a community spaces and games. It uses CryEngine 2 for the graphics, giving some impressive shaders for high quality graphics in a VW. Lots of potential for developers to create rich environments and online game content.

For Educators, this is no SL replacement in terms of casual idea development and experimenting.. it is a Dev Heavy technology, but has bags of potential for some Serious Games, or creating visually rich virtual campuses.

Also its now a good opportunity to consider bringing in students/staff on Games Design / Digital Media courses to help develop content for other departements.

Its hard to judge how useful Blue Mars will be based on these Demo's, as ultimately you can create whatever space you want, so its now down to some exciting developers and community building stuff going on, if it is to succeed.

Of the short time I've played with it , and looked at the other BM preview tools, my vibe is that it is more comparable with Multiverse - http://www.multiverse.net/index.html , than Second Life.

Also if you want to get a good feel for Blue Mars - you could also get a copy of Crysis for your PC ( which you can find in the bargin bin now ) - as it comes with the Sandbox Editor modding tools, that allows for machinima making too. - here's an example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R_i-0lZoj4

Virtual Environments Module - Year One

In the future I'll write a proper longer post about this module, but for now, here's some pics and link to a flickr set for a Virtual Environments module that finished last week.

www.flickr.com

Flickr Set of Projects

In the module, the students were set a brief to create a prototype experience based around an area from the DirectGov website . The students were advised to focus their projects on the themes of 'Environment & Greener Living' or 'Health and Wellbeing'

It was decided to take this module into a more corporate use of Virtual Worlds, rather than a more personal immersive experience, so the students could experience and reflect on designing for a broader audience and content creation issues. It was also an introduction to how games and VW's could be used for serious subject matter.