Museum Virtual Worlds

Using digital design tools to develop ideas for and to prototype real world museum exhibits is an important aspect of contemporary exhibit design. The Tech museum of innovation in San Jose, California is experimenting with a twist on this by inviting people outside of their exhibit design staff to create exhibits virtually in SL that will be created IRL and exhibited at The Tech.

In The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, they opened up a design competition and gave in-world classes and workshops to help guide exhibit developers in using SL to realize their ideas. They selected seven winning designs and fabricated the exhibits which have been installed as a first exhibit in The Tech Virtual Test Zone Gallery at the museum in San Jose. Peter Friess, President of the institution, welcomed a group of San Francisco Bay Area museum and education professionals to the opening of the new exhibit at the Tech on June 4, 2008, along with Philip Rosedale, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Linden Lab — creators of Second Life and the Second Life Grid. Friess stated that The Tech was committed to using experimental methods such as prototyping and developing exhibits in SL as a way to develop new museum exhibits and that sharing information and practices about the approach with other museums and interactive developers was an important part of the museum’s process.

Visit The Tech virtual on The Tech island in SL

This past year, we’ve been seeing more and more physical devices connected to objects and avatars in SL, adding further complexity to mixed reality and augmented reality environments for exhibits and installations.

Artists have often been at the forefront of interfacing the real and the virtual and in exploring the grey zones where these worlds meet. New media arist and sculptor Joe Delappe re-enacted Ghandi’s historic Salt March of 1930, a protest against the British tax on salt at the time. At a gallery in New York and in Second Life this past March and April, Joe walked 240 miles on a treadmill he connected to SL to control his avatar MGandhi Chakrabarti’s virtual world steps, recreating the march. As much a performance as an installation, his work demonstrates the interesting time displacement effects and physical connections that are possible when RL elements are combined with telepresence and virtual environments. We often think of things in a virtual sense as being instantenous, so it’s somewhat jarring to put something like the slower speed of a real person walking next to flying avatars. With a nod to the Slow Food and Slow Art movements, real/virtual connections like this might allow us to savor our virtual interactions a bit more.

If you’d like to connect to a wide range of educators using Second Life, consider attending the Second Life Education Community Conference, held in conjunction with the official Second Life Community Convention. Whereas the SLCC convenes a broad community to dialogue about topics including conducting business in SL, marketing, technical issues, community development and growth, etc., the SLECC focuses on educational projects and resources. I participated in the event two years ago and found it to be a great way to connect IRL with people whom I’d met in SL and to find out more about current experiments in SL in the educational realm. Both events are taking place September 5th – 7th, 2008 in Tampa, Fl.