Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Legume - Bilateral Assymetries: Actual and Virtual Worlds, Human and Avatar Perspectives

Beginning to build a virtual world in OpenSim (which draws on the 3-D virtual world of Second Life library of resources) rewrites questions of the representational actual {the virtual}, vis-a-vis the actual. It's possible to import USGS data elevation maps into this open source, virtual world software, but in order to make this terrain avatar-centric, it makes sense to change the actual in-world topography vis-a-vis real life topography. For example, condensing topographic elevation in-world makes sense 1) from avatars' perspective, as well as 2) from our viewing of our avatars on the screen.

Other changes include . . .

Avatar subjectivity, therefore, rewrites representations of place vis-a-vis human subjectivity, due to virtual world building technologies.



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Here's how to download the free program of Second Life to get your own avatar, which is also free and takes about 20-30 minutes. Not only can you build in this world, there are many free lectures and concerts, as well as an emerging society (with a currency, the Linden dollar, that has an exchange rate with the US dollar.




And here's how to set up the free, open source software of Open Sim on your own MacBook computer.


Download the program from this page:

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Download

(Installing OpenSim requires some knowledge of networking).



And here are useful building tools.





But such questions don't rewrite the benefits of the Harbin warm pools and actual relaxation response . . .

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