Bubble Flowers: Avatar Bubblemeister is dancing around the Harbin Conference Center blowing virtual bubbles, He's scripted some of these bubbles

Harbin ethnography:


... Second Life is both very flexible and open to avatar creativity.

Avatar Bubblemeister is dancing around the Harbin Conference Center blowing virtual bubbles. He's scripted some of these bubbles, as they come out of his soap bottle, to grow very large, and for their diaphanous skins to show psychedelic light shows and video clips of rock and roll bands, that he finds on youtube.com. Rose, who is no longer looking at the share-pile of clothes, some of which seem to have a life of their own, in the way which they shimmer, and even move – one sweater even says the words “wear me, put me on” - asks me to show her how to create something in Second Life. I ask her if her avatar would like would like to dance inside a very large bubble which floats and rolls. She nods yes, and says “with you.” So I click on the ground, choose “create” from the pie-like menu, and another menu pops up with building options. I select the sphere shape, and with the magic wand cursor, create a sphere in the corner of the Conference Center dance space by clicking on the ground. I choose the 'object tab' and go to the x y z dimensions, and enlarge each of these to 7 Second Life meters. I choose the 'transparent' setting, and then go to the 'texture' tab. First I choose the bioluminescent texture, and add ribs of jellyfish-like moving rainbow lights to the sphere Rose and I are about to step into to dance. Then I go to the video link, which is in development, and doesn't always work very well. I select a clip of the Grateful Dead playing that beautiful ballad Peggy-O on April 12, 1978, and slide the opacity bar to the very opaque side of the scale, then I drag and drop it onto the side of the sphere. I say to Rose “just hop through the skin of the sphere, and start dancing; the sphere will lift you as it begins to float. I hop in to it, too. I click the 'suspend gravity' box and, just as avatars can fly in Second Life, this sphere begins to rise up. And we start dancing slowly as the sphere begins to float around the upper spaces of the Harbin Conference Center.








(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/04/bubble-flowers-avatar-bubblemeister-is.html - April 15, 2010)