Island: On my virtual Harbin in Open Simulator, an open, virtual world program similar to Second Life

Harbin ethnography:


On my virtual Harbin in Open Simulator (an open, virtual world program similar to Second Life, which draws from the same library of assets), which was stolen :( in June 2009 (with 14 chapters of this Harbin ethnography, and a very different book than this will be), the whole, virtual Harbin island was situated on my own computer's hard drive, and connectable potentially with other virtual islands on other individuals hard drives, from California with a friend in Massachusetts – that is, my Open Simulator avatar went onto a virtual island on his hard drive 3000 miles away, and we were able to communicate there. We created a network of our virtual islands and avatars using Open Simulator and TCP/IP). Despite some current, technical limitations of hardware, bandwidth and telecommunications networking for making Open Sim as interoperable, avatar-to-avatar, and virtual island-to-island, as Second Life, which is hosted on computer servers owned by Linden Lab, probably in the San Francisco Bay Area, the advantage of the Open Simulator virtual world application is that it's open source, and islands are distributed across individual hard drives, and therefore owned independently of a company such as Linden Lab, which although free to visit and spend time in, is not free if you want your islands builds to remain up and visitable.













(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/04/island-on-my-virtual-harbin-in-open.html - April 8, 2010)