Get a Life: Mixed Reality Conservation
http://secondlife.com/
I had been meaning to write a blog post about the idea of museums and conservation in virtual worlds for a little while, and then much to my pleasure I discovered that ‘Second life’ recently announced the opening of the Smithsonian’s Latino Virtual Museum:
“The Smithsonian Latino Center, in partnership with Ohio University Vital Lab and Second Life’s Linden Labs are pleased to present the Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum (LVM), an avatar-based 3D virtual learning environment whose unique navigational features will provide access to the vast and rich collections, research and scholarship, exhibitions and educational activities of the Smithsonian Institution as they relate to U.S. Latinos and Latin America.”
(Smithsonian Latino Center 2009)
In fact Linden (2009) stated that “Art and culture are no strangers to Second Life–this we all know! The opportunity to visualize artistic content in a 3d space allows for innovation that can expand and expose art collections from the real world”. It also seems that rumours of Second Life’s demise are some what premature, and while it may no longer be the most in vogue website (Twitter seems to have somewhat stolen its thunder) it still has considerable pulling power.
“The number of people that have joined the virtual world since it was created in 1999 eclipsed 15 million last year. The average number of people logged on to Second Life at any given time is about 70,000, according to Linden Lab.”
(Chapman 2009)
“People spent 360 million dollars (US) in Second Life last year, according to Linden.”
(Chapman 2009)
“More than 1.3 million US dollars worth of transactions reportedly take place daily in Second Life, where the currency is the Linden dollar.”
(Chapman 2009)
As I have shown the museum world is developing an interest in Second Life, as the Art world already has, in March 2009 there were “upwards of 600 confirmed art galleries” (tvannatter 2009) within Second Life. The academic world has also taken to virtual worlds such as Second Life, not only for the purpose of studying those who take part in them (Forte 2008) but also of creating ‘mixed reality’ galleries such as that produced by students at the Penn State University (nettrice 2009). The Art World Market (a critical review of Virtual Culture) have made a report concerning Art and Second Life available online (Minsky 2007) that might be considered an interesting source.
Could conservation develop a virtual reality presence in Second Life? Could Second Life be a useful means for conservation to showcase conservation to the world, could they even be places for conserving virtual digital culture? I wonder if conservators could develop conservation that practices in both this reality and a virtual reality, such conservation I shall term “mixed-reality conservation”. The world of architecture has already demonstrated that virtual reality worlds can be a useful place for developing 3d models of reality for testing (Ross 2008), conservation already experiments with a variety of ‘virtual restoration’ processes (cf. Law et al 2009) and therefore it seems that a Second Life virtual world approach to virtual restoration seems a feasible approach. I wonder if any conservators have already set up labs in Second Life? I’d love to hear about any.
resources:
* Glenn Chapman. 2009. Second Life finding new life. Physorg.com. March 14th, 2009. http://www.physorg.com/news156269282.html
* Smithsonian Latino Center. 2009. Museum Web 3.0: The Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum. http://latino.si.edu/education/LVM_Main.htm
* George Linden. 2009. Smithsonian’s Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life. Second Life Blog. Posted on Mar 19, 2009 10:28:22 AM. https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/education/blog/2009/03/19/smithsonians-latino-virtual-museum-in-second-life
*tvannatter. 2009. Early Adopters: The Art world of Second Life. Technology in the Arts. April 15, 2009. http://www.technologyinthearts.org/?p=989
* Forte, M. 2008. Avatara: Ethnographic Film in a Virtual World. On Open Anthropology Blog. December 28th 2008. http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/avatara-ethnographic-film-in-a-virtual-world/
* nettrice. 2009. 322 Mixed Reality Gallery. My Second Life HUD Blog. March 29, 2009. http://netarthud.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/322-mixed-reality-gallery/
* Minsky, R. 2007. THE ART WORLD MARKET OF SECOND LIFE®. http://minskyreport.com/ArtWorld_Market.pdf
* Ross, J. M. 2008. Wikitecture – Radical Collaboration in Architecture. On the blog OʼReilly Radar. October 16th 2008. http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/wikitecture-radical-collabor.html
* Alvin J. Law, Daniel G. Aliaga, Yu Hong Yeung, Richard McCoy, Amy McKune, and Larry Zimmerman. 2009. “Projecting Restorations in Real-Time for Real-World Objects”, Museums and the Web, 8 pages, Apr., 2009. http://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/aliaga/law-mw09-restoration.pdf see also: http://wiki.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/doku.php?id=projects%3Avirtual_restoration
You might be interested to know that The Field Museum of Chicago has had a virtual museum for kids and parents in the virtual world of http://www.kidscom.com Here kids walk into the lobby where the famous dinasaur Sue is, and go on a learning adventure about animals in Illinois wetlands. Then after the online scavenger hunt where they take virtual pictures and piece together the missing animal, they can then download a mini-booklet to use in the museum to find the animals in the exhibits. This has been extremely successful – for both knowledge exposure but also to get families interested in attendance. Try the experience at http://www.kidscom.com, create an avatar and go visit The Field Museum online.
Hi Jori,
Thats excellent. Thanks so much. I like that idea of mixing the virtual reality with the idea of gaming in museums.. Two thumbs up to the Field Museum!
This is great I’d have never heard about this otherwise, this is why I love blogs.
Cheers, Dan.