Second Life

Our ICT class entered another phase (3rd Phase to be exact)!

What is Second Life? Another chance of life? Well, sort of like that! Watch the video below and you will get the picture!



What I knew before this is that the virtual worlds made games possible. But I never knew that virtual worlds also do provide for us, humans to have another form of life (particularly the ideal life we want and not being able to have it in the reality world), the second life.

All you need to do is to just create an account and login to choose your avatar ! You may consider changing your appearance, be a microbe or giant, change gender, whatever you can do in real life, it is always possible to do in the virtual second life!

From the video clip, second life provides the opportunity for people from different locations all over the world to interact. One of the educational uses of this second life is to be able to attend lectures in second life at our own comfort zone. I think it is convenient in the sense that we don't have to travel far to classes and yet able attend lectures, through the lecture theater created in second life. However I felt that there is always a risk doing so, because what happens if the internet suddenly disconnects? I don't think the lecturer would love to wait for us to be connected again to continue his class. From this, we need to have a very stable internet connection!

For me, when my group was using the avatar of second life, at first we were so excited and enjoyed ourselves to this new virtual world! However, we realized that it was not easy controlling the movements of the avatar because I think the respond was a bit slow. After about 15 minutes, I felt a bit bored maybe due to the respond of the avatar or might be we had no goal roaming around the virtual world.

As prof mentioned, second life is not yet widely used (at least here in Asia), but will be the next "big" thing in future. Using second life would require the schools to upgrade their computers with a better bandwidth. Second life is very useful for areas that are hard to be carried out in the real world due to limitations such as time constrains, to save cost, for subjects that needs visualization such as Geography, Biology, Chemistry, Art etc.