BBQ / Second Life

My classmates were at my place yesterday for BBQ. Limin found an interesting caterer who provided almost everything as well as a big pit to put the charcoal in. Sabrina started the fire, and cooked for most of the night. She's very good at it. There were many small cockroaches that appeared from the crevices of the pit, but they were progressively killed by the heat.

Summer says 'hi!', with Limin, Sabrina, Rhizome, Yong 'yuan4 mei4' Li

Andre on the 'crazy horse'.

My social studies tutor Kenneth asked me a couple of days ago to help him build a 'learning space' in Second Life, the online virtual world. I've installed and uninstalled Second Life from my computer many times over the past few years, not due to any substantiative technical reasons, but for more pressing psychological and physiological ones: I get a headache/nauseous everytime I play SL. This fascinates me somewhat, for I've experienced this in other 'first person shooter' games before, but I've always managed to 'train myself' and had 'less dizziness' eventually. I'm trying to do the same with SL, and so will start learning the in and outs of the game, which holds great potential for learning, if kids have access to the resources.

So I wanted to see if others have the same physiological responses. Andre and Matilda (a Sims 2 veteran) tried it for the first time. They didn't get nauseous. Andre used my avatar and teleported to a really cool bar that continually streamed 80s music, and asked for a dance from a lady there (who didn't wear much); she was a little busy at that time to entertain him. I think for a while they felt like they were in the bar, the illusion worked to a certain extent. Andre said he would install the program in his laptop. Maybe he'll get more success with the girls next time, but what would his real life girlfriend (behind him) think about that? That's one of the fun things about the virtual world; ethical issues tend to appear rather quickly!

Anyway, if anyone has perspectives/solutions to dizziness, I'd love to hear them! ;p

My crazy classmates Sabrina, Billy, Andre, Matilda