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written by Larry Pixel (aka Larry Johnson)

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming. In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments.

Ultimately, Second Life was chosen, and working with an advisory board drawn from its membership, the NMC began designing a space within Second Life expressly to support collaboration, learning, insightful interaction, and experimentation — and to encourage exploration of the potential of virtual environments. (See the Concept document for the NMC Campus for additional background.)

The goal of the project was to create an immersive 3-D virtual environment for higher education and museum professionals to interact, collaborate, and experiment that would provide a low entry threshold for newcomers, while simultaneously exploring the boundaries of what is possible. The island was to have three main functions:

1. to be a place for a variety of live events that use streaming video and web content extensively;
2. to be a place to showcase and access content from the NMC’s online libraries;
3. to be a place to experiment for both the owners/organizers, and for participants.

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Once Linden Lab’s Second Life had been selected as the platform for the effort, conversations began with the company regarding the NMC’s hopes for the effort. Linden was very supportive of the idea, and assisted by introducing the NMC to the major developers of content within Second Life. A Request for Proposals was sent to each of the major developers, and the Electric Sheep Company submitted the winning proposal.

The NMC purchased a “sim” from Linden in mid-February 2006, and work began in earnest March 1, 2006.

The snapshot above, looking in the direction of what now is the Spohrer Welcome Center, shows the NMC Campus one week after Electric Sheep began work. Terraforming had just been completed, and the initial objects that ultimately would become the canals and buildings had begun to be laid down.

The bulk of the work on the NMC Campus was completed on April 20, 2006, and the moment was marked with an open house attended by more than 150 people. (See the program). Graduate and other classes began being held in the space soon after. These, and a variety of other events, meetings, and tours were used as opportunities to experiment with supporting processes and technologies to determine the best ways to support the space and the people who use it.

The official opening of the NMC Campus was marked by a simultaneous RL/SL event that took place June 9, 2006 in conjuction with the NMC Summer Conference. Immediately aftwerwards, the campus, which previously had been kept “private” and was only available by invitation, was opened to two new groups which could self-subscribe, and a self-registration system opened on the NMC Campus Observer website, a blog set up to support the campus.

Now fully operational, the NMC Campus has been carefully constructed to provide researchers and students dozens of prebuilt settings for experiments in social interaction in 3-D space. Expressly designed to encourage explorations both formal and informal, traditional and nontraditional, real and surreal, and serious and playlike, the spaces are flexible and will lend themselves to additional uses, yet to be defined.

The campus has a variety of places for these interactions, from the serious to the fanciful, each designed to support an optimal group size; these range from 2 to more than 75. The campus also supports a wide variety of traditional media, including posters, PowerPoint slides, photographs, charts/graphs, videos, and weblinks, and these resources continue to be added on a regular basis as a core component of the project. All of these resources are available to NMC members who may wish to bring classes to the campus for a visit, as part of a research project, or for a full term. Complete details on using the campus are available on the NMC Campus wiki.

Also available is the complete Second Life toolset of sophisticated building tools and the LSL scripting language, with which all of the NMC Campus and Second Life has been created. These allow the creation of virtually any simulated situation, process, or environment, and the incorporation of sophisticated interactivity.

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