(Temporary?) End

The project has temporarily ended. We ae hoping, though, that it will continue in the future. In the spirit of the venture we have decided to keep on with the blog in the hope that we will secure more funding and that it can soon be resumed.

We have land.

A few teething problems setting up a laptop as a temporary server. We now have land in Second Life, however! This means that, as of next Tuesday, we should be up and running streaming audio from here into SL via the servers at Preston College, from whom we are renting our land.

Darren has been refining his building skills: when creating an object, keep it square to the grib. This makes it much easier to bolt additional parts onto your object.

Streaming Server

We have started exploring the possibilities of streaming from the college directly into SL by using a server. Initially, we are trying to use a standard desktop machine as a server. So far, we have set up Shoutcast and Winamp for this purpose. We haven't tested it yet. Experiments to follow.

Arranging Meeting

We have decided to puchase land in SL via Preston College who, as previously mentioned in this blog, are already at an advanced stage in assimilating SL into several college areas. We are hoping to meet with Django tomorrow evening, one of the representatives from there with whom we met in May. This will enable us to both iron out details in our arrangement and to quiz him about other issues we are unclear about.

Avatar Registration

We have realised that several participants in our teacher training session encountered difficulties in registaring their avatar. Upon completing the process and requesting email authentication in order to gain validation and enter SL, some people found that the expected email was not forthcoming. This may be due to problems with the college's server being overloaded or SL having an issue with so many users attempting to create accounts at the same location simultaneously.

Music via local chat

This evening we experimented further with sound in SL. Sound quality was gerneraly good, but plagued with occassional glitches. It seems that these are worse where there are more 'prims' (objects). On a golf course, we experienced the least cutting out of sound. There also appeared to be a disturbance to the received sound when the receiver began to type.

Staff Party

We attempted to stream a live music improvisation into Second Life. This presented some unforseen technical difficulties, which we will soon be examnining in order to solve.