Giuliana Perco

One of the challenging tasks of Module 2 was to create an educational scene in SL and to “pack it” using either the spiffy Holodeck that we got from Loki Clifton, or the Builder’s Buddy scripts. I was all set to use the Holodeck, especially after the enlightening workshop that Paz gave us on the topic. After all, I knew how Builder’s Buddy worked….I had even given a hands-on workshop on it!  It was time to try something new.

This activity immediately posed a big problem, though: for a while it was hard  to think of a scene I wanted to build. I did not want to create the usual classroom scene, also because (as one of my students put it in her blog on her SL experience) if we are going to go to SL just to sit in a replica of a classroom, we might as well meet face to face and avoid all technical problems. I also did not want to rely too much on educational tools, like presenters, HUDs, and so on, I wanted the scene to be “mine”, so to speak.

In the end, I luckily came up with an idea that I really liked and for the past month I have been working hard trying to create a scene that would be related to the Second Life teaching typology in which I am interested, that is “immersive literature”.

In other words, I had the ambitious idea of creating a scene related to a work of literature, a 3D scene that could be “immersive” in the sense that people could walk into it and (perhaps) interact with it. Since the previous examples of “immersive literature” were quite impressive and elaborate and did not limit themselves to a single scene, but often included a whole sim, at the beginning the task was daunting. An additional issue was also to find a literary work that could be suited to SL, that was simple enough for me to follow while creating my scene with my scarce building skills and without a mouse (!), and that could be interesting.

My first and very ambitious idea was to build a virtual 3D version of the labyrinthic library of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa). However, aside from the fact that I would have needed a really huge space to re-create the library, I doubt that I could have done it in time and without using 5000 and more prims. So I eventually thought about Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) in which several impossible and imaginary cities are described in detail through individual, short chapters.  These stories are told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, who wants to know what Marco Polo saw during his long journey to China. Since the chapters of the book are not only narrative, but also very descriptive, I thought that I could perhaps find a city that would work for me. Easier said than done.

Building most of those cities would have required skills that I do not possess and an imagination/creativity that would surpass mine. Several cities required some movement, others were descriptions of ideas and not of physical places. It was hard.  In the end, I chose “Armilla”. What is Armilla?  This is how Calvino’s Marco Polo begins to describe it:

“Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.” (trans. by William Weaver)

Armilla seemed almost perfect for my purpose, so I began working on it, enthusiastically beginning with lots of shiny and skinny cylinders that I would then convert into pipes.  Creating a three-dimensional network of pipes is not that easy in SL. For instance, I wanted all the pipes to look different, some rusty, some new and shiny, some moldy. That required a lot of time choosing and adapting textures. Also, the pipes had to be different in width, length, height. Some of them had to be curved.

I also needed faucets, taps, showers, a bathtub, etc.  I managed to make a realistic shower-head, a pretty good bathtub and sink, an acceptable boiler and a heating unit. But I must confess that the super detailed and almost perfect faucets and spouts in Armilla are not mine, but they are Alpha Lorgsval’s creations: he generously gave me one and I modified it a bit in colour and texture, but the structure is his and his only! Thanks a lot Alpha!!!!

Alas, I tried to use the “snap to the grid” trick that Paz taught us to align my pipes perfectly, but I could not do it, so actually some of my pipes are a bit skewed, I am afraid. In any case, since this was my first attempt, I must say that I am pretty proud of the result.  The free particles scripts for dripping water and water sprays that I got at the “Particle Lab” and modified to suit my purposes were particularly helpful and improved the whole structure a lot.

Once the structure was finished, the real problems arose when I had to put it all into the holodeck. First, I had to insert the holodeck script into all the many, many pieces of virtual plumbing, then I had to insert them into the holodeck.  In other words, quite a time-consuming task.  Second, and most problematic, initially the holodeck was not positioned correctly relatively to the pipe structure (my fault) and so when I created the new crate, only a portion of the construction was recorded. I managed to correct this. But when I tried to place the scene in the holodeck again….. pooof, my whole city disappeared!!!

Unfortunately, though I had saved each single piece in my inventory, I had not recorded their individual positions, so basically what I had was a bunch of scattered 3D puzzle pieces that had to be put together again.

I was very sad

I rebuilt Armilla with a lot of effort: initially I wanted to make it exactly the way it was before, but in the end it was easier to change it a little, so now it looks a bit different from the first version. When the time came  to put the scene into the holodeck again, I stopped though: could I risk it? I had recorded the position of each piece this time, true, but still… if the whole thing disappeared once more, it would have meant a lot of work for me again……

So….instead of the holodeck, I decided to rely on my dear Builder’s Buddy and….it worked

You can visit Armilla on my MUVEnation platform. Next to my SL version of Armilla there is  a very tall board with the initial paragraph of the story in both English and Italian: by clicking on it, one gets a notecard with the whole story, in both languages.

PS: The absolutely best example of immersive literature that I know is called Foul Whisperings Strange Matters (Macbeth 48, 50, 54): as the sim’s name indicates, it’s about William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and it’s  really a great experience to walk into it.