Grady College Exits Second Life; Leaves Assets Behind

The Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication bought an island in Second Life last year to "explore the potential of virtual worlds." Now the project is being cut, not because the New Media Institute wants to stop its virtual world activities, but because of budget cuts. As it exits, though, the college is calling attention to one of the bigger issues in setting up a virtual world presence: owning the assets.

While it was a hot topic last year, interest in full-blown interoperability has died down a bit this year. For many users right now, it's less important to manage your avatar or identity across virtual worlds and walk through them seamlessly as it is to simply re-use your assets.

There's been an increase in virtual worlds relying on standards for 3D assets and modeling from the beginning, and others, like Forterra, are integrating them as they see strong demand from users and clients. As Linden Lab moves forward, particularly with its increasing focus on education and enterprise use, I imagine they'll have to follow suit.

"Here is one of the most unfortunate aspects of virtual worlds. Unlike a Web page that we can download and store on local hard drives, everything that we built only works in Second Life," Scott Shamp, director of the New Media Institute, told RedAndBlack.com. "So we can't save it. Frankly, that sucks."

Comments

[ba]

It was common knowledge that ALL assets in Second Life are stuck there. Nothing new, just "educators" being scammed by get rich vr schemas.
These "educators" were just as greedy and suckered in as most in all the SL-avatar-VR hype sites like this helped promote.
DUMB ASS educators, and you wonder why our students cant read or have any sence of history past the premiere of LOST season 1 DVD.;(

[len]

I hate to say I told you so.

Actually, no I don't.

Time after time the VRML generation pointed out that the real challenge was the cost of owning 3D content in the face of the churn of vendors who insist that market success depends on capturing and locking up the customer's content. It didn't work for the WYSIWYG vendors after the first turn of the wheel and it won't work for 3D content that has complex scripting.

And once again, a media fed by ad revenue knifed the pioneers in the back as their act of making their bones for the New Our Thing.

It's not laughable. It's droll. The web remembers and doesn't learn. In any intelligence test, the web would be considered an idiot.

[Tony]

But this is incorrect. All of the information can be exported and saved. The question boils down to copyrights to anything that you may have purchased from a content developer.
They can use SecondInventory or libSL (now openMV) to export the data to an xml file, including texture data. After that, you would need probably need a tool to convert it for the target platform, but if you at least save all the data, you can worry about the import after you have funding again.

[Chaz Longstaff]

If they are that broke that they can't afford monthly tier on an island, how do they afford to turn the lights on in their RL offices?

Or maybe it was the cost of salaries; if so, then why not think outside the box, and entrust students with the maintenance as part of their coursework?

And like Tony said, "All of the information can be exported and saved.", provided you created it and have full-perms on it. For all the funding (they likely motored through way too soon), I'm surprised they didn't pick that up.

BTW, just what did they tag the overall monthly cost at for them including admin overhead on their end?