Blog Week 1

Hi! It’s me katielloyd99, and it is week one of my Virtual Environments class. This week I was set the task to visit 3 new locations in the Second Life virtual world, of course, this would take me some time as I am still not fully confident in walking! I may be 26 years of age but for some reason, I feel like an all-new being… Strange.

As my wonderful controller Big Katie (BK) is from Dublin, Ireland we decided that visiting virtual Ireland would be a good idea, so we logged in and arrived right in the middle of Dublin, next to the Blarney Stone Pub. I started walking around (as much as I could) banging into walls and such as I went, but I did make it across the Ha’penny bridge, into the Savoy and almost fell into the River Liffey. According to BK, a lot of this Dublin looked like real Dublin. It wasn’t the fastest to load, but I saw that as a good sign as it meant there was a lot to see and some great buildings, detailed wonderfully. I was starting to get the hang of things. I even managed the stairs!

My next stop, we decided to go somewhere that neither of us had been to before. BK had read about the Church of Scientology has a location within SL, although when I tried to go we discovered that we had to pay to gain entry to the group. We decided not to do this and chose to try another place of worship. This time we looked through an SL list of popular worship places and we decided to go with God’s House of Prayer Church. When I went it was 1.41 am within SL and there were very few people there, although this space was truly beautiful. As I moved around this space, I discovered many interactive items. I was given a House of Prayer info book that I kept in my inventory. A moment later I was given a code of conduct asking that I only bring my “human side”, I knew I was going to need BK’s help for that! And some guidelines about behavior and topic of conversation, etc. I decided to walk around and I discovered different rooms within the church, it did feel as if I was inside a modern-day Christian Church, the outside landscaping was beautiful, although it did cause me to crash a little. I finally worked out how to take pictures and practiced taking some snapshots of the church.

Finally, I decided to go somewhere completely random, in the search bar I typed the word “dystopia” and it brought me so a place called “Temple of Iris–Linden Historical Site, Iris”. This location was decorated for Halloween and there were a couple of people around. In this location I was the best at moving around I had been so far, or so I thought until I managed to fall out of the temple and ended up on some sort of peer like walk-way surrounded by water. It took me some time to work out how to get back up but I did find some other cool places where music could be performed. Later I managed to end up in the water and it was good to find out I am capable of breathing underwater. Once I made my way out of the water I came across a “Memorial to Victims of Terrorism Throughout the World”, it was quite beautiful to see all the signs and notices saying things like “Pray for the people of Syria” or “Je Suis Paris”.