NMC Campus Observer

Talking About NMC Campus 3.0 with CJ Carnot and Stella Costello

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Feb 11, 2009 07:47am

In our humble apology department, we’ve been remiss on not getting around to doing this interview earlier. CJ Carnot (aka CJ Holden) and Stella Costello (aka Beth Sactjen) have been the master builders for NMC Virtual Worlds projects for a long time, and we have yet to nail them down to talk about the work they do. So we grabbed some of their time today to talk about work on our home base of NMC Campus.

Listen to interview [14 Mb mp3 15:17]

If you have entered SL on NMC Orientation Island, attended an event in the NMC Conference Center, visited an exhibit at the Aho Museum or Ars Simulacra, picked up freebies on Learning, explored Virtual Macbeth, you’ve experienced what they create for us.

CJ, who works for us from his home in the U.K., is a real life architect, bringing some amazing skills to our builds and designs, such as his method of modular buildings. Stella, who was famous in Sl for her sculptures before joining NMC, crafts her designs from her home in Nebraska.

We met on the sim that was the original one sim home for us when NMC Campus launched in early 2006. As you may now, less then a year later, NMC Campus grew to 8 sims, and rapidly went above 90. Recently, we’ve been moving a few sims around to generate a more cohesive core, of what I am calling (not sure anyone else is or cares) NMC Campus 3.0. Until now, each of our sims really was island like, and the goal here os to create more cohesiveness in moving between sims, and bringing together ones that serve similar functions. For example, Research Park, with the lovely Red Rocks Amphitheater, is now adjacent to NMC Conference Center, convenient for our conferences when we use both venues.

For moving around, CJ has designed a new transport system, riffing a DR Who motif, of a TARDIS. These blue phone boots, that you will soon find on all our sims, offers a clickable map that allows you to teleport to other NMC Campus sims. We have new signboards up everywhere that broadcast via RSS the latest stories from the Campus Observer and the NMC Campus Community Events Calendar.

But the real work has been the core of the original NMC Campus to make it the focal point.

Our plan is to create a place people will visit, hang out informally. At the core is a public sandbox, what we are calling our “60 Minute Social Sandbox”

The 60 Minute part is the piece that auto-returns things to you (to keep it tidy). This is not really the place to work on projects (we have NMC Labs available for that, more space), but this more as a place where people can informally share, do impromptu demos, etc. Our plan includes a new program, lacking a formal title, but “Somewhere in the world is is Lunch” urging people around the world to park here during their lunch hour and interact with other people that show up.

And just before we recorded the interview today, we brainstormed a great enabling tool. We were talking about some new LSL scripting that allows access to an avatar’s profile pic. In about 75 seconds, CJ created a little prim demo, where as we took turns could click it, and it would assume a texture of our profile picture:

So our Social Sandbox will use similar code to locate the textures/pictures of anyone hanging around the sandbox, and then we can broadcast that to other sims on NMC Campus as a way of seeing “Who’s At NMC Campus Now”, with a click teleport to jump to the sandbox.

Look for more announcements soon as we ramp up activities at NMC Campus, coming up on our third anniversary this April.

Story filed under: Audio / Video,Studio NMC

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)