NMC-Campus:About

From NMC-Campus

About the NMC Campus

The NMC Campus is a virtual laboratory available to NMC member institutions and their faculty. Located in the virtual world of Second Life, it has been carefully constructed to provide researchers and students dozens of prebuilt settings for experiments in social interaction in 3-D space. These settings are expressly designed to encourage explorations along dimensions such as formal and informal; traditional and nontraditional; real and surreal; serious and playlike; and other continua as may be defined.

The campus has dozens of settings for these interactions, from the serious to the fanciful, each designed to support an optimal group size, from 2 to more than 75.

The campus supports a wide variety of traditional support media, including:

Posters
PowerPoint slides
Photographs
Charts/graphs
Videos
Weblinks

Also available, however, is the complete Second Life toolset of sophisticated building tools and the LSL scripting language, with which all of the NMC Campus and Second Life has been created. These allow the creation of virtually any simulated situation, process, or environment, and the incorporation of sophisticated interactivity. A special “Sandbox” has been provided to allow users a space to experiment with these tools, or to “rez” (create an instance of) any objects in a user’s inventory.

Interactive audio is also supported on the NMC Campus via external resources. For small groups, Skype is the recommended solution for 2-way interactive audio, and greatly enhances the experience.

For larger groups, we have found one-way audio to be most effective, with chat response, and have set up a special streaming server solution for that that can be used that takes advantage of the SL music channel.

To learn more about the NMC Campus, see the NMC Campus Observer

A short informative video can be found at http://www.nmc.org/sl/video/nmc-secondlife.mov