Nigel Paravane

Over the holidays I started a little project to take some of the building topics that I discussed in my 25 entry blog series on Second Life last year and turn them into an online book. This will allow me to update and improve those pieces, and expand into other areas of building. I reworked [...]

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After doing a lot of Second Life during the first half of the year, I took a few months off. As I previously mentioned, I needed a break from what I was doing in that virtual environment because I felt I had gotten into a rut. For a social environment, I was being rather anti-social.
When [...]

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I just received a copy of Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life. Since I did the rather long series on Second Life earlier this year, I’ve been thinking about doing a book on construction and scripting techniques, though as with most such thoughts of mine I haven’t had [...]

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I just got a question via email about how much land to buy when first doing so in Second Life. Here is the response I gave.
That’s a good question. Do you plan to build on the land yourself or buy a prefab? The smallest lot that people usually build on is 512 square meters, and [...]

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I’m on the plane now between Chicago and Tucson, heading for the InformationWeek 500 Conference. Travel has gone very well so far, with no glitches. Evidently the guy sitting behind me on the plane was arrested recently on a Driving-While-Intoxicated charge. To hear him speak, the problem was that he got caught, not that he [...]

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I did the weirdest thing this morning: I sold all of my Second Life land and converted most of the Lindens into US dollars.
Am I giving up? Am I pulling up stakes? Why would I do this? This blog entry, the twenty-fifth in this series about Second Life, is about the answers to those questions.
So, [...]

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I finally got a new USB headset today and had a chance to experiment with voice in the Second Life beta. It was really quite good. Mitch Wagner has a very nice writeup of it today over in InformationWeek and he was kind enough to mention our conversation (I’m Nigel Paravane in SL).
When I first [...]

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I’m going to tell you a Second Life secret: there are ways to fly as high into the air as you wish. This allows you to fly over (but not down into) land on which you have no access or from which you have been banned. You can build a house 600m up in the [...]

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I decided to elevate my castle and surrounding land up several hundred meters off the ground. Here are a few shots of what it looks like and how it is developing.

I did this because:

I wanted more elbow room,
The ground was snowy and once I “sodded” over it, I was no longer tied to the terrain, [...]

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If you own or control land in Second Life, you can play streaming music to anyone who is on your land. This all boils down to their having streaming music enabled and your providing SL a URL to the music. Let’s start with the first.

Looking at the menu bar at the top of the screen, [...]

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Sometimes you need to go out and check those darn rocket engines yourself.

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As a reminder, this blog entry contains my personal opinions and does not necessarily represent the ideas of my employer IBM regarding virtual worlds in general or Second Life in particular.
The rise in popularity of online multiplayer games and 3D interaction environments like Second Life naturally brings into question what other services may follow. In [...]

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Very early in my Second Life experience, an IBM colleague asked me “So, are you dreaming about SL yet?” Ha, harumpf, of course not, I replied. Now, of course, I sometimes do and so do many others to whom I’ve asked the same question. You are not alone.
This really shouldn’t be all that strange, [...]

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My team and I have been working on our Second Life building for open source and standards. This is what the building looks like at sunset.
To be clear, this is not for every one of the thousands of IBM people involved with standards and open source, just my extended team. We’re done with the third [...]

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Linden Labs has open sourced the client for Second Life . This opens up all sorts of new possibilities but also raises some questions.
One possibility, raised in the transcript of Cory Linden’s Town Hall held yesterday, is for the creation of robot clients that then move through the SL world. (The client is the viewer [...]

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