VCM Building Under Construction on Second Life Virtual World

The VCM (Visual Communications Program) has started the construction of a three-story building, nickname the ANNEX. The Annex will consist of a first floor art gallery, second floor classroom, and a third floor multi-purpose Learning Resource Center. On the campus grounds overlooking the ocean, avatars will walk to the beach through an interactive work- ethics garden.

The campus building is located on Second Life-Virtual World. Anyone can visit the Annex by simply joining Second Life with free membership (https://join.secondlife.com/) and creating an Avatar (an avatar is a computer user's representation of himself/herself or alter ego). With an avatar you can visit the campus annex at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stephenson/102/204/32 The annex is open 24/7.

Grand opening of the facility and first art exhibit is scheduled for Midterm.

One of the reasons for VCM procuring and developing land on Second Live is the closing of Lively.com this month. Lively was a network of avatars and virtual rooms created and decorated by its users. Google launched Lively on July 8, 2008 as an experiment in providing people with more ways to express themselves on the Web. Our Virtual chat room 202 3/4 was a product of lively.

In such a short period of time, Lively grew, to thousands of cafes, bars, discos, tropical islands, treehouses, space stations, galleries, bedrooms and more. Lively's users shared their rooms with people from all over the real world, meeting and chatting with each other via their customizedavatars. As of December 31, 2008 Lively ended and because of that we are off to Second Life.