Beyond the Button

Dwight's desk in Second Life: Courtesy christen bouffard.This has been posted a million other places on the interwebs but I thought I would throw it up here because it made me spit coffee all over my laptop with laughter. Also, museums are getting all excited about Second Life and humor is always in order.

On The Office, NBC's satire of a paper company in Pennsylvania, Dwight Schrute created an avatar in the virtual world of Second Life only to be mocked by his co-workers.

Jim asks Dwight if he is "playing that game again."

Dwight replies quickly and exasperatedly, "Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user virtual environment. It doesn't have points or scores; it doesn't have winners or losers."

But Jim retorts, "Oh, it has losers."

I found a video clip and I am crying with laughter all over again. (Thanks Valleywag)

As penance for making fun, here are some links to some actually thoughtful posts on how museums might be able to use and inhabit this virtual space:

Museum Blogging on Second Life - Thoughts from Leslie Madsen-Brooks.

A Second Life for Your Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments and Museums - A paper published at 2007's Museums and the Web conference.

Colonizing Social Spaces - Jim Spadaccini at Ideum talks about the issues involved with museums moving into these spaces.

Exploratorium inn Second Life - The museum that has probably created the largest presence in this virtual world.

Too popular for their own good

I recently got to see a preview of the new hands-on interactive gallery at the Science Museum, London, called Launchpad. It looks like a fun and well designed space. The director of new media at the Science Museum London, Dave Patten, even has pictures up on Flickr of the space in construction (a cool move that I hope some more museums adopt).

To help promote the exhibit and to compliment the exploratory nature of the experience they built a really rad online flash game called Launchball. Sadly, this game quickly got picked up on digg and was swamped under the burst of traffic that digg can bring. It's been offline ever since. But hey, too much traffic is a good problem to have. I am sure they are working on a way to get it back up with more server juice behind it.

Wolf party at the zoo

WolfQuestI also just ran across this, in development, game from the Minnesota Zoo. They are building WolfQuest which seems like it will be a 3D first person game designed to give you a sense of what it feels like to be a wolf. I am curious to check this out when it launches. Will it be another educational "game" that feels a little too much like work, or will it be a unique multilayer environment that let's you play your way into knowledge. We shall see. There is lots of potential for this type of experience giving you a unique augmented sense of nature.

Thingamagoop: It bleeps and blinks.I ran across these fun toy synthesizers the other day while digging around in the projects that will be showcased at the Austin Maker's Faire.

You've got to watch the video to really get what this Thingamagoop does but it's safe to say it's frenetic and fun. These things got me thinking about little modular toy synthesizer components. It would be exciting to build things like this into a larger bench interface that let you play with the audio aspects of electricity and electronics.