 Hello, my name is Alan Hudson. Up until about a year ago I was a lecturer in higher education here in the UK. For the last year I've been a freelance developer working mostly in second life building educational and I suppose you could say art type installations. First of all I should say a little bit about second life for those of you who don't know about it and aren't familiar with it. It's a 3D virtual world accessible via the internet. One of the reasons I particularly like second life and to use second life with students is that it's available 24 hours a day every day of the year and it's free to access it. So students don't need to buy or steal any software. They can legitimately download the viewer and within a few minutes they should be in and using second life. I find generally gaming type students take to second life very very quickly. It has an interface now which I think is fairly similar to a lot of gaming environments. Other students struggle but usually enjoy it and I think if you're enjoying learning you're going to learn a lot more than if you're not. It's quite a fun and very visual environment which students seem to take to very quickly. It's also a very sociable place in that you're aware of other people using that environment. Unlike using a website where a lot of the time you're unaware whether anybody else is looking at it or not. In second life you can see other users' avatars and you can interact with them, you can talk with them. Now in that way a student is never alone in second life. There's always someone that can turn to her help. There are lots of groups similar to Facebook and other social networks. You can put a message out on the group and usually you'll have two or three people trying to help you out and fix your problem for you. No matter what time of day that is. Which means that tutors don't need to be in there all the time to help and support students. Students don't have to wait a week until they see their lecture the next time. They can move on with the project. There are potential problems there with assessments. Can you ever really be sure that what you're seeing is actually the student's work is certainly an issue. But it's a great environment for learning in. I think one of the problems with using multimedia generally for educational purposes are the times, resources and skills needed to develop resources for education. It's fairly typically in second life to see quite enthusiastic projects which are lacking in one or more of those areas. So perhaps the person has the time but they don't have the skills or they may have the skills and not the time. They may not have a budget to develop. So second life tends to be full of potentially good installations. Work where you can see that with a lot more work, a lot more development, this could be something really great. But the people developing it, I don't have the time or the skills or the resources to do that. What's nice about me not teaching now is that I have a lot more time. I have a very mixed background in both IT and programming and in arts, which I think is the mix you need in order to develop resources within platforms like second life. I used to find even teaching part time I just had no time left in my day and my week really to develop much in second life. Whereas now I can get up in the morning and be indulgent, self-indulgent in it and really work to create something rather unusual and deep in second life. I'd like to show you two things I've been working on the last year. One is what we call the 3D Warehouse, which is a warehouse built for health and safety training here in the UK. Although we built it with UK regulations and UK type warehousing in mind, we're also looking at developing countries where I think training in this sort of area is particularly difficult. Training in health and safety generally is difficult because we can't expose students to too many dangers. We can't actually throw boxes on top of them or set fire to them. But of course we can do that in second life. The second installation I'd like to show you is what I've called New Synthetic Theatre, which is a new way I think of experiencing a time-based medium. It's a little like theatre, it's a little like an unmanned multi-screen movie theatre. And it isn't really like either of those at all. You could say it's a bit like a very short video game. But I'll show you that second. So first of all we'll come along to the warehouse. The idea of this is that it runs 24 hours a day. Students can come along either as part of the class or individually or with their friends out of class hours. And the whole system should be here up and running all the time. Basically what happens is the student approaches the warehouse gates and you'll be prompted to attach a HUD, an HUD, a head-up display. If you don't do that you can see we have three security guards who scream at you to put your HUD on. They don't actually stop you going in, but they make it very clear that you are supposed to wear the HUD and you're not going to get a full experience if you don't. So now as we attach the HUD the security guards disappear and we can proceed through the car park. This is based on a real-life warehouse in Selby in Yorkshire here in the UK where we visited for two days and took photos and recorded what we did and interviewed the workers there. We also got the workers to actually take part in small simulations because there are two sides to this project. One side is the 3D world you can see here in Second Life. We also have a website, quite a significantly large website with videos and other health and safety information on there which is free to access. This was funded by the CILT which is a transport and logistics organisation here in the UK. Really as a pilot programme to see where we could go with it and only if it would work. And we worked with both London Metropolitan University and Anglia Ruskin University. My two colleagues here, Chris O'Reilly from London Met and Debbie Holly from Anglia Ruskin. Warehouses I realised are quite busy places. As you can see there's lots of moving objects. There are two conveyor systems here, one moving small boxes, small trays and the other one carrying hanging garments between the levels within the warehouse. My original intention was that students would come in and just explore the area, wander around looking for hazards. As they find a hazard they click on it. If it's a legitimate hazard that's reflected in the HUD and they gain a point. If it's not they actually lose a point and they're given a short message telling them that as far as we're aware there's no hazard here particularly. But preliminary testing showed very quickly that students are very reluctant to just wander around freely. They really want to be shown the way in some way, at least the first time round. Hence the rather loud green arrows along the ground here to try and encourage students to actually proceed in a particular route. Then they don't have to say to that they are free to wander. But our findings so far is that they stay very strictly to the path. I'd prefer it if there was some way we could encourage them to wander off a bit more. See within the warehouse it's quite busy, there's lots of movement, there's lots of things going on, there's lots of noise. So we have sound files embedded all around to try and give that atmosphere of what a real warehouse actually feels like. And as you can see here there are certain hazards and things we have to be careful of. Here's a hazard, I click on it and I get a point because people really shouldn't be doing that in the warehouse. Other things we can click on, they're not legitimate hazards so we actually lose up the point. We can proceed all the way around the warehouse and after a few minutes we return back at the entrance here. And if I click here we can actually get a full list of all the hazards that are findable within the warehouse. We still have to work on these, refine these a bit more and we're going through an evaluation process at the moment. Now I'd like to show you the second project I've been working on, New Synthetic Theatre. The thinking behind this is that virtual worlds like Second Life enable us to experience things in quite a different way. We're all used to watching films or going to the theatre but there's always a space between the audience and the performers which can be a problem I think. I think you're probably all aware of students on the back row of the room being bored witness by the video because they don't feel involved, they don't feel it's relevant, they don't really know what's going on and they really don't care. My idea, my thinking behind New Synthetic Theatre is that if we involve the audience in the show they will be engaged much more and they will enjoy it and they will therefore learn much more. Now this can be for an educational purpose or purely for entertainment. I really see it as being used as both and for that reason I'm very keen that this be a successful commercial enterprise and so it's one of the rare things in Second Life where you are actually charged for access to it. Almost everything in Second Life is free to access and this isn't. Now having said it's not free, it only costs the equivalent of about 15 UK pence which I'm guessing is around 20 cents US. It's not particularly expensive. And here we are at the ticket office where we buy our tickets. So I click on here, purchase a ticket and I actually wear it. Now the significance of the ticket isn't so much for gaining entry, that's actually done with some code hidden backstage which you can't see. The ticket will actually become one of the props in the show because in New Synthetic Theatre the audience are the performers and we can't normally do this in real life because we'd have to rehearse the audience and there are all sorts of health and safety problems and we don't know how many audience members we're going to have. In New Synthetic Theatre I've organised it so that I can have an audience on this first show between one and seven people and they don't need to know what to do because I can animate the avatar, I can move the avatar around, it's now got a prop which I can change into different things according to what's the action of the piece. And so they are actually in the show, there is no audience really, there's just users performing in the show. I always thought this has been a social thing, just like you could go to the cinema or theatre on your own but people tend not to, they tend to go in pairs or small groups and that's actually what's happened with New Synthetic Theatre. Most visitors come in pairs, a few come in pairs and there are a few individuals but mostly it's people come along in pairs, they bring their friends along to experience the show. The first show is called 99%, it has a running time of just under 10 minutes so we get six shows an hour, 24 hours a day and those of you that are good at maths can work out that's quite a lot of shows per year. It's been running for about six months and we've had almost 600 visitors so visitors are still low but it builds up because it's always available. And of course the running costs are extremely small. I don't need to be logged into Second Life to look after it. It's coded in such a way that it just runs. If things go wrong it recovers, re-synchronizes with the music and continues on. It's time based in that it has a running soundtrack coming through Stream Sound along with the action which is programmed in Second Life. And here we are, we've now been teleported into the theatre and we have an introductory message. There are quite a few instructions for people who are so familiar with Second Life and then the action begins. It's based on the Occupy protests and the current economic problems we have but this could be applied to many other, really almost any theatrical piece you can imagine. I'm currently working on the second show which is putting three pieces of poetry to action, The Wise Men of Gotham, which is not all that well known, Kubla Khan which you may have heard of and The Jungle Walkers. And that should go live in the next few weeks. I'm then going to work on a free show which I'm calling A Trifling History of the Moving Image which really shows the history of storytelling from the Bardic tradition around the camp firing in the evenings all the way up to modern 3D cinema and of course New Synthetic Theatre. Two cabins measureless to man down to a sunless sea so twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round. There were gardens bright with sinuous rills where blossomed many an incense bearing trees and here were forests ancient as the hills in folding sunny spots of greenery but oh that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill as water seeded in cover. A savage place as holy and enchanted as air beneath the waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover. As if this earth in Bardic camps were moving a mighty fountain momentarily was forced immediately.