 Hello, and welcome to this video tutorial. In this video tutorial, we're going to cover logging into the Avocon virtual world for the very first time. To do that, we're going to use the Firestorm Viewer. There should be a Firestorm Viewer shortcut right on your desktop. Go ahead and double-click to open that. When Firestorm has started, you should see the Avocon Grid's home screen. You should also open provided with a username and a password. As you can see, there are several text boxes where you can place that information. The first text box is your avatar's name. In my case, that is Marcus Llewellyn, so I'm going to enter that now. You'll also have been given a password, so you'll want to enter that too. Once you've entered your name and your password, all you have to do is click the Login button. Once you've logged in and you're in World, one of the first things you're going to want to learn how to do is move around. The easiest way to do this is by using the arrow keys on your keyboard. The left arrow key will turn you left, and the right arrow key will turn you right. The up key will move you forward, and the down key will move you back. You can also use these in combination with each other, so you can move forward and turn left, or move backward and right. You should make sure to practice using these keys. Get used to how they work and how they feel. Make sure you can move around obstacles easily. Once you've gotten used to moving around in World, you're going to want to learn how to communicate with other people. If you look at the bottom of Reviewer, you're going to see a text box. Next to it is a nearby chat button. Anything you type in that text box is going to be seen by other people in World, so if I say hello, Joyce here is going to see that. And you can see the text pop up on the lower left-hand corner of your screen. When Joyce says hello back, it'll appear there too. If you want a more permanent way to see your chat, look at the toolbar at the bottom of your Viewer. One of the buttons is a conversation button and has a little quote icon on it. Let's go ahead and click that, and a new window pops up. You can see that our hellos are in there. I could ask her how she's doing, and she can answer back. And this is a more permanent way to chat. Now chatting this way, everybody around me for in a distance of about 20 meters can hear what we have to say. If I want to speak to Joyce privately, what I'm going to do is put my mouse cursor over Joyce's avatar. Right click and choose I am. You'll see in the chat window that a new tab has appeared with Joyce's name. Anything we type in this chat window will only be between Joyce and I. So, if I say hello to her here, nobody else can see that, just Joyce. And when Joyce replies, I'm the only one that can see that. Another way to communicate in world is with voice, just like on the telephone. If you have a good microphone and for your computer or in your laptop, you can talk to other people via voice. A good headset works too. As a matter of fact, that's preferred. If you have a headset, that's perfect. And as you can see in world right now, I have voice active. So you can see my lips are moving. You can see that there's a little white dot over my head, and that means voice is active. And as I talk, you can see wavy green lines coming off of me. If you look at your toolbar at the bottom, you'll see that one of them has a microphone. That's for voice chat. And there's a little checkbox. I have the microphone button already pushed and the checkbox on, which means that I'm constantly open. Everything I say, every noise in the room I'm in will be broadcast to the people around me in world. If I want to turn that off, I click on my microphone button. And as you can see, my mouth is stopped moving and the green lines have gone away. So if I want Joyce to hear me again, I need to click on that microphone button. And now Joyce can hear me. And I can hear her too. She's on voice. Hi, Joyce. Hi, Marcus. How you doing? I'm doing well. Good to see you here. Yeah, good to see you too. And this is a really wonderful way to communicate online. It's for a lot of people, it can be much easier. Not everybody's as comfortable with chatting in text. So sometimes voice is a wonderful option if you have a good microphone or a good headset. One of the features of the viewer is called mouse look. It allows you to look at the world in a first person perspective. The easiest way to do this is by using the scroll wheel on your mouse. By scrolling up all the way, you will achieve a first person perspective. And by moving your mouse, you can look around. If you use the arrow keys, you can also move while you're looking around. To exit mouse look, you can just scroll back on your mouse wheel or press the escape key. Often you can interact with objects in world. That includes things like sitting on chairs. These chairs are all ready to sit on. And you can tell because the mouse cursor changes to a little chair when you hover over them. When you have a little chair icon, you can just click on the chair and you'll sit down. In order to stand up, look for the little stand button down towards the bottom. Click on the stand button and you'll stand up. Another way to sit down is to right click, choose, sit here and you'll sit down. Again to stand up, just use the stand button. In a virtual world, you aren't limited to just walking around. You can also fly. In order to fly up, use your page up key. While you're flying, you can move around with the arrow keys. If you use page down, you will go lower. To stop flying, just look for the little stop flying button down on the bottom of your viewer. Click on it and you'll fall to the ground. Go ahead and practice flying. It's a lot of fun and a very quick and easy way to get around. To look around in world, there's more ways to do it than just moving your avatar. You can also move your camera. One way to do this is to look at the toolbar that's at the bottom of your viewer. You can see that you have a lot of buttons down here. The one we're looking for has an eye. That's the camera controls. Go ahead and click on it. A new panel will pop up. On the right side, you can pan your camera. And on the left side, you can orbit. Let's go ahead and try orbiting. And now let's try panning. To reset your camera's view, just click on the little X button. You can also click on the little person button to take a good look at your avatar. This is handy if you want to take a look at your outfit. You can use it with orbit. Make sure you look good and spiffy. The next icon is an over the shoulder view. And then the next one is the rear view, which is the normal one. The next icon will let you look at an object. If you click it, you'll notice that your mouse icon has turned into a magnifying glass. Let's say we want to look at this rock right here. We take our magnifying glass and we hold down our left mouse button. That becomes the focus of our camera. When we move our mouse with the left mouse button held down, we can look all around it. We can see it from every angle. And we can choose a different rock and look at that one too. We can use it to look at our avatar too. Or anything else in the world really. To reset your camera view, remember, just press the X. You can also use your keyboard and mouse to look around the world. By pressing the Alt key and holding it down, you get the hourglass. Hold your left mouse button and you can look at an object by moving the mouse around. Again, you can look at anything in the world this way. So if you need a closer look at a sign, you can just use your Alt key and your left mouse button. To reset your camera view using the keyboard, just press the Escape key. As you spend time in the world, you're definitely going to make friends. And you're going to want to keep track of those friends. And you can actually add people as friends in your viewer. If you look at your conversations window, you'll see that there's a Contact tab on the left. If you click that, another area will pop up and at the top you'll see you have a Friends tab. I have a few listed already, but I don't have Joyce as a friend. So if I right-click on Joyce's avatar, go over to Add, and then As Friend, you'll see a window pops up, offering friendship to Joyce Betancourt. I'm going to click OK, and that's going to send a friend request to Joyce. Now normally, Joyce would accept that friend request because she's a nice person, but she's going to refuse this one, because we want to see what it looks like when you get a friend request. So now, Joyce is going to send me a friend request, and as you can see, a little toast popped up, saying, would you be my friend from Joyce? I'm going to click Accept, and there are Joyce's in our friends list. Now that Joyce is in my list, I can talk to her anytime I want, no matter where she is. All I have to do is find her in my list, double-click under Name, and a private message window will pop up, and I can chat to Joyce in there. One final way to communicate online is via a group chat. Most people in the world belong to a group. In your case, you're going to belong to the CompuGirls group. You can see this in your conversations window, under Contacts, and under the Groups tab. If you move your mouse cursor over the CompuGirls group and double-click, a new conversation window will open. Anything you type in here will be seen by everybody who belongs to your group, and anybody in your group who talks back, like Joyce, you'll also see in that window. Everybody in the world has an inventory. You can see your inventory by going down to the toolbar at the bottom of your viewer and looking for the suitcase. First click on the suitcase to open our inventory. A new window will pop up, and we can see that it's filled with lots of folders. There are also three tabs at the top. The default one, Inventory, shows your complete inventory. The recent tab will show you everything you've picked up since you've logged on, and the Warn tab will show you everything that you're currently wearing. Some things in World are for sale. On this grid, everything's free. We don't have any money. But sometimes making things for sale is just the easiest way to give things to people. Sometimes you can tell if something is for sale because it will actually say it's for sale with a sign. Or if you hover your mouse over it, you might see this little icon up here, which is an L with a little dollar sign. Let's say you want to buy this question mark t-shirt. If we left click on it, we get a pop-up telling us what we're buying, in this case the question t-shirt. Let's go ahead and click the buy button. When you buy something, it goes into your inventory. We can look and see that we have a new folder called question mark t-shirt. If we open the folder, we can see the t-shirt right there. Let's wear this t-shirt. If we right click on the t-shirt and go down to where it says wear, it can take a little bit but you'll see that I've changed shirts. If I wanted to find this t-shirt later after I picked up lots of stuff and my inventory got very large, the easiest way is to use the filter. You can search for things in this text box at the top of your inventory window. We know that this is a question t-shirt, so if we type in question, everything in our inventory that has question in the name will show up. To clear this filter, just click the little X in the text box. Sometimes things that we buy in world come in a box. This is very common when what you're buying is a set of objects, maybe a complete outfit or a set of furniture. In this case, there's a box here that has three hats in it. Let's buy the box. We right click on it and choose buy. We get a pop up telling us that we're buying the CompuGirls hat box and what that box contains. We can see it contains three hats. Let's go ahead and buy it. If we look at our objects folder and open it up, we can see that we have the CompuGirls hat box, but now we need to get the hats out of the hat box. To do that, we need to do what's called resin. We need to take the hat box and make it appear in world so we can open it up. To do that, we click and hold our left mouse button on the CompuGirls hat box in our inventory. We drag it out into the world and then we let go of our left mouse button. As you can see, the box has now appeared in world. To open the box, we right click on it and then we choose open. We get a pop up telling us what we've just opened and we have the option to copy it to inventory. Let's go ahead and do that. Click on copy to inventory. Now you can see we have a new folder called CompuGirls hat box and if we open it up, we have some hats. Let's wear the top hat. Let's right click on it and choose wear. I already have a hat on, but now I also have a top hat on. If I want to take the top hat off and go over to my inventory, right click and select detach from yourself. You're going to want to remember to clean up after yourself when you open boxes. So don't just leave them. Make sure to right click on the box and take it back. That'll put it back in your inventory. In a virtual world, you can look like practically anything you want. You could be a dog or a cat. You could be a robot. You could even be a talking garbage can if you'd like. One of the things you can do is customize the way that your avatar is shaped. You can see I have a stocky guy. I could make changes to that though by right clicking on my avatar and choosing appearance and then edit shape. I get a new window and the camera has moved so that I can see my avatar in a pose. There's all kinds of sliders we can change. I can change how tall or short I am, how thin or thick I am, maybe I saw fat or thin. And I can change a lot of different body parts. My head, my eyes, my ears, nose, mouth, chin, torso and legs. Let's play with my ears a little bit. Let's make them really big and using the slider make the ears really pointy. There. Now I have really big elf ears. If I wanted to keep this change, I could use the save as button. I don't want to keep this so I'm going to use undo changes and that snaps everything back to the way it was. When I'm finished editing my shape, I can just close the appearance window. You'll probably want to practice with this. There are so many possibilities and it can take a quite a long time for you to find a look that you really really like. If playing around with the shape of your avatar isn't for you or you'd just like to get started quickly, we've provided a bunch of free starter avatar looks. All you have to do is click them and buy them. And you can see we now have three professional women outfits in our inventory. Let's say I want to be professional woman number two. All I have to do is right click on that folder and choose replace current outfit. It may take a few seconds, but soon you'll change into that outfit. You can also mix and match. Let's say I don't like these pants. I want darker pants like professional woman one had. So let's go looking for professional woman ones pants. Let's see there they are. And I right click and choose where. Let's say that I've decided that that's an outfit I want to keep. If you look at your toolbar at the bottom, there's a button that has a t-shirt on it. Let's click that. This brings up an appearance window and it'll save all of the outfits that you've created. So if you want to save this one, all we have to do is do save as and let's name this one professional woman two mix. We can also use the appearance window to change our outfits. So I happen to have a cute little mouse that I like to wear. So if I choose that one and wear it, I'll change into that tiny little mouse. And if I want to go back to being the outfit that I created, I can click on that one. Choose where. I know I'm back to being that woman. When I'm done, I can just close the appearance window. And that concludes this video tutorial. Remember that the CompiGirls region has an orientation area so you can go through it at any time to refresh yourself if you need to learn some of these skills again. Thank you very much for watching and we hope you find it helpful.