A MIxed Reality Conference at MIT in Second Life

When you are an eleven-year-old boy playing countless hours of Super Mario Bros., Mortal Kombat and Final Fantasy, you probably don’t think much about how you are preparing yourself for a future career. The fact is, as a moderate video game addict myself, I rarely gave it any thought.

Fast-forward to 4 years ago when I was finishing up what would be my first of two Masters degrees in Digital and Media Art and I found myself looking for employment. Over the course of my two years as an M.A. candidate in Emerson College’s Visual and Media Arts graduate program I dove in feet first into computer animation and eventually Virtual Worlds, unaware of the benefits it would afford me.

I came from a pretty traditional Fine Arts background. My undergraduate education was spent exploring the boundaries of charcoal on paper. Taking the leap into the sterile world of digital media was awkward at best. I began with some harmless “new media” courses that taught what I now refer to as the unholy trinity of new media; Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. Please note that it is not my intention to speak ill of these three pieces of software, I personally use the Adobe Creative Suite on a daily basis. My criticism is more directed towards the perception that those three software applications somehow encompass all of what new media is or was. I shall save further gripes for another post.

University of Queensland Virtual Classroom Building

I moved on quickly to Computer Animation and the dreaded Maya. It was in my second semester of Computer Animation that I was introduced to this crazy new “game” called Second Life. “It’s a world where there are no rules and you can fly” I used to tell people.

What I would realize later on is just how superficial that perception really was. Not only was Second Life a world where you could dress up as a furry elephant or some Shakesperian half man half goat hybrid, you could break free from geospecific discourse and interact with people regardless of location. All of the sudden you could be having a meeting on top of a skyscraper with a colleague in Berlin without leaving your office. I became so engrossed in building, coding and interacting in Second Life that the perception of it as merely a game became my mission to dispel.

By my final semester at Emerson, I was overseeing an interdepartmental effort to build out Emerson’s own virtual campus. We hosted virtual symposia, classes and team meetings on Emerson Island. We brought in scholars, academics and business professionals from all around the world to discuss the merits of Virtual Worlds in education, distance collaboration and commerce. Not bad for a kid whose parents begged him to put down his Sega Genesis controller at dinnertime.

It was at one of these events that I met the man who would end up giving me my first job.