Category: Second Life

Shortly after Linden Lab launched the Log (or lodge, as I tend to prefer) Homes for Premium members on Bellisseria (see Second Life: Log Theme Linden Homes released), they started to add – as they had with other Linden Homes themes – a number of public spaces. Some are on the main run of land, others sit on islands within the lakes and rivers. All offer places of escape and relaxation. Chief among them its is Randelsham Forest, intended to act as a community hub, open to those who might wish to make use of it.

We actually visited Randelsham back at the end of April. It’s a rugged location, sitting between lowlands with house and a large, semi-sinuous body of inland water. At the time, I didn’t blog about it, as it appeared the regions around it were still very much a work in progress: whilst on a stretch of the Bellisseria railway passes by and has a local station, the line doesn’t as yet connect to anything.

This is still the case, but it’s clear that now that SL17B no longer requires the input, the Moles are returning to work on Bellisseria, so I’ve little doubt things will be properly connected up.

The focal point for the setting is a large “tree house”, in part sitting up on wooden legs from the shore of the lake to level itself with the railway station, to which it is linked by a wooden board walk. Split into two, the tree house offers a large lounge area with wooden walls with a long balcony to one side with a bubble rezzer at the far end for those who fancy taking to the air. A bridge on the other side runs down to an open-sided platform ranged around the trunk of one of the area’s great redwoods.

Like other community areas before it, the tree house is able to be reserved as a community use space to gather with the community, your friends. socialize, hold events, and enjoy the beautiful scenery.

– Patch Linden, April 27th, 2020

Lamp-lit paths await discovery, offering opportunities for people to the means to descend down to the banks of the lake, where trails further give opportunities for exploration and to find places to sit.

The paths also offer routes up into the hills rising either side of the rail lines, to peaks where people have the opportunity to take to the air in a different way – via zip line;  although when we tried it, the ride was a little rough! The line out to the lake’s island also (at the time of our visit) leaves folk without an option to get back to shore without flapping their arms to take to the air; I assume this will be rectified as more work in the area is completed (a rowing-boat rezzer, perhaps, to connect to the little pier below the tree house?

With a path down to the houses on the inland side of the hills, Randelsham offer a perfect setting for the locals to use and hold their own events, planned or spur-of-the-moment. On a broader front, it, and the social spaces large and small that can be found throughout Bellisseria offer the means to help break-up the land and present places for explorers and visitors to discover. For my part, I’m looking forward returning and using it for a start of some more horseback explorations of Bellisseria.

SLurl Details

• Randelsham Forest (rated Moderate)

In late 2008, the US Army made the headlines in a number of on-line periodicals such as Wired, when it announced the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) was opening a “recruitment island” in Second Life, hoping to tap into the “4 million” users of the platform (yes, this was the era of hype about SL) into signing-up through a mixture of promotion and tchotchkes.

While that announcement was met with sniggers by some of the press reporting on it, it actually masked the fact that the US military had been engaged in evaluating Second Life as a platform for modelling, simulation and training (MS&T) activities for more than a year.

This work was centred on a group of regions called MiLands – Military Lands – which at their height (2009-2010) were made up of around 30 regions, split between the four major branches of the US military: Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps. Such was the US military presence, Linden Lab assigned Scott Linden to manage the regions and liaise with the US Department of Defense in its use of SL.

Within those regions, Coalition Island, established (2009), was created to offer a public point of access to the US Military’s use of second Life. Today, it remains as a piece of Second Life’s early history – although it could in all honestly do with a little TLC as parts of it have not weathered the passage of time too well.

At its heart is a large pentagonal area – the symbolism here fairly obvious! On four of its sides, this presents photographs of each of the four military branches mentioned above Brownstone paths radiate each to lead to informational displays on how each branches was using SL – although both the Army and Air Force displays look more recruitment oriented, and the US Marine Corps is now conspicuous in its absence. The US Coastguard also gets a passing nod, with a small inshore patrol RHIB moored to one side of the island.

The fifth side of the pentagon comprises a broad set of steps once used for presentations (and now somewhat disconcertingly inhabited by three disembodied heads). At the top of these is the island’s former greeting / conference / meeting centre, the upper floor of which contains the Second Life US Military Coalition Charter, covering the aims and use of the former MiLands regions.

Close to main conference centre is a display by Team Orlando, a collaborative alliance of U.S. military organisations working in modelling, simulation and training using a number of platforms including – back in 2009-2010 – Second Life.

While I was unaware of Team Orlando’s use of Second Life, thanks to Dr. Douglas Maxwell (Maccus McCullough in SL, and also the founder of he in-world group RL United States Military in SL), I had originally become aware of attempts by the US military to use Second Life as an MS&T platform, back in 2011.

As a civilian contractor, Dr. Maxwell was employed at the Navy’s Virtual Reality laboratories in Washington DC, and in 2008 he was asked to head-up the work in establishing a 12-region campus in Second Life to be used by the Navy Undersea Warfare Centre (NUWC) for training and simulations.

It is a computationally steerable persistent simulation. The capabilities in here are tremendous: in-situ scripting, terrain deformation in real-time, every object is composable, not static. We got the idea that if we could increase the fidelity of the physics in here, it could actually be very useful.

Dr. Douglas Maxwell discussing NUWC’s use of SL in 2008

Maxwell’s involvement with the military use of Second Life expanded in 2009 when he became the Science and Technology Manager at the US Army’s Simulations Training and Technology Centre (STTC), also looking to make use of Second Life. This came at a time when Linden Lab was engaged in the (ultimately ill-fated for a variety of reasons) development of the “standalone” (or perhaps more accurately, the “behind your firewall”) Second life Enterprise (SLE) product, and Maxwell and his team were steered towards SLE as a potential solution to their needs.

In fact, Maxwell’s team found SLE to be highly conducive to their work thanks to a greater freedom of control over the simulator software and capabilities than could be achieved with the “public” SL product. This allowed them to develop a number of feature-rich training simulations to help train troops in advance of their deployment to Afghanistan.

Nor was the STTC alone in the use of SLE – the US Navy invested in it, at one point filing a US government FBO request for the purchase of up to 70 SLE support licences for the product, worth in the region of an initial US $3.5 million, had it been approved.

But before that came to pass, Linden Lab opted to discontinue the development of Second Life Enterprise, thus ending US military interest in the product. For Douglas Maxwell and the STTC, this meant taking the lessons they had learnt and applying them to building a simulation environment using OpenSimulator (see: MOSES: the US Army’s OpenSim exercise).

Whether or not the ending of SLE development was also the cause of other branches of the US military stepping back from experimenting with Second Life, I cannot in all honestly say. Today, as far as I’m aware, the US military has little or no official involvement in Second Life. However, Coalition Island today stands window on a time, as short-lived in the scheme of things though it might have been, when Second Life was being looked at seriously as a platform for training and simulation, and so it remains as an integral part of the platform’s history.

SLurl Details

• Coalition Island (rated General)