A sneak peak image of an enviroment I am developing as part of the ‘Caerleon artificial-agency research collaboration’ on ReactionGrid..

We have set up a presence for the Caerleon Collective on Reaction Grid.. This is an adjunct rather than an alternative to Second Life and is just one of the steps being taken into the larger metaverse.

Nonnatus can be seen here testing the new sims by slowing filling one of them with a tower of 45,000 cubes…

btw… at the recent Electrofringe OpenSim workshop, there were a number of educators interested in OpenSim as a platform.. I can really recommend ReactionGrid which has a strong virtual-world / education leaning..

i just noticed this discussion of oracle by Aleister Kronos.

http://slambling.blogspot.com/2008/05/oracle-of-culturegion.html

oracle will be de-rezzed forever at the end of this week – though i already have plans for some of its parts in a the institute of the self on new caerleon.

(thanks to Georg Janick for the images)

on february 26th 2008, the first species of creatures that i introduced to caerleon isle hit some sort of critical mass and, as far as i can tell, in combination with the severe time dilation their (physics based) ‘food’ was causing, had a population explosion. unfortunately i was offline for two days and this allowed the creatures to replicate out of control swallowing up the entire islands resources.

here is my proposal for what happened:

a. the flyers have several ‘hard coded’ behaviors. the behaviours that i think are relevant here include that they will be attracted to, and consume spores when they detect one in their vicinity. they will continue consuming spores until they are full and the they become lazy and sleep off their meal. also if they notice an oversupply of spores they will self replicate. (i don’t intend to explicitly outline all behaviours as this will detract from the experiential nature of an encounter with them)

b. spores are created by the landscape at regular yet random intervals. they are controlled by the second life physics engine, their behaviuor can then be seen as being a result of the second life laws of nature.

c. i believe after a point the flyers all came into sync and became lazy and rested at the same time. this created an oversupply of food, which meant that self replication took advantage of this window of opportunity.

then

d. the laws of nature in second life (physics engine and script run time allocation and simulator frames per second etc.) all became overtaxed. depending on the state a particular object was in, it had more or less operations to fulfill, in an ever decreasing amount of time ie: the time allocated to running scripts per frame was becoming shared over many more scripts.

e. eventually the creatures just were not eating any more.. but instead they were replicating.. their scripts ran up until the replication call but failed to make the eat call.. the result…

The palace of memory project in second life has a new home. I am continuing to keep some land and projects in escanes, but i have also moved onto a new private island in a sort of second life social experiment where a group of artists and writers have come together to not only work on their own projects, but to forge new collaborations along the way..

from the Caerleon group charter: In ancient times, Caerleon was the legendary seat of King Arthur’s Camelot and birth place of the forge of Excalibur.

In the digital age, a collective of Second Life’s most talented artists, writers, poets and philosophers has come togther to give birth to a new legend and a totally new kind of magic. Caerleon is where art meets technology in a virtual world unlike any other…come be a part of the legend. 

Also described to me as an island of ‘misfits, poets, artists and philosophers,’ by my new SL neighbor and Caerleon resident Feather Boa.