Nascent

Shamefully, nearly a whole summer has passed since I last reported on Second Nature, and far too much has happened in that time to cover everything, but I do have some really exciting new developments to report. Firstly, I have started a Second Life blog on Nature Network, to talk about all things SL and Second Nature without distracting from the "real" world elsewhere.

The biggest event this summer has been the acquisition of our third island, which has been entirely given over to setting up an SLEcosystem, created by the Ecosystem Working Group. In their own words, the EWG is "a small group of dedicated scripters and builders committed to the notion of developing a simple, but functioning, ecosystem within the confines of the Second Life platform. We are attempting to develop common protocols for animal-animal interaction and believe our experiments here can enrich Second Life and the scientific understanding of complex systems themselves"

The SLEcosystem has been living at its original home, Terminus, since its inception, and has already attracted a lot of interest in Second Life and beyond. Terminus lives on: the version living on Second Nature is independent, and features high prim organisms which (in some cases!) look not dissimilar to real-world creatures. The whole project is ongoing and fully open sourced, so anyone is welcome to contribute to it: our ecosystem is being continually being updated as members of the group create new organisms or update the existing ones. Species on Second Nature currently include the basic plantform, the Cannon Plant, the herbivorous gridlice and gridbirds and the predator, a flourescent blue Flying Fox. The chief guardian of our ecosystem is Luciftias Neurocam in SL, a neuroscientist from Drexel, and he will be coming to Second Nature to give a talk and demo of the sim in the next few weeks: details to follow. In the meantime, to see the ecosystem and get more information, come and see it. Tip: watch the large green blobs - if you're lucky, you might see a gridlouse hatch!

The other major new inhabitants of our land this summer are CASA, the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis from UCL. They have colonised a large region of the sky about Second Nature and are using it for experimenting with city modelling - a vast array of 3D graphics, maps and other things have magically appeared: see more about what they're doing on their Digital Urban blog

Last but not least, for SciFoo attendees, Jean-Claude Bradley has set up an area on Second Nature called "SciFoo Lives On", where attendees can put any slides and other materials and where SciFoo can be continued with virtual sessions: see his blog for more details.