Earth Hour: March 29th, 2008, 8pm to 9pm local time, globally.
Check out http://www13.earthhourus.org/ to register and get other info on the event.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Hour to see which countries are participating to Earth Hour 2008
So………….I emailed Torley. no answer. I emailed Pathfinder. no answer. I just IMed Philip Rosedale in SL, literally begging for a name, someone to talk to about the decisions on the gestures made standard in SL, particularly the speech gestures and other immediacy behaviors I am interested in.
In the meantime, I found a few answers regarding why the gestures are a limited affordance in SL. The Linden Labs know that the gestures are really important, but they shelved the puppeteering project back in March 2007 because they wanted to focus on stabilizing the platform. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Puppeteering
From the titbit of what the post says, though, I am not impressed with what their puppeteering solutions would be. I mean, having to use the mouse to move the avatar in the RL way to manipulate a puppet is really a depressing solution. Why, oh why, using RL solution for a virtual world where an algorithm could help the gestures be more autonomous…where AI-like applications could help avatars assimilate some behaviors and enrich a conversation with discrete mimicry. The idea of making an avatar more life-like is fine as long as the manipulation is more transparent and less in the way of instructors trying to deliver their lessons.
well..in the meantime, i am still waiting for someone at the Linden Labs who would be willing to talk to me about gestures and animations. There has to be a designated social scientist there, right?
Then I found a post regarding teh Lindens’ interest in developing lip sync and avatar animations, but a year later, still nothing. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev-Traffic_1#Lip_Sync_and_Gesture_Motions
