A Simple Business Meeting Room For A Second Life Newbie – Second Life (Post on Request)

Author: Business Beyond Reality

I’m writing this post on a special request from one of my acquaintances who wanted to know about the best meeting practices in Second Life and basic raw materials required to build an efficient meeting room in this graphic world.

The two images below show examples of simple yet effective meeting spaces in Second Life.

Simple Meeting Room

Simple Meeting Room: The above sample image consists of a centre table (Made from a single prim) and a couple of chairs (Seemingly 4-5 prims each). It also consists of a presentation board which again is made up of a single prim. The walls are of smoked glass and there’s a stoned floor with a grayish look. We’ll see ahead what it takes to build such a simple meeting room.

Enhanced Meeting Room

Enhanced Meeting Room: The above sample image consists of a slightly complicated centre table with designer chairs and a more sophisticated finish.

Some basic terms to be aware of:

1. Prim: These are Primitives which are simple shapes like cuboid, cylinder, pyramid etc, available in Second Life to construct a complicated object. The size, shape and rotation of these prims can be altered through a Graphical User Interface.

Prim Example

2. Texture: It is an image which can be pasted on the face of a prim. For example: The brown table that  is there in the Simple Meeting Room image has a brown texture on it.

Basic Facilities Needed for a Meeting:

1. Text Chat: Supported by Second Life.
2. Voice Chat: Supported by Second Life through VoIP.
3. Meeting Room: Can be easily built with the help of Prims.
4. Presentation: We’ll cover this in detail below.
5. White Board: We’ll cover this in detail below.
6. Video Streaming: Video is played on your land in SL using a URL (web address) which you set up in your About Land options. You can hook up to an existing stream on the web, or create your own if you have the resources.It’s very simple. A texture can be defined and a media file can be attached to it. Whichever object loads that texture can play the media.
   

   Adding Media

    

7. Audio Streaming: The same steps as in Video Streaming are to be followed to sream an audio.
8. Web Streaming: The same steps as in Video Streaming are to be followed to sream an audio. It is important to point out that the web page is loaded as a texture on the prim and can’t be clicked to navigate ahead.

Presentation: Second Life doesn’t support uploading office documents like doc,ppt,xls,txt etc. Any document that has to be presented to the audience is to be converted into images and uploaded into Second Life. This can be easily done in PowerPoint by doing SaveAs in JPG format. These images can be added to the texture list of the prim (A cuboid to look like a presentation board. Can be made from a cuboid prim by keeping the height and width high and the depth as less.) and a simple LSL Scripting can be done to change the image (Which actually is a texture) on clicking the object with the mouse. A lot of such scripts are available on the net for free which can be downloaded and used in the meeting room.

White Board/Message Board: An interesting technique to build a White Board/Message Board is to make a prim look like a presentation board and attach a listener to it. The user enters text on a prescribed channel which is shown on the White Board.

The conclusion is that creating real life scenario is pretty simple. It just needs some effort, a bit of creativity and a little bit of exploration !