[Opensim-users] Some questions about recreating history in OpenSim

[Lisa Evans]

Hi all,

I'm very new to OpenSim and just signed up to this list to ask a few 
questions. Sorry if I come across as a bit of a newbie, although I've 
been studying OS for a few days and I have my own standalone grid up and 
running at home.

I'm putting together a proposal for this educational portal run by the 
ABC here in Australia:

http://www.abc.net.au/learn/proposals.htm

My project is all about teaching history, the idea being that students 
and history classes could put together simple sims telling stories about 
the history of their own local area, linking them up with videos, 
photos, essays, etc (which you could hopefully launch from within the 
sim). Their sims would all be linked up in a hypergrid, so students from 
all over Australia (later maybe the world) could get into a virtual time 
machine and visit different places at different times, to see what was 
happening. Students would be able to chat with each other and show each 
other around their creations. Hopefully the act of collaborative world 
building would engage them in learning about history, but I would want 
them focussed on just telling small stories, involving a small number of 
characters (which would be created as NPCs if that's possible, with 
simple, looping animations if not more complex behaviour) and buildings, 
objects, etc. (I have ideas about how to source lots of 3D content, 
which I need to explore more).

I'm sure none of this is an original idea, but it seems like a good 
opportunity to put an idea like this forward. I just was wondering if 
anyone could tell me whether it would work in OpenSim or if there are 
some big barriers to creating something like this.

My main issue right now is trying to work out how you create sims that 
represent not only a region in space but also a period in time. I've 
been thinking that I would have a grid that contains regions in which 
only stories from, say, 1950 to 2000 were created. Then another grid 
would represent the same real world area, but contain stories from 
1900-1950. The further you go back in time, the longer the time 
intervals would get, along an approximately logarithmic scale, so if you 
were telling stories about the dinosaurs one grid would represent the 
entire Jurassic era, for example.

Would this be the right way to go? I've been reading about regions and 
grids and hypergrids but I'm pretty sure there's a lot I don't understand.

My own background is that I've been working in 3D animation for film, TV 
and games for the past decade, as a 3D all rounder and a technical 
artist. I've worked on one big MMO for three years that was never 
released. So I know about 3D modeling, animation, worldbuilding, etc. 
but I've never spent much time around Second Life or OpenSim, so a lot 
of this is new to me.

Thanks for any help!

Cheers,

Lisa Evans
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