STA Tests Time-Share Dorm Room Model in SL
Rik Riel has a good post on a project that opened last week and launched on Friday, built out by the Electric Sheep Company (3pointD’s sponsors). It’s STA Travel in Second Life, which seeks to do in SL more or less what it does for college students in the real world: point out the most interesting places, and provide a way to get there and an instant community when they arrive. With no lodging requirements at SL destinations, however, STA is instead providing free dorm rooms for people to hang out in — but the really interesting aspect of these is that they’re provided on a shared basis: you can claim and customize a room, furnish it from an in-world menu, and even drop some of your own items there, then save your settings. If you leave, the room reverts to a blank space ready for the next occupant. Come back to any of the many other dorm rooms and you can load your old settings from the service’s memory. The dorm service is in closed beta at the moment, though »STA’s sim nearby« is open for business. The shared room model is an interesting approach to scaling in Second Life, and could be a good way to reduce the resource needed to service a global audience (i.e., one that’s not all online at the same time). It’s hard to see that this scaling solution will scale significantly itself, but it feels like a technique that will have its uses from time to time. No doubt there’s some more technical version of this that’s in common use elsewhere; if so, please enlighten us in the comments thread.
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I’m having a laugh at loud at this project, which now very demonstrably gives the lie to Forseti’s claim of a year or even six month’s ago that RL clients of the Sheep like Starwood would never compete in the inworld rentals business. And I kept saying, but of course they will, and you will help them to do it. And of course they are!
This concept may be suitable for college kids who don’t mind dorm life, but most adults on the grid want spaces that have privacy as to chat settings and the ability to control the parcel. They are also very intensely fussy about having their items persist when they aren’t there. I will be curious to see if the concept of rolling them up each time you log will somehow be free of buggyness and still feed the human craving for persistence in virtual worlds.
If your house and furniture logged off when you did, that would solve the annoyance of people using land for an afternoon and putting up a stupid plywood ugly build on it, then forgetting to come back and clear it for months at a time.
But, as the book “Bobos in Paradise” explained, people like to buy cross-country skis and keep them in the garage, even if they don’t use them. The idea that they’d disappear if not used and could only come back if used would undermine their trophy and fantasy status, which is of course big in SL.
This is a great system! I’ve been using Holodecks on my educational Sim English Village - to accomplish the same thing… sort of… with my holodecks, I can change the scene of my classrooms for my teachers, but if they want to make their own, they must purchase a production holodeck (Im just a user of the holodecks, not the creator)
A system like this therefore is much better, as my teachers could set up their classes appropriately.
How can I get this technology for my island?