Second Life UBC Arts Campus – Buchanan Island
With all the hype about Second Life and virtual simulation platforms used in education, here is a quick review of the UBC Arts Campus – Buchanan island.
The island was purchased early 2006 by Arts ISIT, thanks to the grants from Dr. Marvin Cohodas, a fine arts faculty member here at UBC. It is a small island in the Second Life virtual space, we named it after the Faculty of Arts' main building – Buchanan. Everything starts from the scratch, modifying the terrain, land texture, and geographical planning.
The very first thing we built was the Rose Garden and the Flag Pole which is a symbolic site of UBC. Of course we included the "Plaza".
The first architecture we attempted to build was the clock tower and the water fountain besides it.
The Helen Belkin art gallery was the next in line and as you can see, we have modified the concrete roof into a glass panels for extra lighting and easy navigation access.
We had a lot fun building the Chan center (it's big!) which we will attempt to use it for film and creative studies courses.
The immediate academic purpose of building the island is to recreate the Bonampak building in order to accommodate the artistic paintings on the interior walls. Until today, Marvin's students are learning the paintings through books and photos where the stories are not connected and spaces are not defined. With the building in SL, students are able to browse through the paintings “room” by “room” in the virtual space.
We have also filled the gallery with rotating vases where the scroll on the wall is changed according to the vase you choose and the vase will rotate in order to illustrate a continuing visual art story of ancient Maya.
Comments:
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11/01/06 @ 02:14 · http://blog.namikosurf.com This is fantastic... I'm actually a RL grad from UBC, and it's so crazy to see an SL version of the UBC Clock Tower, the Rose Garden and the Helen Belkin Gallery!!
I took art history for a term at UBC and would love to see a more immersive experience in learning the material. It was not until I traveled to many of the places in Europe that I had a sense of the (intense) size and scope of some of the architecture and artwork. Employing SL in this way would seem to be a perfect way to get students to 'experience' the artwork.
Kudos to you, Tim. I'll keep checking for your progress. Cheers ;P
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