GOVERNMENT

LSU is located on an island, Nicholson Hall backs up to a beach retreat and the Quad houses a fountain and seating area where professors and students can meet. These are not attributes of the actual university, but they are some features of LSU in Second Life. Researchers within the LSU Center for Computation and Technology, or CCT, Cultural Computing Focus Area spent the Spring 2008 semester creating LSU in Second Life, a popular virtual environment where users interact with each other through 3-D avatars. “A key focus of our center is exploring ways we can use new applications as resources for interdisciplinary research,” said CCT Director Ed Seidel. “Virtual environments are an excellent opportunity for us to explore how to collaborate in ways we previously could not.” LSU School of Music Professor Stephen David Beck heads the Cultural Computing Focus Area at CCT, which focuses on how emerging computer applications impact the arts and humanities. “As Second Life and other virtual environments become more popular, they will have implications for computational science, social science, business, the arts, mass communication and many other areas,” Beck said. “LSU in Second Life offers a portal for us to experience these changes together.” LSU architecture students worked with Beck’s group to create LSU in Second Life, ensuring the campus’ buildings and structure retained a familiar feel. “In visiting other university virtual campuses in Second Life, we noticed many of the students did not feel the campus was the same,” Beck said. “That sense of connectivity is very important to students who may feel uncomfortable in a virtual environment, so we wanted to keep roughly the same elements and design as LSU in real life.” The Second Life campus is mainly limited to buildings of the Quad and the second quadrangle behind Thomas and David Boyd Halls. Since all locations in Second Life are on islands, LSU features oceanfront property in the design. The campus features Memorial Tower, which users can scale with their avatars for an aerial view of the campus. Class and teaching space is available in Dodson Auditorium, and Atkinson Hall offers a display area where students can showcase original art they design for Second Life. Nicholson Hall is home to CCT’s visualization laboratory, which features an immersive environment to study coastal modeling, hurricane simulations and other areas of scientific visualization. The Greek Amphitheatre sits behind Coates Hall, and will be the site of live concerts streamed into Second Life from the School of Music. LSU in Second Life will be a tool for the newly formed, campuswide Virtual Worlds Research Group to explore how virtual environments can aid academia and research. Beginning in the Fall 2008, the Virtual Worlds Research Group, which CCT Cultural Computing sponsors at LSU, will hold monthly meetings to discuss on-going projects, explore collaborations, and coordinate research activities to explore what kinds of research can be accomplished through virtual social networks that are not available through traditional methods. The Virtual Worlds Research Group will be testing various scenarios, including hosting classes and holding office hours in these networks, creating methods for students to display original work in a virtual environment and simultaneously hosting lectures, concerts and other events in real time and in virtual worlds. The group is also exploring how virtual worlds can be used to better understand the complex world of high performance computing, supercomputers and high-speed networks. “In the future, this could develop as a way for professors to host classes that experiment with traditional course structure, and it will become a way students can test how to digitally capture and recreate original work,” Beck said. Users who already have Second Life installed can get a free avatar to explore LSU in Second Life. To reach LSU’s virtual campus, go to its Web site.