Re-enactment of traditional May 1 re-enactments in New Berlin

geschrieben am von joaoflux

Police blocking Alex

[...] Wie aus sicheren Quellen verlautet formieren sich derzeit zwei feindlich gegenüberstehende Gruppierungen -€“ Polizisten und Autonome -, deren Zusammentreffen auf dem Alexanderplatz in newBERLIN unvermeidbar scheint. Der Höhepunkt der Ausschreitungen wird gegen 17.00 Uhr erwartet.

Apparently there are plans to re-enact the traditional May 1 riots that have haunted Berlin in the last 20 years in Second Life (newBerlin). Having turned into a ritual the May 1 riots in old Berlin are pretty much re-enactments themselves.

Real riots in virtual worlds would of course look quite different. We have seen hacker attacks on Servers, but they are usually not politically motivated. Arguably protests that slowed down the FN headquarters and maybe even the famous penis attack on Anshe Chung are exceptions. Compared to the May 1 riots in old Berlin one can imagine a reverse development in SL: They begin as re-enactments and will become authentic in the next years. The equivalent of hooligans hiding amongst peaceful protesters would in SL be hooligans with coding skills hiding amongst hooligans without.

Mapping New Berlin

geschrieben am von joaoflux

Jan and Tobe of You See Me In 3DJan Northoff & Tobias Neisecke are building a New Berlin in Second Life – a replica of the german capital. If it feels a bit small, it is because it is optimized for avatars who are not more than two meters tall. The average avatar in SL is actually quite a bit taller and the two are having a conspiracy theory: The avatars are tall so people need to buy more land. You ever wondered why 512qm seem so small in SL? After all it’s hard to believe that the Lindens got confused because of using the metric system. I was wondering if they may have gradually increased the size.

Anyway, Jan and Tobias are quite a team: Tobias is a doctor who got bored with hospitals and Jan is an artist who got bored with art (I have much sympathy for that). They met only 5 months ago when Tobias ran into Jan’s tiny Berlin Mitte gallery. They are serious about turning New Berlin into a lucrative business and I think that they do have a chance. Lets put it like that: Their plan is much better than other plans of replicating real places in virtual spaces. They also came up with a very cool tool by combining Google Maps and SL’s map: Map In Map, a service that lets you find virtual representations of real places in SL.