Leveraging the Power of Virtual Worlds

Once again a great example of why virtual worlds are so powerful.  I met Professor Elaine Polvinen through a link someone sent me about her blog, and from there sent her a note in Second Life and eventually met there. One thing led to another and before we knew it, we had a formal collaboration to develop fashiond esign curriculum in virtual worlds.  Our original platform will be Second Life for a number of reasons, and I’m preparing to drop a couple of new islands for development purposes. 

I spoke at FIT this week, with a teleconferencing connection to Elaine and to Nyla Cheeky.  It was a complementary group of speakers, with Elaine speaking about actually using virtual worlds to educate her core group of students about the power of 3d modeling and virtual fashion; Nyla speaking about using virtual worlds (Second Life) as a way of extending her brand image and awareness to drive real life sales and business; and of course, me, speaking about leveraging the power of virtual worlds to enable big business to cut costs, cut time-to-market, and reduce carbon footprint while maintaining the fidelity of a fashion designer’s vision. 

 We had a great audience, very engaged and interested.  Based on such a strong response, I’ll be adding a welcome area on Shengri La Hope, specifically for fashion educators, so that they have resources that will help engage them in virtual worlds. 

yes, yes, I know…but I’ve been BUSY

Real Life managed to rear its ugly head and keep me out of sorts for the last bit.  We finally managed to get the three wild life sims fully terraformed
(mind you, I think they are terraformed. Rez, however, seems to think not, and since I disavow all knowledge of terraforming….maybe we’re not) and populated! So far, in Shengri La Love, we have pools of free-swimming manta rays, flexi-finned goldfish, sculpti corals, giant oysters, dolphins, and sea turtles.  I’m looking forward to our new sculpti sea horses and starfish – the sea horses are scripted and animated and swim freely while tossing their heads and curling and uncurling their tails.

The giant oysters will eventually host a treasure hunt, with pearl jewelry hidden in selected shells.  That, plus our new rental horses, promise to keep Shengri La active.

Calli has a new landscape exhibit in Demi’s house. Demi has been out of sorts and out of touch since her back surgery, and not in world much, so w’re using her home for Calli’s landscapes.  They’re simply stunning…Calli is such a talented artist!

Yuri continues to grow and evolve her line and always delights with her garments. I see she’s taking a different direction, which is good. It’s easy to become stale at design (as I well know, as I have started my real life fashion development for Fall of 2008, and I am so very burned out on the whole thing…OMG, please, not 700 styles by November 15th!)

The nation continues to forge ahead.  I’ll be selling the sims off to my nonprofit organization sometime in late summer or early autumn, and buying four more sims. I see our neighbours are encroaching on us, no doubt because Shengri La is so heart stoppingly beautiful, but I think they’ll get a surprise some morning when they wake up and the sims are gone, moved far away.  Plans call for a 9-sim complex that is open to the public, with another 4 private islands dropped around the edges so that we can use them to develop business processes for the Fashion Research Institute.

FRI is currently in the process of setting itself to rights, but we’ll have our initial seed funding in place by September and we’ll be ready to apply to Linden Labs as a nonprofit.

Of course, my own fashion line has been screaming for my attention.  So I responded with a set of 1860s jewelry in three metals and four stones, an improved version of the Large Victorian Parure, a new line of bustle gowns (12 colors and patterns to select from), and a line of Celtic ball gowns. I did a bunch of hair decor, too – sculpti hair roses, scripted hair combs, jewelry hair combs, and jewelred hair sticks.   All new jewelry has bling on/off via chat command. I am working on a new set of Edwardian jewelry.