Safari Boosts its Brains

Our first stop of the week was on Virtual Learning Village, usually this grid is mostly closed to Hypergrid tourists because it is a place of learning and meditation, for improving your brain health. What better place to end a hectic 10 weeks of HG travel. The sim has a European feel, like an elegant suburb in a historic city.

Lisenna welcomes the HG Safari group - arriving a little bit at a time, and in grey.

Lissena Wisdomseeker: Welcome to Virtual Learning Village!  VLV was created in 2018, but I have been active in Opensim since the first OSCC. I volunteer at the conference every year.  I had a region on Avacon first, then Max and I talked about developing our own grid. Our vision was to have a place outside of Second Life where we could offer our programs for organizations and groups who would benefit from a more private, controlled environment where they can design their own regions. Max's team has given this grid a very special ambiance and I am very proud of what we have built. Many thanks to Max and Buildwerk.

Lissena Wisdomseeker: whispers: Sunny has a place here, and Fran has helped us too

Maximillian Merlin: We are now in the Hypergrid region of Virtual Learning Village. The Virtual Learning Village is a non profit virtual 3D platform. The grid was developed by Lynne Berrett (Lissena Wisdomseeker) and Maximillian Merlin with his volunteer Buildwerk  team. Our umbrella nonprofit organization is the Ageless Mind Project. Our purpose is to provide lifelong learning of many kinds, all based on best practices for promoting brain health and total well-being.  The VLV grid offers limited access to and from the hypergrid, to protect our students. We have devoted much time and thought to making this virtual world more user-friendly and sheltered than SL can be. 

Maximilian Merlin

Forest Azure: /me takes her brain temperature, just to be on the safe side

Maximillian Merlin: For this tour we have opened the most important regions for hypergrid access. Virtual Learning Village offers a holistic learning environment.  Over the years in virtual worlds we have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't when you bring newcomers to virtual worlds. Our target audience often consists of new users that have no prior virtual world experience. 

Nara drinks in the ambience of Virtual Learning Village

Maximillian Merlin: That's why, when we developed the Virtual Learning Village, we spent a lot of time and thought on the first steps for virtual world beginners with different learning styles. To learn the basics we have created an interactive ingame tutorial, which allows new inhabitants of our world to discover the most important functions like movement, avatar adjustment or camera in a short time. In addition to this interactive learning we also provide video tutorials to cover the basics like movement,camera control and avatar customization.

Lynnestra Parker: I could have used that when I started out :)

Thirza Ember: Max, did you develop the games first in SL, or is this something that was done all in Opensim?

The sim has its own elegant train station

Maximillian Merlin: Thirza, both . We have taken some things from SL but made a lot new stuff here They can be found here on our Tutorials web page. Our concept is holistically oriented. 

Ayla Alvarez: do you have discussion groups like you do in SL?

Lissena Wisdomseeker: My background is in psychology

Forest Azure: my background is the same, Lissena and I did educational projects here

We moved on to another part of the grid, where there is a chatbot, Abby Sciuto, to provide interactive help for users. Unfortunately a lot of us crashed with the TP, so it took us a while to regroup, but we got the general idea of the setup - it's all very professionally designed and extremely attractive. it's easy to see that newcomers to virtual worlds would find this a pleasurable place in which to learn and train their brains.

From there, we moved on to the place where residents get to choose their appearance. A simple skybox on sim Black Ocean offers a few dozen options in terms of full outfits.

Ayla Alvarez: who would want to have a system avatar?

Beth Ghostraven: I would, Ayla, I prefer it

Ayla Alvarez: why do you prefer a system avatar, Beth?

Beth Ghostraven: I can customize it myself - to me, mesh is like molded plastic. I don't want to have to conform my body to someone else's ideal

Lynnestra Parker: For the beginner a system may be best as they learn. I had to teach myself about mesh, it was frustrating at first.

Maximilian Merlin

Maximillian Merlin: I agree. We believe it is important that new users can customize their avatars. In VLV we provide 2 levels of customization: 1). This basic place where they can find fully equipped  starter avatars to wear out of the box, and 2) A whole island with clothing and other accessories for further avatar personalization.  The Avatar island is like a virtual flea market that allows social interactions between users during their shopping trip. 

Nara Nook, Lissena Wisdomseeker, Beth Ghostraven and Mal Burns

Maximillian Merlin: We are convinced that virtual learning only works if we look at the human being as a whole and offer our users possibilities that go beyond mere learning. We have designed regions that give users the opportunity to discover this new world alone or in interaction with others in a playful way. We therefore deliberately avoided reconstructing traditional school classrooms. To keep this tour short we have selected specific regions to give you a feeling of how we structured the grid.

Thirza Ember: what kind of people benefit from your games?

Lissena Wisdomseeker: Thirza--we focus on different kinds of experiences rather than games.

Our next stop was on the Meditation Path. The idea is to follow this rural walkway, stopping to read the posters and take in the advice. Luna Lunaria and I took the opportunity to have a sit down, as the others teleported over. 

We had one or two problems with teleporting, but on the whole, the Buddy system of the Safari worked out pretty well, and everyone tried to make sure that everyone else arrived.

 Sometimes, you may have noticed, that when you try to TP a friend, their name is greyed out, even though you know they're online and you are in Im with them? The quickest solution in that situation is to make a LM and send it to them. That generally works fine. Why is the TP option greyed out sometimes? Geek opinions vary, but in my empirical experience, it's usually because three grids are involved - yours, your friend's, and the grid you're both trying to travel around on.

Thirza Ember: well this has been really fascinating! we have finished our time, but I think all will want to return to understand it a bit more

Maximillian Merlin: At the end of the walk is the meditation place where users can have a guided meditation through media on prim.

James Atlloud: Such cool buildings.

Maximillian Merlin: If you have any questions feel free to ask them now or contact us via our website. We would also appreciate feedback and we are open for any collaboration requests.    We also have a Discord server .  Thank you very much for your visit. We hope to meet you again soon.

Thirza Ember: it's really lovely, and a wonderful project too - so positive

Lynnestra Parker: I would love to come again and visit. I love what max and Liss are doing here

Tosha Tyran: very good, thank you so much lissener and max

Lissena Wisdomseeker: we got a lot of useful feedback from your visit so thank you

Maximillian Merlin: And again sorry for the lag

Thirza Ember: we are the ones who make lag - not you! Thanks for putting up with us!  we are just a lot of people, and we make a lot of lag, so don't give it another thought, I'm just glad we didn't crash the grid

HG Address: virtuallearningvillage.org:8002