I heard a while back, before I knew what it was, that there is an Anglican cathedral in Second Life. So, after it was brought up in class, I went there to see about it.
They hold services and classes and programs, which is fascinating. They have a priest, and serving the church in Second Life is part of his Real Life job, which is also interesting.
The services are participatory events, as you can see here:
I’ve been thinking more on the idea of a cathedral as a space to preserve memory, especially in the obvious things like stained glass, tapestries, icons and statuary, which tell stories. I would like to see if a virtual cathedral space, as in Second Life, could be combined with the idea of a website.
My uncle worked on creating virtual museum tours as part of his dissertation, and he helped students at native American schools assemble websites documenting temporary museum exhibits, creating permanent records of those events. The students would take 360 degree photographs in the middle of each room of the museum and stitch them together on the computer so that a person could virtually "look around" in the exhibit. Close-up photographs of individual displays, combined with text researched and written by the students provided more in depth information that a viewer could access by clicking on links from the 360-degree view.
I wonder if, for example, the National Cathedral could be reconstructed as a virtual space, and the information regarding its traditions embedded within that space in a way that a visitor to the site could walk around inside and look at things and learn about them. I think it would be great if visitors could also interact with cathedral staff and volunteer docents.
The national church has been redesigning its website, and I wonder if that might be a new thing that could happen in site design somewhere down the road - they could become not only layered but three dimensional.
From the Second Life cathedral, it looks like some of these ideas are already being realized – at least the virtual and social aspects though I don’t think the memory idea is incorporated. I would like to explore the idea more and talk to these folks some about it.
That is such an elaborately planned out (and apparently successfully interactive) use of Second Life--I thought it particularly interesting how Craige Gravestein describes himself in relation to his avatar. Also, in Mark Brown's statement on stepping down into more of an advisory role, I thought he made a couple of compelling statements:
ReplyDelete"I am firmly convinced that God is the God of the virtual space. There is much the church needs to do to make the most of the internet; this isn’t about producing yet another website or blog, but of reconfiguring what church is, to best interface with the digital generation."
It's interesting how he (and many others) are working to combat the prejudices of many people that virtual worlds are primarily secular. And these assumptions, I suppose, come from VR's original association with largely secular activities and realms such as gaming, D&D, and academe.