Another Hazlitt machinima! Lucky to be invited into yet another new world Vastpark (who hail from Melbourne, Australia)…just down the road, although Melbournians hate Sydneysiders, alledgedly! Even through it is a closed beta demo (called Immersion2) with very limited ‘interactivity’ it gives a real sense of the potential of this new platform at least the look/feel and physics. I do like the general aesthetics of the place and of course the icing on the cake, those lovely dynamic shadows. It would have been good to be logged in as an avatar and actually check out the aspect that separates it from being ‘just a virtual space’ - but perhaps next time. For now I was inspired to do this quirky little machinima for Halloween as the demo is particularly scary…

A machinima by Gary Hazlitt in the new virtual world Vastpark

The music is by Gary Hayes performing live on his Salvi Julia (concert string spacing) Harp at the Contemporary Composers Festival run with the Royal Academy of Music in London a few years ago. There is added ambient mood and specialised sound effects using LogicStudio.

Filmed and Edited by Gary Hazlitt ©JustVirtual 2008

Medium rez (47MB MP4) download available here

For Vastpark enquiries contact Bruce Joy on bruce@vastpark.com

Categories: Australia, Environment Design, Experimental, Machinima, Virtual Worlds, vastpark
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So I will be wearing my worksite hardhat next week and taking apart our ‘creation’ pixel brick by pixel brick. It will make way for a fresh start though, a brave new world, a small patch on ‘Furry’ ABC Island…

and a reminder of what it was like in its opening glory

Categories: Architecture, Australia, Building, Environment Design, Environments, Gary Hazlitt Builds, Humour, Inhabitants, Second Life, Virtual Tourism, Virtual Worlds
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In the course of my work (educational, creative and commercial) it is often useful to know the proximity of islands to each other on the greater grid. A cool full grid map was recently uploaded onto Wikipedia by SignpostMarv Martin and although some of the far right part is cut-off affecting a few sims, I found and labelled the following Oz Islands - The Pond, ABC, Cog, AFTRS, USQ, Marni, Riverina, Monash, Victoria Univ, Murdoch, Deakin, QUT, Griffith, Terra Incognita, Jokaydia, La Trobe Univ, RMIT, Regor (Aussie Land), Australia and NMC (US edus). Also note this is only about half of the full grid - there is an equivalent area to the left of this map but as no Oz islands were there, crop, crop

You obviously can’t read the labels on the map below, clicking will take you to the high rez version. Enjoy. Oh and if I have missed an Australian sim (or related to) please add in comments and I will update if I get at least 5!

Modified map is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Although the distance between, or proximity to fellow inhabitants doesn’t really affect you operationally in Second Life it is nice to be able to just call up the map and in one quick hop, double click a neighbour’s sim to ‘pop over’, feels all communal and friendly. I tp all over the grid and meet anyone and everyone but it is nice to be back in Marni on a Sunday morning and just pop over to AFTRS, The Pond, USQ and Cog with a simple double click And there are many other benefits too, especially when adjacent, joined at the hip so to speak - over to you!

Categories: Australia, Bio World, Environments, Neighbourhood, Population, Second Life, Travel
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