Earth Primbee has finished a new video about the NASA Future Forum that took place in San Jose (at the Tech Museum of Innovation) and in SL:

Earth Primbee made a new video about CoLab.  Check it out over at blip.tv!

Tateru Nino has written a great overview article about NASA CoLab in Second Life. The article is in the SL blog at Massively.com (which covers many virtual worlds and MMORPGs). (That blog used to be called Second Life Insider but they changed the name when they moved over to the new site.)

Cypress Rosewood reports in with the latest iteration of the 12-hour live music extravaganza!

As of late April first,

YURI’S NIGHT 2008 Live Musical Entertainment
PERFORMANCE VENUE – Inspire Space Park
[Cypress Rosewood Emcee and Producer]
Inspire Dance Planet, Butsu 236, 212, 200

ARTISTS to PERFORM – Tentative Schedule
11:00 am SLT Spiral Sands – USA (electronic)
12:00 pm Joachim Gustav – Argentina – confirmed (Jazz/Tango)
1:00 pm Cylindrian Rutabaga- USA – Confirmed (Contemporary Pop)
2:00 Yan Etzel – France – not confirmed (Cont. Acoustic Guitar)
3:00 Torben Asp – Denmark – confirmed (Electronic Dance)
4:00 Frogg Marlowe and Jaycatt Nico – USA confirmed (acoustic pop)
5:00 Professor Blackmountain – Texas – confirmed (Ambient Space)
6:00 pm Gamelan Tunas Mekar -  Colorado – not confirmed (Balinese Traditional)
7:00 pm Jana Kyomoon & Trefies Kaufman – USA – confirmed (Electronic/Acoustic)
8:00 pm Stella – California – confirmed (Ambient Pop)
9:00 pm SPACECRAFT – Kentucky – confirmed (Electronic Space)
10:00 pm Von Johin – Tennessee – not confirmed (Blues)
11:00 pm Cypress Rosewood – Tennessee – confirmed (Ambient Space Native)

ISS model in NASA CoLab’s Testbed sandbox, with HQ ring behind it and Geofrank Taurog’s Lunar building looming in the upper background.

I was one of a dozen avs who burned part or all of 4 hours inworld Wed March 19th while Earth Primbee shot footage for his 2nd CoLab machinama vid.  A big thanks to all those who responded to the Space Riggers’ call for volunteers!

The 2 minute rough cut is online, as is Earth’s previous CoLab machinama vid, NASA CoLab’s Second Life Mission, with over 36,000 50,000 hits at YouTube!

The March 20 Episode of Search Engine, a weekly show on CBC Radio One, starts with a segment on NASA using virtual worlds. Jeanne Holm (SL: Devery Barrymore) was interviewed by Jesse Brown. Click here to listen.

Note: CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the country’s national public radio and TV broadcaster.

Radio valvolare Geloso by barb_ar on Flickr

This is how many views the NGEC2 post at NASA CoLab’s blog got during the conference.

The Next Generation Exploration Conference 2 was held from Feb 12-15th. Notice the 21-views (or hits) peak on Feb 14th? Here’s the origin of that: I took snaps of the opening remarks by Ken Davidian, posted here, put the pics on flickr, captioned them, and got a couple views over a day. Thurs I asked Caledonia Heron to make a RL [real-world] mention of the link. Ten views a day for 2 days on the ngec2 post, and a steady tail of 3 hits a day since.

This was the first year, with only twelve hours notice inworld, that the proceedings were shown in Second Life [SL] as a prototype technology demo. Here’s how this came together so quickly, with, ah, virtually no lead time: Caledonia Heron is from JSC [Johnson Space Center) Learning Technologies program, an education technology incubator. She, Cindy Bolero, and Drew Frobozz, the NASA CoLab sim manager [SL names, all!], were the RL team that made this happen, partly because SL *is* a virtual world.

Caledonia tells the tale: NGEC2 mentioned at colab tues [Feb 5th] … we started seeing email late wed, working tech issues up til mon wee hours to begin event tues at 11sl [SLT, equal to US Pacific Time].

Paradox: gaah! A hundred hours! <hat, er, helmets off!>

Cal: between us easily – probably apiece

Para: I had meant only 100 hr to go – b4 u could start work

Cal: oh, yeah didn’t seem like much lead time plus we didn’t really plan on the first trial run being an all day, 4 day event

Para: hooo-”test to destruction”!

Cal: yeah, so focused on making it work we did not gin up PR; we didn’t really have it running until late monday so there was nothing to promote!!

Para: was this regarded as a success, defined as doing SL feed next time too?

Caledonia Heron: imo, yes. It was a trial run, to see if we could do it given the time, resources (0), and technical limitations. I think the sl attendees would think it was successful – expecially die hard space fans – seeing inside the internal process at NASA.

At the next weekly CoLab meeting’s published minutes, [13:19] Drew Frobozz: and lots of machinima video taken in SL by Haley Bailey at http://video.lisarein.com/nasa/02-12-08/. Please use only with attribution to her.
Ariel Miranda added: And many thanks to Cindy and Paul for keeping the cameras rolling for long hours each day.

And all the colab workers were thanked as well.

Posting or creating a specific page for an event seems like a good way to use this blog’s fast re-edit ability and visibility. Let’s add 2 or 3 zeroes, orders of magnitude, to these numbers for NGEC3!

The full-sized screenshots, far easier to read, are in the Flickr Next Generation Exploration Conference II (NGEC2) in Second Life at NASA CoLab (Set).

NASA CoLab island is hosting the Second Life Virtual World’s side of this Mixed-Reality conference.

There is a NGEC2 in SL flickr group – ask me for permission to upload to it in flickr or at paradox.olbers AT gmail.com.  I posted 5 snaps from the Tues opening day.  [Update - I created a flickr group for everyone's snaps - 3 people have contributed 20 pics.]

Europas_ice posted a slideset and other info at the Index of /NasaColab/Ken Davidian NGEC Supporting Docs and also gives us a great pointer to U of Wisconsin’s Fusion Tech Institute’s Resources from Space Course Notes – Spring 2004 with a note “with useful slides, especially see lecture 10 slides 21-24ish.”

Here’s the audio from Buzz Aldrin’s talk Thurs morning.  And Drew Frobozz advises: “lots of machinima video taken in SL by Haley Bailey at http://video.lisarein.com/nasa/02-12-08/.  Please use only with attribution to her.”

Favorable pre-event press article/blog at Troy McConaghy’s blog [he's Troy McLuhan in SL], Science & Virtual Worlds.

We haven’t posted anything here since April, but that’s not because we haven’t been doing anything.  To get a sense of what’s been happening with the SL Space CoLab project, check out the links in the “NASA: Virtual CoLab” section of the Second Life wiki.

Aaron Rowe of Wired.com wrote an article about the CosmosCode project.  NASA Watch noted it.  Second Life was mentioned several times, as well as the Yuri’s Night party at Ames and the one in SL.