Visited Sploland with the vague idea that it is associated with the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco. I chose not to listen to the streaming music, I also chose to download QuickTime so that I could see movies.
The first thing in front of me is a giant eraser which I can climb onto and ride. Not sure why.
It’s a bit of a confusing mess to be honest. One of the conventional objects is ‘The Incredible Running Bat’ (you can see it in the left of the screenshot above). A series of flickering images show a bat running. If you click on the object you can collect a notecard that informs you:
Eadweard Muybridge, pioneer photographer renowned for his sequential images of horses, people, you name it, once bet rich guy Leland Stanford that a bat lifts all four limbs off the ground whilst running. Muybridge used these photographs to win the bet.
Still pretty confused about what Sploland is I searched on Google and found surprisingly little information. Several searches later I ended up in a page of the Second Life website that provided the following information:
The Exploratorium – the museum of science, art and human perception in San Francisco has created an interactive science museum in Second Life which allows residents to explore art and science whilst having fun. They have established two locations – their original Splo Museum at Midnight City (SLurl) and a dedicated Island, Sploland (SLurl).
The Splo Museum spaces house more than 100 exhbits including optical illusions and perception exhibits (SLurl), a 3D map of the nearest stars (SLurl), the Pie Ride (SLurl) and a Distorted Room (SLurl). Residents can also ride Halley’s Comet as it makes it’s way around the sun, or ride one of the other planets in the Splo Solar System at the Orbital Experience (SLurl).
Watch a video tour of Sploland, read the paper: Creating Museum Content and Community in Second Life or find out more on the Exploratorium’s Virtual Worlds website.
