A Tour of the Kristalnacht Exhibit in Second Life (video)

[Rik Panganiban]

Drew Stein, CEO of Involve Inc, and David Klevan of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, gave me a tour of their new collaborative project: "Witnessing History: Kristallnacht, the November 1938 Pogroms" in Second Life. It's an impressive exhibit that shows the power of virtual worlds to combine various forms of media into a powerful, immersive, emotional experience for the visitor.

Here's a quick video tour of the exhibit that gives you a flavor of what "Witnessing History" is like. But it really needs to be experienced "in avatar." You can visit the exhibit yourself at the US Holocaust Museum1 sim (click here to teleport). Go with a friend, because you are going to want to talk with someone about it later.

[Melissa]

Georges Melies was a creator of special-effect films; he was generally one of the first people to use animation with his technique. He discovered a technique by accident which was to stop the camera rolling to change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film. This idea was later known as stop-motion animation. Méliès discovered this technique accidentally when his camera broke down while shooting a bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be passing by just as Méliès restarted rolling the film, his end result was that he had managed to make a bus transform into a hearse. This was just one of the great contributors to animation in the early years. And March Madness On Demand is here! In where a great way for people to watch college basketball. It's funny that most people that are college sports fans root for teams from universities and colleges that they never went to! March Madness On Demand is a software bundle that you can download onto your cell phone (only for smart phones) and with a broadband internet connection get the game broadcast to that phone. It may not take payday loans to download the app, but at the least you can get a news feed to see the scores. If you have a desire to see teams prevail from universities you never went to from states you have never seen compete, March Madness On Demand might be the thing for you.