We’ve seen the Burning Man Festival, the World Trade Center and a lot of weird sex stuff recreated in the virtual world Second Life. A recreation of the 1955 Montomery Bus Boycott? That’s new.
Students at Indiana University have turned part of the Second Life world into a bunch of staged re-creations of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. According to an official press release: “The simulation allows participants to experience the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, the 1964 Mississippi Freedom School Movement and the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.”
The video shows the sights. I’ve not been to many recreations in Second Life since back when I flew through a recreation of Peter Pan and hung out at a fake U2 concert. The technology in this virtual world allows for any of this stuff, since users can reconfigure what the world looks like, how characters dress and even how the physics of objects functions.
Interesting project that probably merits a return visit to Second Life, the first one for me in a long time. Maybe we can send some of the racists who hang out on Xbox Live to this thing?
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