Prize for bridging first and second life

A museum exhibit that bridges real-life with Second Life has won its two Manchester-based creators a trip to America as part of a major prize.
Pete Wardle, 42, of Swinton and Alan Hook, 25 of Rusholme will be jetting off to San Jose in California in May to see their project Connecting Point become a reality.
The pair of MA students on Salford University’s creative technology course have been named as one of four winners of an international competition run by The Tech Museum of Innovation.
Their project provides a link between SL and the real world. Visitors to the real museum will see a large screen and be able to interact with avatars.
“The idea is that it’s a gateway between the two”, explains Pete, “The avatars will be six foot high but able to talk directly to the visitors and they will be able to talk back.”
At the moment the pair are working on overcoming the challenge of time lag between the two worlds in readiness for the installation of the project and Alan revealed that the choice of SL for the project wasn’t an easy decision.
“I was quite adverse to using Second Life to begin with because I thought it was just a 3D chat room and didn’t really understand its potential in terms of creativity,” he said.
“After helping on a project for Prof. Paul Sermon for the Urban Screens festival and discussing it with him and other artist it really opened my eyes to it’s creative potential.
“Maybe for some people it is just a chat room and it’s got a lot of bad press recently but it has great potential in terms of creativity and experience both for artists and the public.
“It is a very simple and open platform to use, it has and is developing a great supportive community to help people build their ideas. Its potential is massive and, because it is built largely by the users it is always growing and producing new ideas that make us think about the capabilities of the internet in the future.”
Find out more about the project at the Tech Museum here.