I have been spending time lately working on the development of Koru, which is as most of you here will know, NMITs Second Life sim (island). A number of parcels have now been created on the island and are available for rent by educational institutions (one year periods) from NMIT. Please IM Arwenna Stardust inworld or email Professor Clare Atkins at Clare.Atkins@nmit.ac.nz for further details in terms of pricing etc. Parcels come in two sizes currently, 4096 sqm which supports 937 primitives (the building blocks of SL) and 3072 sqm supporting 703 prims, though the parcels have been laid out to enable the combining of two or more plots thus increasing the available prim limit. To give you some idea of what those prim numbers can give you in terms of buildings I have included a capture of the ISTE building on Eduisland which uses around 620 prims for the building and furnishings. The parcel it is on is 4096 sqm.
A casual meeting area has been developed on Koru in terms of terraforming and seating though the actual landscaping still has to be installed (a NZ bush setting). A more formal conference area will be developed eventually but this will suffice for now in terms of the current Koru requirements, which include being the set out point for most of the Kiwi Educators group trips. I have also finished the creation of the sims main landscape feature, a pair of kauris, using photographs for the textures from kauris in my local area. The provided image shows one of the SL modelled trees.
In return for the services I am providing to NMIT I have my own parcel on Koru (under the name FXual Education Services) which I will be using for educational research and development purposes. Currently it is housing my build for the Literature Alive program which has unfortunately taken a bit of a back seat due to my efforts with Koru development but hopefully I'll be able to get back to working on that build soon. I am also working on some basic Second Life training modules which will be available for group use in the near future.
The Slurl for Koru (this will take you to the meeting area).
Enjoy
Aaron/SL: Isa Goodman