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Lively

This will be my last entry into my journal for the semester. I started off by going into my rooms and practicing everything that I have learned to date. I changed the appearance of my avatar by changing the clothing he was wearing such as adding sweaters, pants, boot, etc. I also practiced how to move furniture and finally figured out how to create a cave or hole in the ground. I did this by using a poster and typing a jpg link through the gadget options. I then put a pole over top of the poster and then was able to add a second pole underneath the first pole by using the control up and down arrows. After repeating this step several times I was able to create a room underneath the original chat room. After completing the room I practiced using my different views such as avatar view, birds eye view and view finder. These different views really do make a difference in seeing everything that goes on in the room. At this point I got kind of bored and started to go around to other peoples rooms and tried out my animations on new users. It is still funny to see my avatar kick and punch some other avatar especially when it is a new user and they do not know what they are doing. In one chat room I went to I was unable to perform animations on the avatar who had created the room. I asked him how he was able to delete this option but he would not say. At this point I got bored again and started chatting with the other users about how lively is about to shut down but nobody knows why. I personally think that the creators of lively want money from the users/members to run the system and that this was probably a trial. It has been fun up until this point but lively is not something that I would pay to use and if it requires money for membership than I will probably pass on that option.

Lively

Today I went to a room called Giza. It looked something like a pyramid with stairs leading to the top. There was also a chat room that had a cave like setting with a purple polar light. In another chat room there was only a dock that was floating in the water. I have not seen these room shells previously so they must have been recently added. This would probably mean that lively is a new site as new items such as room shells, furniture and other objects are always being added. One chat room I went to called Trapped under ice was a shell of the north pole. The creator of this room had a video screen playing the movie The Thing. She also had a fireplace with wooden stumps and a coffee mug. When you entered the room she would initiate conversation with you and eventually tell you that all her friends have disappeared. I asked her how and where in which she replied in a cave under the ice. I thought she was joking but she brought me over to a flag where there was a hole surrounded by a fence barrier and a skeleton. Upon reaching the hole you can enter the underground cave by pressing control and the down arrow. There was a golden pole that you click on which will bring you down into the cave. In the cave there were more skeletons, creatures, torches, cryochambers, an alter, marble floors and walls. This room was very well thought out and decorated. This is probably one of the best chat rooms that I have been to. I asked how she created the hole in which she replied by pasting a link of an image through gadget options. I tried this but have been unsuccessful to this point.

Lively

Today, I went to a room called city life. Again I found items that I have not seen in the catalog such as a magic book, a piggy bomb, a cannon, a column, a street lamp, a jeep and a baseball toss stand. I played the different animations and added the items to my inventory. I also learned something new in this room which was that I have the ability to move from rooftop to rooftop. The person who had created this room had furniture on other rooftops so I clicked on the furniture and clicked move to. It took a couple seconds for my avatar to reach the other roof tops but this showed me that I am not limited to the roof top that you automatically start off at when entering the chat room. I also met other new users to the site who were not familiar with lively, what it is about or what you can do. I explained to these other users that lively is a virtual chat room where you chat with other users, create rooms and perform animations. I also told them how to perform animations on other users by clicking on them and clicking animations. Some users were interested in how to create a room so I told them that they need to click on the new room icon to create a room, select a room shell and then furnish it to their liking. I told them that they could add furniture to their rooms by either clicking on the item in the chat room and add it to your inventory or by clicking on the catalog through the main page. Some came back with questions on how to move the furniture or add videos to the movie screen. Again I told them about the icons on the right side of the screen and also referred them to the getting started link. I have only used lively about eight times in 2 months but now I am the one who is teaching new users how to perform different functions yet I am still learning myself.

Lively

Again I went around roaming from room to room. I am still finding rooms with new items such as a bed with a head board in the shape of a pigs head. There were also other items such as muffins, a book shelf, a recycle bin, a pachinko machine, a wall mounted screen and a miniature pig that explodes when you play the animation. I asked the owner of the room if he added these items to the catalog and if so how he was doing it. He told me he was not adding any items and that I can search the catalog by name of items to find what I am looking for. I asked him how he was uploading video games onto the mounted screens in which he told me to go to youtube and select the game you want and type the url into gadget options. I went to the catalog and selected the items I wanted and then went back to my rooms and created another room. I called the room “my room” and then started adding furniture to it. I added items you would normally find in a bedroom at a university residence such as a bed, desk, dresser, a computer, a sofa and a television. After decorating my room I went back to other peoples rooms and started chatting with them about life, and sports. We started talking about the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, their amazing turn around season and how close they were to winning the world series. We were also talking about the Tampa Bay Lightning and how terrible they are doing. It is interesting to see that there are a lot of other people out there from Florida or the Tampa area using lively. It is also interesting to note that we have a lot of the same interests in life be it sports, food or life in general. To this point I have found people on this site to be very friendly and helpful.

Lively

I went around to different rooms collecting items I did not see in the catalog. Some items I picked up were a tree lamp, pumpkin jack, a disco ball, a picture frame and a movie screen. I went back to my room and added a movie screen but it was not playing any videos. I went back into other peoples rooms that had these movie screens and asked around as to how they were able to play different videos. Finally, this one guy was able to tell me that I needed to go to you tube and find a video that I wanted to play. He then told me that I needed to copy the url and paste it into the movie screen using gadget options. I then went to you tube, selected my video and put the url into the gadget options. Once I clicked enter the video loaded and started playing. I then went around looking for people to invite to my rooms. A couple people came and we talked about daily life such as what we do for work, where we go to school, if we were married, how many children do we have, where do we live etc. One guy was from Tampa and lives one mile from USF. He said he was a student at USF for about one year until he got kicked out due to bad grades. He mentioned that he had to go to University in North Carolina to finish his bachelors degree and has now returned to Tampa. I told him I was going to USF as a graduate student and that this was my second semester. He asked if I was familiar with the area in which I said no. He then recommended several restaurants, bars and pubs that I should check out.

Lively

Today I created 2 more rooms. The first one I created was a rooftop that I called skyline. I furnished the room with chairs, a firelog, a telephone booth, a bed, sofa, money and 2 stereo systems. The other room I choose was a lecture classroom I named class. I decorated this room with goth chairs and one high school classroom chair. I was hoping this would give it a feel of a classroom one would find at a university in a lecture setting.

Lively

Today I created my own room on lively. I clicked on create a new room and had to choose a shell for my theme. I decided to shop around for a shell room and chose to go with a coffee shop. I am calling it the USF cafe house. I then tried to select a sound for the room but was unable to as it said it needed an mp3 player and should be less than 512 KB. I then tried to burn a cd to my computers library to upload to lively but again got the same message. I then went ahead and saved the room. After the room loaded I started shopping around for sofas, chairs, tables and kiosks. After selecting the furniture that I wanted for the room I then started to add the furniture. It was easy to add the furniture but I found it difficult to move the pieces around. After awhile I realized that when the green light came on that I could move the piece of furniture to a particular spot and when the yellow light shadowed the piece it was to change the direction that the furniture was facing. Another problem I encountered was that I do not know how to get behind the counter to make it look as if I work there. I will probably just go to a similar room and ask the host how they are able to do this. The music that plays in my room must be set automatically as it is the same music as another coffee shop that I visited which has the same room. No visitors at this point but maybe I will go around and visit other rooms and invite people to come.

Lively

Today I visited more rooms in lively. I got added to the contact lists of other users. When I was talking to some other people they had moved out of site and asked me to come up. I did not know how and they told me about an icon on the left hand side that I could click on to get different views. There was a birds eye view, avatars view and a viewfinder. The birds eye view allows you to see the room from the top like a bird would view you from the sky. The avatars view allows you to return to normal viewing. The viewfinder allows you to rotate 360 degrees. Some objects have comments when you click on them where as others do not. Some rooms I was unable to move to or sit on chairs as in one room called lively: high school 101. Again all people I spoke to were able to speak English. Some rooms would not let me add furniture. One room had a background animation of snowflakes falling.

Lively

This was my second time visiting lively. I went to a couple different chat rooms. I found out that I was able to walk outside of the building of the chatroom and walk around. A lot of other first time users were there. There were a lot of different people from different countries such as China, Thailand, Brazil, Holland, etc. I thought that it was amazing that they all spoke English. When I was walking around the rooms I clicked on some new objects and found out that some objects have animations that you can play. Some objects even had their own website listing. Some rooms took more time than others to load. The rooms had different background music themes. Some played music, some had drums playing on and off and some even had narrative themes. Some rooms had multiple rooms as oppose to one open room with multiple floors. One thing that I disliked was having to resign in to enter new rooms.

Lively

Today was my first day using lively. Lively is a virtual chatroom site that offers many different chatrooms to enter. There was no membership fee and I had access to all of the rooms. I chose my character and then dressed him up appropriately for each chatroom. I was able to dress him up after going to the product catalog and selecting different items that I liked such as clothing, furniture and phone booths. Upon selecting my items I then went from chatroom to chatroom. At first I did not know what I was doing and just stood there waiting. I then saw the other characters chatting to one another and saw an area for posts to be made. I said hello but nobody responded. I waited again and noticed the characters moving around, adding furniture, moving furniture and other various actions such as laughing and choking. I asked them how they were able to do these various actions but they did not reply. It was not until somebody else that was new to the site had entered the chatroom and told me that I needed to click on the character that I intend to kick. At this point I realized that I needed to click on my own character to move him around. This made the site much more interesting as I went from room to room practicing all of these actions.