Tuesday, September 3

This morning I prepared for a meeting with the First Year, while also writing a draft of the first assignment for the NSS students: a pre-assignment they will need to complete and return before leaving for Johannesburg. Then Jutta and I held the meeting, handed out USB sticks and planned the first Gathering for this academic year.

Immediately afterwards I had a tutorial with Tony and Maija about the virtual worlds thesis project which has now mutated into something exciting and entirely possible. It looks as though we will be building a mobile app in Adobe Air, which is a far cry from the original plans, but might actually implement much better than OpenSim ever could. I left the meeting feeling re-enthused. Tony showed us a demo he had made in Rich Media Masterclass using the Away 3D engine, and it seemed to be exactly the kind of simplified world we have been talking about in our meetings, and exactly the kind of simplified world that has proved almost impossible to build in OpenSim.

I returned some cds to the library before meeting Stefan for a long meeting about the progress (or not) of my thesis. He was very happy with what he had read and agreed that the problems in the previous drafts appeared to have been solved. I left feeling better about it than I had for about five months. Combined with the new possibilities embedded in the revised project Tony and Maija are going to do, I felt as though I might perhaps be able to glimpse a finishing line on the horizon.

Now I am sitting in Arcada compiling and recompiling elements of the empirical research. I am in the corridor taking a break to catch my breath and think. Things seem to be moving again.