Nokia Italia

Having posted about a couple of "hot off the press" sites, here is one that is rather less new, and that managed to slip past my less-than-perfect radar: Nokia Italia. It's been open since mid-November and has been put together to support Nokia Trends Lab. Rather than finely craft a post of infinite subtlety, with poise and humour, I think I will take freely from the Nokia website.

Visit the island and join interactive games, listen to web radio or participate by creating your own multimedia content. When arriving on the island you will immediately notice the big stage. Here you can visit performances of Nokia Trends Lab artists. In the “My Radio” area you can listen to 10 web radio stations, bringing to you the sounds of Nokia Trends Lab in an atmosphere of a real event. Artists have the opportunity to enter information and add pictures or anything useful to get to know the residents of Second Life. As a visitor you can participate too: take pictures, shoot videos and record sounds! The best multimedia content will be selected and used as an integral part of The Milan Experiment.

Well that's what the website says. I don't know what The Milan Experiment might be, but it sounds a bit scary. My experience of the site is a bit less gung-ho, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that some of these features are yet to come. What I did notice was:

• Music listening stations
• Video viewing stations
• Options to vote for your favourites
• Open mic spot
  
• The "My Radio" area has a number of poses you can adopt, to match the music being played.

The look and feel is a continuation of that found on the website, although the surrounding desert island theme seems a little at odds with it. The Trends Lab seems to have been dropped in, rather than blending with the environment. Still, I like what Nokia are trying to do here, though they need to increase the frequency of events. If the website is correct, there has been only one actual event - and that was at the time of launch. Here are the piccies I took:

Italia Vera 3D

In the Summer of last year you might have noticed a flurry of Italian sims arriving in Second Life. In fact, SLNN carried this article back in July, in which it highlighted the work of Italian builders Italia Vera 3D. At the time, they were planning to develop an ambitious 24 sim presence in Second Life, modelling it on a map of Italy. The original plan, according to SLNN, was to have the whole thing finished by November.

While that target has come and gone, development appears to have continued. I was peering aimlessly in the North East corner of the Second Life map when I espied a large group of Italian sims - some connected to form larger land masses, others standing alone or in pairs, to form an extended archipelago. A couple of these sims showed signs of occupation, so I hit the teleport button and went to have a look.

I settled on the Romagna Veneto sim as my starting point. There was not a whole lot happening at ground level, but at much higher altitude I found an Italian town under construction. This town happens to be a recreation Marostica. At the heart of the town of Marostica is the Chess Square, the Lower Castle and The Doglione. Each September of every even numbered year, a human chess game is played in full medieval costume on the Chess Square, in a festival that lasts for 3 days. These signature features of the town are being reproduced here.

Nearby - and higher up - I also came across work on virtual Milan. A highly-detailed rendering of Milan Cathedral seems to be the main work in progress, though building is also proceeding on Castello Sforzesco and Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. It strikes me that there is an enormous amount of work still to do, but I took some pictures to give you some idea on progress to date:

Given the huge amount of care being put into this, not to mention the huge amount of money, I have to wonder about the approach being taken. It strikes me that the recreation of RL buildings in SL, while it can initially seem like a good idea, can become an obsession. While it is great to build somewhere around which SL Italians may wish to form communities, I am struggling to see where the return on investment is coming from. This is a large, complex build - and one which cannot be easily throttled back if finances are constrained. It is either a "faithful reconstruction" or it isn't - and the latter is not an option.

On the plus side, if and/or when it is ever completed it will be an amazing series of showpieces.