Next Tuesday, the BCS is organising a talking on Virtual Worlds. A friend of mine, Dr Toni Sant who’s a lecturer at the University of Hull is flying over to share some of this background and experience in the field. Here’s some more information about the event and the speaker:

Second Life is a 3D multi-user role-playing online environment. Unlike other virtual worlds, created as games with set rules and stock characters, most of what goes on in Second Life is created by its users. This makes it an ideal playground for all sort of creative people. At any given time, there are no fewer than 20,000 people active in Second Life. Over a period of 60 days as many as one and a half million registered users log in. Building on over 10 years of experience with text-based virtual worlds on IRC, MUDs and MOOs, Dr Toni Sant has more recently been exploring Second Life as the next part of the evolution of virtual worlds on the Internet. His work on this subject has been published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and in the book Learning & Teaching in the Virtual World of Second Life (Trondheim – Norway: Tapir Academic Press, 2009).

About the speaker:

Dr Toni Sant is Lecturer in Performance and Creative Technologies at the University of Hull’s School of Arts & New Media in Scarborough, where he also serves as Subject Group Leader for Interdisciplinary Studies. He is currently writing a book called A History of the Future: Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant-Garde (Intellect, forthcoming 2010). He also podcasts and blogs regularly at http://www.tonisant.com

More information (and a CPD certificate to download) can be found at the BCS website