FINDING SPACE IN SECOND LIFE, NASA'S LRO/LCROSS MISSION EXHIBIT HALL

Second Life (SL) is a virtual reality simulation with almost eight million users world-wide. SL has seen explosive growth in the four years it has been available and is now starting to host a number of educational and institutional “islands.” Federal agencies with an SL presence include NASA and NOAA. There are several educational institutions and education specific sims in SL.

At any one time there may be 25–30,000 users on line. Users develop a persona and are seen on screen as a human figure called an avatar. Avatars are able to move around the sim islands by walking or flying and move from island to island or remote locations by teleporting. While a big part of the Second Life experience deals with avatar interactions and exploring, there is an active community of builders who create the scenery, buildings, and other artifacts of the SL world including clothing and other personal items. Builders start with basic shapes and through size manipulation and adding texture to the shapes create a myriad of objects.

This paper will deal with the design and creation of an exhibit hall for the NASA LRO/LCROSS mission slated for launch October 2008. The exhibit hall will be placed on the NASA sponsored Co-Lab sim and will feature models of both spacecraft and the instruments carried on board. There will also be story-boards with information about the mission and individual instruments with links to external websites. The exhibits are to be interactive and will support the outreach efforts associated with the mission. Upon completion of the visit to the hall participants will have the opportunity to visit a near by sandbox—SL parlance for a building area—to design and build a spacecraft from a suite of instruments provided for them depending on their area of interest. Real limitations such as mass, power, and cost will be included in the guidelines for building their spacecraft.