Task 7: The Experience

The Experience

A video was compiled to show all the features created working all together on Second Life.

Future Enhancements

There are several ways how this idea could be enhanced to portray the Institute's presence on Second Life at all times.

Improvements related to Design

• The six course sheets present on the shelves should be skinned according to each course offered.
• The kiosk would be attended by an ICE Malta receptionist - to be able to help people even on Second Life.
• The user interface for the method used to communicate in-world would be greatly improved using a form integrated into the ICE Malta intranet.
• Land should be bought for a proper Second Life presence. In this case, the current operational building could be designed on Second Life in order to portray the environment of the school without having to actually visit or viewing pictures.

Improvements related to Added Functionality

• Another possibility would be to integrate Second Life with a 'canned-replies' robot, providing answers to frequently asked questions as well as suggesting study paths to students given their target and knowledge.
• Further still, the Facebook integration could be improved to allow avatars to post statuses and update their Timeline from within Second Life without having to load the Facebook web page externally.
• Sample lessons can be given in an ICE Malta 'auditorium' featuring recorded lessons or scheduled live lessons.

Conclusion


Despite all the room for improvement, the ICE Malta kiosk designed and developed for this coursework is a very good start towards the company's Second Life presence. In real-life, showing students the whole environment and explaining the whole student experience makes it a whole lot more interesting than reading the default paragraphs highlighting the positive aspects of a company. However, creating a real-world identical environment (building, demo lectures, group talks ecc..) on a virtual platform is beyond doubt a step ahead to reach users at any time, from any place. For this particular reason, the management at ICE Malta are considering actual use of this project.