The original NMC Campus opened on April 20, 2006 (so many prims ago!) as our first step in exploring the potential of this 3D virtual worlds as a collaboration space. Fast forward from one sim with some buildings and events to more than 80+ sims in the NMC Campus region, and much has changed.
Over the next few weeks, the NMC Virtual Worlds team is finishing up some changes to the original sim. The Aho Museum, with all of its detailed art, has been nudged just over the border to a new spot in NMC Campus West, giving it a lot more prim space for its holdings. This too was completely redesigned from its original version.
The plan is to implement some more things and events to make the NMC Campus center a hub to the vast NMC Campus Region. We will be unveiling a few as we go, but one important thing is making the open space in the middle a sandbox (the old sandbox in the sky is long gone), not only for rezzing prims, but for rezzing ideas. The plan is to make this the NMC lunch room, because at any time around the world, it is lunch, and we invite you to stop by, chat, talk, ask questions, etc. We will stage some events here, show some movies, create some draw, but it shall be mostly informal.
To make some room, the venerable Gonick Amphitheater has been retired. We had a lot of fondness for it, but we have better venues on out other sims (NMC Conference Center, Red Rocks at Research Park, the sky performance stage at NMC Campus West…). Besides, you can get your own copy for L$1 at Learning.
One new tool we want to draw to your attention, that you will soon see in numerous public places and quads across the region are our NMC Campus Community Calendar event screens:
Powered from the NMC Campus Community Calendar, these will soon be able to tell you the most current events going on in the region, and will update dynamically as the calendar does.
We have set up the calendar site, which resides within the NMC Campus Observer, but is actually its own publishing site, so that anyone who owns or rents land in the NMC Campus Community, can directly post their events to this site. And automatically, these same stories are republished to the front page of the popular NMC Campus Observer. If you are part of the NMC Campus Region, then just submit a request for a calendar account at http://sl.nmc.org/calendar/contact/ and your events will be shared broadly, via both the web and in world on our events screens.
Coming up next, we will introduce you to the magic TARDIS!