Welcome Area in SL11B

This year the welcome area will be on one sim only. If the sims arrive in the layout expected, it will be at the top left* of the estate, with the north and west sides facing out into the never ending water and the south and east sides adjoining the rest of the estate. For this reason, some kind of diagonal design that faces and directs people into the main estate is prefered.

* The position was changed to the bottom left later.

There is no specific design requirement or function for the welcome area build apart from it being a welcome area. As a guide, it is expected that it will take up around half the sim, be wide open to accommodate many people and be very low lag. The welcome area sim is probably the most used sim at the event as it is where everyone first lands. The design will need to house info areas, greeters and host areas, tour pod stations and the like - things as yet not thought of. It will also need to have an area of up to 4,096m2 (64m square) set aside for our time capsule display, and the builder will be required to liaise with the time capsule 'keeper' to arrange the display area.

The welcome area should have some relevance to the theme.

It is expected that the build will be mainly mesh, however there is no requirement to be mesh, prim or sculpt. It’s up to you!

The theme this year takes inspiration from a quote by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill:

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Last year’s theme was “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” but we focused mostly on looking back, and rightly so, as 10 years was an important milestone and a perfect opportunity to reflect back on where we came from.

This year it’s time to look forward; to imagine where we are headed.

When Winston Churchill said this in 1943, he could not have imagined a virtual world like Second Life, but now, more than seventy years later, his words have come true in this new world that we have created.

If there’s one thing that makes SL unique, it’s our community of users. Users from all corners of the globe come together under a single umbrella to build a community that comes from our minds and our imaginations. Everything we see, touch and use in Second Life is a product of our imaginations, our minds, and our community.

And this year, at the SL11B Community Celebration, we want to celebrate precisely that!

Get thinking. Get imagining. Get creative!

Well, first, I was told that welcome area this year should be along with the theme of SL11B, "the empires of the future are the empire of the mind". When builders were required planning image sketch, I drew a large statue holding a tablet as the landing point, and the statue had a brain inside of the head.

Tablet expresses... you know, today it seems we can experience this world with mobile devices.* I haven't experienced mobile SL yet, because the service is not available yet at present in my living country, Japan. But I think it's an epochmaking thing, and probably it's also a necessary thing for the virtual world to be spread globally among common people. So I wanted to make a large tablet floor as the landing point of avatars who visit to this celebration event first time, as if their actual bodies just came into this digital, electric, ... how can I say... but the world of imagination, through the tablet screen.

* A mobile version of Second Life, "SL Go", appeared in March 2014, and ended its services in April 2015.

I thought there should be a brain object to express this is the world that is built by our mind. But during the process of modeling, I found that human shape with a visible brain caused a strange, horrible, weird feeling. I was embarrassed because Welcome Area shouldn't be looked like an anatomy classroom. So I decided to pick it out of the head, and enlarged it, then made it turn into a big dome-like building.

And, to bind the brain dome with the statue, I thought there should have been a common thing between the both. So I made the tiara. Then the statue started to be a girl, princess of "Empire of the Mind", and the total image began to solidify with a colorful, fancy, floral taste, like girl's mind. Though I'm not a girl and I don't know well.... It's just my imagination.

This is the brain dome. Don't be fooled with flower patterns. We are inside of a brain! This can be an expression of the virtual world itself. It's interesting, isn't it?

Well..., this occured to me during making. Mind needs substance, body. But body dies. Everybody dies. But today, our mind can remain among other people on the internet through this kind of virtual world. Things we built: what came from our mind can stay existing clearly and eternally, even after our each end. Anyone in future generations will be able to access to them easily and instantly. This is a deep subject and I don't know how I can say about it yet. Still, I think I can say this: "Life is a game. But Second Life isn't just a game."