2nd life

how cool?!!!

OOh look an ambulance! but where are the patients? awww, i wanna see blood and gore! hehe think I play too many games, but  Ican't help but look at 2nd life as a game!

These empty beds would look better if they had dying virtual patients on them....

Posters....

We got together in our group today to discuss our project and come up with some ideas, the first thing we thought of was to design a house that people can visit in 2nd life and it would have interactive rooms each focussing on a different area of personal health, ie: Kitchen for healthy eating, bedroom for sexual health, bathroom for personal hygiene etc. but after discussing this with anna we discovered that we should only focus on one area as there will be alot to do, research, modelling, moodboards, planning, themes, slogans, logos, posters to design, textures etc. so we have decided to focus on one area.

Then we looked at doctors surgeries, dentists and the NHS and decided it would be good if we had a 2nd life doctors surgery in which maybe young people come come for information and guidance on a range of health issues. This would be mostly beneficial to those that may be worried about speaking face to face with a GP about embarrassing matters, or even for those who don't have the time to go to the doctors or can't get an appointment in time, rather than looking through pages and pages of text for information users can visit our virtual surgery where they can ask questions directly and get answers from one of our virtual doctors or nurses. This could be done by either pre-programming set questions and answers or by having live health officials actually working there and giving live responses.

I think that sexual health would be something that users would want to enquire about the most, simply because it is the most awkward subject for them to talk about and this way may be easier for them, anyone from the age of 15 upwards can come here for information, or maybe younger? but that is where market research comes in, we plan on making questionaires to give out to students and young people, or to have them answer the questions on the spot, to find out if they would use the service and what they might use it for, or what they think the majority of young people would want it for.

We need to carry out this research to assertain how this service would be beneficial to users and if the users themselves feel it would be a useful service?

typing NHS into 2nd life we found that there was already a london based NHS service, which surprised me as I didn't think there would be anything like that on 2nd life! after looking around we saw that some of the ideas we had, ie: having posters and webpage links were already in place, but what it was lacking was interest, interactivity, fun! yes we need to make it fun or people will not want to go there as it will just be another 3d world, we felt that nurses should have been walking around for you to maybe interact with, it would have been fun to see patients being rushed in on trolleys, (as we were in an A&E section) the whole place seemed a bit dead and boring, it was cool that they had coffee machines etc, but I kinda felt, why walk all over the place for information? surely it would be easier and more accesible on google? 

so we will have to make sure our virtual world has character, vibrance and holds visitors interests whilst giving them useful information at the same time! so maybe we could make a game out of it? 

we have all decided to do individual research over the weekend and then bring it all in on monday so we can develop it further as a group. 

I will be designing questionaires in the hope to find out the main reasons young people visit the GP, and what issues they may find easier talking about virtually, and if they find this idea appealing or not. 

The 3 of us in our group on our empty land! this will soon hold a masterpiece of design!