For almost an year I have been thinking about various builds for Burning Life 2008. The theme, borrowed from Burning Man 2008, is “The American Dream”. I kept focusing in on one aspect of this: given all the diversity of American culture, what is that makes us all Americans?
I had lots of ideas, all of which were too vague to be built, or too complex for Second Life to support, or just silly. When I claimed my plot for this year’s festival, I still didn’t know what I was going to build.
So, I went looking through my inventory for anything to make my bare rectangle of playa unique and I came across a “thought balloon” attachment I had made a few months ago.
After a few days of tinkering I ended up with this:
That’s some 60 randomly colored heads each with a thought balloon. The pictures shown in a thought balloon is picked randomly every few seconds from a set of some 20 or so pictures. I selected those pictures because they represent things I tend to think about and, I believe, are things that most of us think about.
If a visitor touches a head, it changes color. If a visitor touches a thought balloon, the picture shown in that thought balloon is briefly flashed on all the nearby thought balloons.
I also finished up the attachment and have been giving copies away to visitors. It is also listed on SL Exchange. The attachment comes with over 200 pictures and can easily be customized to display any picture. Since I made the entire thing full permission and put it under a Creative Commons license, anyone can customize it in any way they want.