One of my favorite groups in Second Life is the Virtual Pioneers group. As their Twitter handle notes, “This is a group of historically-minded educators that enjoy using Virtual Environments to learn and explore.” Over the years I’ve enjoyed meeting up with this group to tour various historic, or time period sims, and learn some fun facts. Many times they encouraged period dress, such as the time we toured a 1950s themed sim and we were all rockin’ our poodle skirts and saddle shoes.
Most recently, I joined the Virtual Pioneers on a tour of ancient Rome! This is a beautifully done sim created by Queen Ellen of Sparta (Second Life resident) and is a recreation of Rome from around the year 40 B.C.E. As described on the Virtual Pioneers website, this build is “Based on real life history and geography, this version of the city of Rome is as it existed in 40 BCE (just after Julius Caesar and at the start of the reign of Augustus Octavian, the first emperor of Rome).”
What’s really cool about this area is that in addition to the buildings, artifacts, and artwork that Queen Ellen has meticulously built and arranged, she included notecards placed throughout so you have all of the history to go along with the locations. You simply need to click on one of the white and red posts along your path to receive the notecard and information. The history nerd in me loves stuff like this!
The slideshow below contains a few more snaps I took of this tour, and I highly recommend you stop by in-world if you’d like to learn a bit about ancient Rome!
xoxo,
Z
