During my evening constitutional, an idea came to me. It may be a solution to a design problem.

The design is a themed camp to be installed at the Burning Life event in Second Life®, and may introduce a curious aspect of the American Dream: the Stealth Tower. For one element in this collaborative project, I will be adapting my SLickPix panel to serve as an interactive picture postcard. Conceivably, visitors to the camp will see images of other Burning Life camps and installations.

The problem is this: how can the image-sharing panel be modified to engage passerby? The hope is that—by enticing rezidents to participate by submitting images (generating content)—an image set will emerge that represents our collective memories.

If that sounds splendid to you, too, a tip of the hat goes to Sachie (whose notions tend to the elegant, I find).

So, I am walking along thinking about

1. how I have not worked on SLickPix in days
2. how a self-serve instructional kiosk might work
3. how to improve the Parcel Media Link Prim Generator (could start with that name)
4. how to proceed on the Virtual Ability proposal
5. how to reconcile the existence of two identities (alts)

…and it comes to me: Polaroids.

If the image panel were married to a blank, white, rectangular prim, it could be made to appear like a Polaroid snapshot. Can a two prim object be made to auto-scale one dimension, given a change in another? But still, that alone does not bring me (the user) to the tipping point; I need something else. I want ownership in this project you are asking me to invest in…I want my own Polaroid!

Alright, what if you had a chance to take a piece of our little camp with you? Not only will we show you your own memories yet to come, but we’ll make them interactive and persistent, too. (After the Burn, when the embers have lost their glow, you can still share the collective memory of the event.) You just need to…

Take a copy.