With new textures in tow, the process of replacing the sketchy vine rows has begun. ‘Planting’ each section of vines and ensuring that they are rooted in the landscape has given an added sense of respect for the labor of the people who pick the grapes come harvest time, or indeed anyone who works in a produce field for a living.

While attempting to evoke the experiential qualities of a real vineyard, here in the sim the vines respond to the conditions of the virtual world in a couple of ways. Here in the virtual vineyard the vines can closely follow the contours of the terrain by appearing to grow perpendicular to the ground, rather than straight up and down. As well, the construction of the vines as a series of alpha channel-mapped texture planes that cross each other lends itself to variations in face brightness and a small number of subtle, almost holographic flickers, as if “Vine Unit #VU39ghtu4-A” were somehow malfunctioning and in need of scheduled maintenance Given a limited number of prims, the nature of Second Life’s rendering engine (and/or my knowledge of it to date), these artifacts while imperfect also impart an added level of variety and activity to the vineyard and seem to be mitigated somewhat by the overall scale of the planting when viewed as a whole.