How to create opaque walls?

hi,

i am working on a collaboration environment for a uni- class. i built one house for each group and i am currently restricting access to the buildings with scripted doors. it is important to secure private environments to avoid plagiarism. My problem is now, that it's still possible to look through the walls. is there any possibility to make walls opaque?

thanks

No. There is no way to exclude a camera. Since a user can disable camera constraints, s/he doesn't have to be anywhere nearby -- even in the same sim -- to pan around and see what you're doing in your inner sanctum. The only real way to beat the problem is to own a private, isolated sim and restrict access. That's what the corporations do. But of course that approach won't help if the plagiarizers are in your own midst.

Here the problem seems to be plagiarism not voyeurism. I've sometimes encountered scripted objects in which you cannot open and read the scripts. Can someone tell us how that is accomplished? You might not be able to avoid imitation of visible objects, but that should be easy enough for the instructor to spot. Seems to me it's the scripts that would be the problem, and that ought to be curable.

That's simply a matter of setting permissions. If you mark a script as no mod/ no copy, nobody but the creator (you) can view it.

In general, you have to deal with plagiarism among students in SL with many of the same tools you use in RL. If you're an experienced teacher, you know that there are no foolproof methods, but you can discourage cheating by all but the most determined people. Console yourself with the knowledge that people who go through life plagiarizing typically develop only shallow understanding. There's a brick wall waiting for them at some point. (Even if that's not always true, it can help keep your blood pressure under control. )

To answer the original question, you can put a different texture or change the opacity on the outside of your walls to that of the inside so you can see out and not in. Can't stop anyone from camming inside and inspecting things though. In this case there's no difference between plagiarism and voyeurism, unless you mean something else by that.

thanks i know that, but the problem is u can still get inside the building using the camera.
the students should write essays using google docs, whiteboard and so on. so its not about copying prims or scripts, its actually really about copying their assignments and stealing ideas.

each collaboration room takes place on its own parcell. is there maybe a possibility to exclude/block non group members.

Now it sounds like what would be needed is a prim with a restricted access list that opens a joint document specified students could access and work on, one that would be visible on the authorized computer screens but not visible in world to an unauthorized plagiarist. Anyone know if something like that is possible within SL, or perhaps using the prim to open a (restricted) page on an outside website? The restricted access list is a freebie, bujt I don't know about the rest.

You can certainly set parcel parameters to admit only certain people. That's easy. It won't solve your problem, though. If I have disabled camera constraints, I can be hundreds of meters away in the next sim and still cam right into your room. NOTHING stops a camera.

The only way you are going to prevent copying is to have the students do their work off world and bring it in later. Frankly, I taught college age students for 30 years and NEVER found a way to prevent dedicated cheaters. In fact, if you get too rigid about it, they'll treat it like a game to see whether they can beat you. The best system I ever found was trust.