Just been playing with the export/import feature of Hippo and managed to get the Apollo LEM I did for our Tranquility Base build out of SL and into my Virtual Mars build on OpenSim. Very nice. Next step must be to make a 9 sim version of the Tranquility Base build, complete with the overlays and then maybe make it available as an OAR file.
Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has an interesting blog post comparing Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, based primarily on a Google Trends plot of both search terms in Google.
His conclusions:
As Mark Kingdon's New Year post says though virtual worlds such as Second Life are likely to become even more real (Second Life HD - SLHD Mark calls it), and anyway:
So in most respects while the "tension" between AR and VW is interesting to me it is ultimately pointless as the future involves both.
But then I looked at Erick's graph again. He plotted virtual reality against AR - which apart from being a poetic balance is actually the wrong thing. All my (and most other people's talk) is about virtual worlds. VR is very much the 70s/80s term - no wonder its declining on his graph - and the VW "bubble" was in 2006 well after his graph shows VR declining.
So I did my own Google Trends - plotting AR against not only VR but also "virtual worlds" - having checked of course that my AR/VR graph was the same as his. The result:
That looks a truer picture. VW steading growing with something of a step change around 2006 and then growing steady til it was overhualed bythe AR hype of mid 2009, but then actually taking AR back over (just) at the end of 2009!.
As ever lies, damn lies and statistics!
As I said earlier this isn't to say that VW is better than AR or more important - they are both going to be important and vital to the future - all we need to know is which to use for which application, and how to get them to work together.
As my Twitter stream shows I watched The Wall production in SL. Quite stunning and really began to show how a virtual world can be used for performance.
I've uploaded some photos to Flickr.
About 20-25 years ago I found a copy of any early home programming magasine called the Liverpool Software Gazette. In it was the listing a programme for the Apple II for Stargate - an app which let you view the starts near the earth as a 3D cube - or even watch the night-sky from Sirius. I didn't have an Apple, but did have a BBC Micro so I rewrote it for the Beeb and released it into the public domain. A few years later I bought an Atari ST an rewrote it again.
And now I've brought it bang up to date in Second Life. The Astrocube on Daden Prime is a big 3D box within which we can plot astronomical objects in 3D. We've already got it loaded with closest stars, brightest stars and exoplanets. The one I really liked though was the 100 closest galaxies. It gives a real sense of a) the distance between the galaxies and b) the huge galaxy clusters which are out there.
We'll be posting a video to YouTube and a URL shortly.
Andy why, after 20 years and the Internet is my best source of data still the star atlas which came with GDWs Traveller 2300AD RPG?
James Wagner Au (aka Hamlet Au) bumped into our Abi chatbot when visiting our sim recently and wrote a lovely piece about her in New World Notes.
