Recently in Virtual Worlds Category

Nice post by Ian Hughes/ePredator from IBM on the EightBar blog about my mirror worlds presentation at Virtual Worlds London

"The post lunch session began for me with the "Rise of Mirror Worlds and Mirror World Applications". Now dont get me wrong I like mirror worlds, but I was more taken with the sort of augmented mashup approach that David Burden of Daden took in showing the mirror world potential than initially the approach of Alex Wrottesly of Near and Mirko Caspar of Metaversum (Twinity). Alex was basiclaly coming out of "pseudo stealth" and sharing the Near concept of a 100% accurate model of a city with managed shop fronts and interiors for all the parties involved in the real place. Twinity was showing virtual Berlin and the sort of activities and popularity of having a real place to socialize in.
David showed google maps mashups with aeroplane arrival data and layering of reality with augmentations from various places."

Between PICNIC08 and the JISC event today it seems like Active Worlds might be making a bit of a comeback - it could certainly give Schools and maybe FE an alternative to SL without the age issues and with a simpler interface and PC requirements.

So I decided to set out and have another go at finding my old home in Alpha World (the main communal world). I failed miserably at the same task about 12 months ago - I new it was in the NE, but Alpha World is about 14000 km by 14000 km! And I knew it was on a train track- the crossing that gives it its name. At first I flew North from the centre looking for where the main drag met the rail road, but to no avail. Eventually I found the new Alpha World map (www.imabot.com/alphamapper/aw/). Zooming around that I finally found something that could be a rail track, TP'd to it and it was, but not mine. I flew and Tp'd along it but it gave out after only a few 100 km - but I did find a sign that mentioned Retsmah. I then found a big rail junction, and checked each rail out of it, looking for stations and TP'in in to check. And then I was there - Retsmah Crossing. And right by it, where I left it ( I built it on Mon 13 Aug 2001 it says) was my first virtual house.




The little pond was there too, and the space cube (an early visualisation experiment). In suitable cyberpunk fashion all the screens were showing snow - "the sky the colour of a TV set tuned to a dead channel" - the URLs pointing to files on converj.com that are long gone - I wonder if they' reappear?



So now I've found it it's probably time to sign up again - or even try and reactivate the old account and build something new and personal on AW before we do something corporate on AW Europe.



Oh, and the grid: 2847N 624E. Make sure I don't forget it again!

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?

http://news.hiperia3d.com/2008/07/20-technologies-for-3d-worlds-on-web.html

Good list of 3D technologies out there. What's interesting with OpenSim is the way that its beginning to divorce 3D graphics from the actual protocols, so you can use your 3D engine of choice - as RealXtend have done. Would it be possible to do the same thing with one of these web/flash based systems and put it in an OpenSim/SL wrapper? One feels the metaverse getting closer.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SL5B/Panels_%26_Keynote_Speeches

Just finished off the Data Viz panel for Second Life's 5th Birthday. Linden Lab asked us to organise it and we were fortunate to get Xanthe Oe who runs the data viz wiki and plot on Sci Lands to actually to the hard graft and pull the speakers together and chair it (thanks Melanie). It was a great panel with a full auditorium and speakers from IBM, Gren Phosphor, UoPlymouth and UoMichigan. After the session we took people on a tour, first to our Briefing Hub and then DataViz on Scilands. Even Pathfinder Linden and prolific twitter Mal Burns found time to join the tour.

Spent the day working on our ChatbotIF interface to Second Life for a change. This sits between our Discourse chatbot engine and libsecondlife. Worked my way through a list of things we'd flagged up over the past few weeks. Improvements/new features include:

- better point to point movement by estimating travel time for each segment
- full IM handling, including routing IM via Discourse and setting the bot to decline IMs
- full friend handling, including setting the bot to decline Friend requests
- a "fidget" function when idle to play random  animations and movements
- ability to set whether to ignore or listen to objects on channel 0
- ability to control movement from Discourse so the bot can more easily show people around
- accept teleport lure's form owner

Always more to do though!

Just spotted this in a post about the SLGOGP - the "metaverse" standard for Second Life and SL type virtual worlds:

"2) Scale the Second Life Grid architecture to support the
industry-projected situation in the next 10 years, where virtual worlds
will comprise at least 60 million regions, 2 billion users and in-world
concurrency of 50-100 million residents."

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLGOGP_Draft_1

AMEE is an interesting site that's collecting CO2 emission data on EVERYTHING and then making it available as a web service. Babbage Linden is already using it to make Carbon Goggles, an Augmented (Virtual) Reality app within SL to give you everythings CO2 emissions.

Good coverage of the DataViz panel from the Life2.0 conference in March by Gus Rosania. Gus is speaking at our SL 5th Birthday visualisation panel on 2nd July. Xanthe Oe/Melanie Swan  was/is chairing both events.