By using the “building” tools in Second Life (actually 3D wire-diagram and texturing tools), complex models can be constructed quickly, and with practice, easily. With a length conversion calculator in hand, I was able to build the house model at 1:1 scale. The only complexity was that Second Life uses metric measurements, while most US builders prefer English, so I wanted to make it easy to calculate square feet rather than square meters. The building platform is slightly smaller than one acre (60m square). And yes, I do intend to clean up the roofline for those architectural engineering purists out there. It’s a preliminary sketch, ok?

Oh, and of course I do have the presentation on my iPad. In fact, I created it there using Apple’s Keynote for iPad app, and exported it to PDF. This might come in handy when we talk to a real builder, since we can show him our ideas without requiring him to go into Second Life to see it. The same is true of our Realtor, who will be able to see exactly what kind of lot we are looking for. As a portable electronic portfolio, the iPad would be hard to beat.

However, while it is not possible to get the hardware accelleration normally available from the GPU, it is still possible to use vReveal to clean up shaky, low-contrast videos. It just takes longer since it will be processed by the CPU instead of the GPU. Much longer — in some cases it can be up to 20Xs slower on the CPU. But if you have the time, it can be done with just one click of a button.

While investigating CUDA, I was bemused to see a whitepaper in the Nvidia CUDA Zone called “Fast N-body Simulation with CUDA”. If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you may recall an item I wrote about a year ago, called Virtual Worlds Galore, that included a video made by the guys at Genkii in cooperation with the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, or MICA, on this subject. Apparently n-body simulations are all the rage now that desktop computers are capable of displaying them, thanks to virtualization and graphics acceleration architectures like the Nvidia CUDA. They’re a bit over my head, since I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a 3D visualization expert, but its fascinating to follow what’s being done by people who are. And it is more than a little interesting to see how so many of the topics I cover are connected one way or another in unexpected ways.

Last time I wrote, I was downloading the OpenSim server software to my external hard disk via SVN. That went well, but I have to admit that the instructions for compiling and running it on MacOS 1.5 were so daunting that I deferred that until after I’d tried out the binary under WindowsXP.

It worked! I installed and ran the binary version of the open source server on WinXP, which was installed on a virtual machine running in Parallels Desktop for Mac on my early 2006 20″ Intel Core Duo iMac, and while I couldn’t do much except look around with the camera tools (since I had not configured any of the other servers — asset, inventory and avatar databases), it was quite a thrill to know that I could have my own little world running on even a laptop unconnected to the internet if I wished. (The reason I use an external disk for my virtual machines is so I can access them using my husband’s 17″ MacBook Pro or any other Mac with Parallels Desktop installed.) I logged in using a copy of the SecondLife viewer, just editing the target definition in the shortcut’s general properties window, and using the default login ID and password of “Test User” and “Password”. The target I specified in Properties, of course, was the localhost URI, http://127.0.0.1 plus the designated port, in this case “:9000″.

Other VW Developments

In an already-running OpenSim grid (OpenLife), a week or two ago I met the person who started that system, Sakai OpenLife (OL name). It was interesting chatting with him, and he gave me a tip I’ve followed up on for porting content among VWs. He said many people have had good luck with Second Inventory, an application that creates a backup on your own hard disk of objects, textures, bodyparts, etc. as long as you have full permissions for those assets. I discovered that there is a multi-avatar version available, so while it’s a bit pricey (29 Euros, vs 14 Euros for the single-avatar version), I went ahead and bought it. It does indeed work as promised, although it is a bit slow to copy a large inventory since the “folder copy” function isn’t yet enabled and items must be backed up and restored one at a time. Folder actions are promised for the next version, though.

I ran a few tests, and I was able to back up and “restore” copies of simple and linked objects from both my primary and alt accounts in SecondLife to accounts in Open Life and OS Grid. It isn’t perfect; embedded scripts don’t always make it, and when they do they must be recompiled since not all LSL functions are available in the OpenSim VWs yet, and animations also don’t seem to come across when embedded in an object. Presumably those might be uploaded and added to objects if one has the .bvh files for them, though. My coffee mugs came through with their handles and “coffee” intact and didn’t require relinking, but the “drink” animation and script aren’t there, and the little “ring” piece used for the rim of the cup wasn’t linked. I just threw away the rings since they aren’t critical, and copied the particle steam script I used in SL, recompiled it and added it to the “steam” prim, but I haven’t done anything about the animation yet.

Interestingly, once I had the backups made, I could restore inventory items from my SL alt account as well as my main account to either SecondLife or another VW with impunity. The owner’s name didn’t make any difference to the software. When an asset is “restored” to an inventory, whether it came from that account or not, the owners name becomes that of the account that it’s being restored to, not the source inventory owner’s. There is certainly some potential for mischief here, especially since I was also able to “back up” some full-permission assets that I did not create, and when they were restored my avatar’s name showed up as the creator.

Copyrights and DMCA Issues

The ability to “rebrand” items that I owned full permission copies of, but had not created, made me wonder what the attitude of some of the content creators in SecondLife were toward these brave new virtual worlds. Would I be able to legally use copies of fulll-perms textures I’d bought in SecondLife in other worlds? I sent that question to one of the texture store owners I’ve patronized extensively, LilyBeth Filth, owner of Textures-R-Us. Predictably, she said, “No.” Here’s a direct quote from her IM, which I think explains her reasoning and the problem very well:

Hi, Our User License does not allow customers to use them in any other virtual world including SL open source clients. The reason for this is because they would be uploaded in your name and not that of the creator. In time people will share these textures with friends (as they always have) and before we know it people are selling work created by the original artist but uploaded by other people and it creates a nightmare of a DMCA issue. We create & sell textures for SL only. Sorry. LillyBeth 2008/5/17

So, it sounds like there could well be a whole new round of rights issues to hash out, even when the dream of a mostly seamless metaverse becomes a reality. The technology is not the only thing that needs to be mastered.

One of the things people have been clamoring for in SecondLife for as long as I can remember (back to about July 2005, when I first rezzed into that world) is “Web on a Prim”. A prim is a primitive object, like a representation of a 3D cube or sphere or cylinder. These are the building blocks out of which all the incredible representations of physical objects are made in 3D virtual worlds. By combining them, twisting and resizing them, “painting” them with textures, linking them together and embedding little scripts in them, all the wonders of the grid are made manifest.

All, that is, except for a functioning Web browser that an avatar can share with others in the world. The latest version of the SecondLife viewer, the client software that enables one to enter these virtual worlds, offers at last a rudimentary Web viewer, but it can only display a single page with no live links. Hypertext without hyperlinks is almost useless, but of course it is a step in the right direction, and better than anything that preceeded it.

In one of the derivative VWs I’ve joined recently, though, they have taken LSL a step further. As well as implementing most of the commands from that scripting language, a few home-grown functions are added. One specifically enlarges the ability to display Web pages on primative objects, chosen by anyone in the world, not just someone who has control of the media on the land parcel where the object exists as is presently the case in SecondLife. For the geeks among us (you know who you are), this function is called osSetDynamicTextureURL() and it allows a “voice” command to be used to surf to any given URL. Where native Linden LSL commands follow the convention of having their names preceeded by “ll” (two lower-case letter Ls), as in llSetText(), the OpenSim scripters have used os[Function name] to identify those that are not from Linden Lab. I’ve tried out an object that uses a script with this function, and it works quite well. However, when I tried to make my own Web display object using a copy of the script I found in the user’s forum on the OSGrid.org website, it did not work; I don’t know why. Perhaps the copy has a typo I’m not proficient enough to spot, or maybe the grid was just being a bit unstable at that moment. It is still alpha software, after all.

Still, even if I couldn’t make my own Web display (yet!), the fact that LSL is being extended in OpenSim grids is very encouraging.

Also encouraging is the fact that I heard from a friend tonight that a mutual acquaintance is also planning to install Sun Microsystem’s open source Darkstar server to run a Project Wonderland region on his own computer, as I hope to do soon. This is becoming the favorite indoor sport of the really extreme VW addicts on the block! I’m one step closer now, since I finally located the package I need to install Java6 SDK on Debian Linux, a requirement for running Darkstar.

I naturally immediately signed up for an account (katlemieux) and briefly explored this Web-based world, which only opened to the public this Monday. So far, they have two types of “rooms” available which one can rent on a daily basis and invite people to join you for free, and two generic avatars, “Joe” and “Jane”, which can be customized to a limited degree. With a Pro account, one can upload textures to create a better looking avatar and wardrobe, etc., but so far I haven’t found any specifications for those.

In general it looks promising. The idea of a low-cost, Web-accessible virtual meeting space has some real possibilities, even if it’s not visually rich yet. Already one can link to a folder of images to display as a slideshow, or a video file, and a voice chat tool is available. Adding voice to a meeting room rental (US$5.99) costs an additional fee (US$4.99), but that’s not horrible considering that people you invite to your room don’t have to pay a cent.

So far I’ve only tried browsing this site with Firefox on Mac OS X.5, but (after adding a line to my computer’s Java settings, according to Transmutable’s very clear instructions, and restarting Firefox), it worked very well. Later I’ll fire up my virtual machines with WindowsXP® and Debian GNU/Linux, and see how it works on them.

Find more videos like this on Association of Virtual Worlds

Yes, yes, I’ll get around to learning the application myself soon (it’s pretty easy to get started with) and will write my own sterling prose about it, but for now this is a good placeholder.

In addition to the International Spaceflight Museum, where I’m a director and CEO, at least one other “homegrown” SecondLife island is to be included in this archiving pilot program, Democracy Isle. I think the project may also be including a sim that the Stanford Humanities Lab people have been building as well, the LifeSquared. (There is an intro video to the LifeSquared project online.)

Non-SecondLife subjects include the original text-based computer game, Colossal Cave Adventure, and possibly some aspects of World of Warcraft (WoW), which of course is a wildly popular multiuser online game world.

One aspect I found interesting was that this project seeks to document and perhaps enable recreation of the user experience, not just the sourcecode for the worlds it is archiving. Probably the most important object of the project is to define a methodology for doing this, beyond preserving the specific content from the test subjects. However, as the representative of one of those subjects, I can say we (the guinea pigs) are very grateful to be part of this study, since it will preserve at least a snapshot of our museum that otherwise could well vanish one day if SecondLife or Linden Lab happened to go away. Since a number of us have invested considerable time and even a little money into our virtual museum, to have that happen would be a personal tragedy.

Several months ago, Henrik Bennetsen, research director at Stanford Humanities Lab asked me if the International Spaceflight Museum would agree to participate in the project as one of a few test subjects. Our museum planning group agreed, so here I am.

I won’t be “live blogging” this workshop, since I need to concentrate on what’s being said rather than try to capture the bare events, but I will come back to this blog space to comment on some of the highpoints.

One of the points in Brouchard’s talk was something about people always asking if they can import their content from other 3D worlds into SecondLife. He said, not at the moment, but the wisdom of crowdsourcing won — an avatar mentioned the 3PointD.com article about doing that, published back in 2006. However, the Blender object import tool created really, really messy objects made of hundreds if not thousands of primative pieces, using far too many resources. So, a true format conversion is a much better solution, but one that so far is not available.

Now, after another long break an my computer crashing (thunderstorms in the area), we’re back. The panel on the stage now consists of Raph Koster, a game designer, Cory Ondrejka, former CTO of Linden Lab, Inc., and Howard Rheingold, a noted futurist.