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.

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.

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.

In the meantime, I did try importing a model into 3DXchange from the Google 3D Warehouse. Here’s a screenshot of the Lambourgheni I found there in the 3DXchange window.

Export Formats
• bmp
  • 24 bit
  • 32 bit
• jpg
  • sliding scale 0-100% quality
• tga
  • 24 bit
  • 32 bit
• gif
  • transparency

Obviously, these are 2D formats, not 3D. Maybe for 3D I need to look at 3DXchange2 instead? iClone is really intended for creating machinima rather than 3D models for virtual worlds, after all. The right tool for the job…

I just received a couple of new products from Reallusion® for review, iClone2 and 3DXchange2.

This intrigued me because I spend a lot of my time and effort participating in a corner of the metaverse called SecondLife™, and at least some of that time involves designing and “building” models of objects to populate that virtual world. Unfortunately, at this time it is not easy or perhaps not even possible to import models into SecondLife, but that may not always be the case, and anyway SecondLife is not the only virtual world out there. I also have an account on Qwaq, for instance, related to the work I am doing with the Qwaq-SL Liaison group in SecondLife. That in turn is related to some activities regarding the future of the metaverse, particularly with some researchers at Stanford’s Humanities Lab. That group is putting on a conference next weekend, called Metaverse U, which I am helping to bring into SecondLife.

Anyway, to get back to the software, I haven’t done much more than install all the elements, look at the website and press kit, and open it up for a first peek. 3DXchange is particularly interesting since it allows one to access the Google 3D Warehouse and import 3D models for use in iClone2. But I will look at it more closely in the days to come, and relate my impressions and experiences here.