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.

Now the wait. Naturally, I “need” the version with 3G, otherwise what’s the point of a mobile device? That won’t be available for around 90 days. But in the meantime, I am downloading the SDK with iPad emulator from the Apple Developer site, and who knows? Maybe I’ll even get around to developing something for it someday? In my copious spare time, of course.

The ones I found (all prices are in US$) are:

• Color Expert $9.99 by Code Line Communications
• Palettes $9.99 (also has free Lite version) by Rick Maddy
• cliqcliq Colors $2.99 by cliqcliq
• colorSutra $1.99 by Alex Rybkin
• Color Set $2.99 by Corellis

Color Wheel $0.99 by Trevor Gray

Here’s a few screenshots from the two apps I bought. First, colorSutra:

I generated the “Peachy keen” color using the color wheel, by dragging my finger across the display then adjusting a couple of slidebars to manipulate the tint (amount of black or white added to the pure color) and saturation. I clicked the “Display” icon on the bottom of the screen, which showed it along with coordinating colors. Finally, after saving the color, and giving it a name, I was able to see the hexadecimal value, which is useful for web site design since that is how colors are defined in HTML.

Another way to find colors with colorSutra that I really liked is illustrated here. By selecting the “Camera” button, you are presented the choice of taking a new snapshot with the iPhone’s camera, or selecting a picture already in your Camera Roll. Once an image is imported, you can tap or drag your finger around on the image to choose an individual color, as I’ve done here. Then you save it and display the definition, as above. It is a useful little app for finding exactly the right shade you want.

Then, from Palettes:

Palettes is quite a bit more sophisticated, as one would hope for an app that costs five times as much as colorSutra. This app also has a tool for extracting colors from a camera snapshot, although it does that automatically rather than letting you scrub around the image yourself. What is particularly good about Palettes is the large range of colors you can store in each palette, or collection of related colors — up to 25 — and the way you can extract additional palettes from any color in the set. There is even a function for creating blends from any two colors in the set, with choices of 1, 2 or 3 blended colors along a spectrum from one original to the other. On another menu, you can drag one of the colors from your palette into a “well” at the bottom of the screen, and the app generates another palette of colors, from five to fifteen, based on your choice of controls, selected by tapping little wheel icons. If you want to create not just a color, but a whole color scheme, Palettes is an app you will really appreciate.

So, why do I care? Well, as a website developer, I sometimes struggle to find just the right shade or combination of colors for a page design, and as a jewelry designer I also look for new combinations to generate ideas for new items. Actually, there are dozens and dozens of reasons to use apps like these, but having them on the iPhone makes them particularly useful for crafters and decorators, since having a color scheme with you when you go shopping can be very handy. But there is another reason to use them on the iPhone, and that is the touch screen. Both of these apps I’ve reviewed here use touch gestures to perform actions quickly and easily. This makes them intuitive and fun to use, as well as producing quick results. I will be using both these apps for some time, I’m sure.

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.

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.