This is a little sneak preview of some things that I have had some success with in Second life
Primarily it is around getting data on an http request to explore some of the possibilities for future sports events. With the french open on at the moment and our collegues from Atlanta working over there, with a certain UK event in the next few weeks powered by IBM, well I had to have a go didn’t I?
In this article Wagner James Au writes about some of the pressures and expectations that everyone is expected to be American in Second Life. I personally have not found it to be a barrier, though I have been happy to express the fact I am a brit. Indeed there are many groups such as Brits in SL who are clearly not just US based. Our eightbar group in SL by its very nature crosses many cultures as the interest in Second Life spans further than us in Hursley and across IBM.
I have also found that in general people are quite chilled out and polite about things. SL is more of a leveller in terms of culture. Though given it is a ‘english’ focussed language based medium I am sure its NLS support will grow. Who knows we may even be able to learn a bit more about one another’s cultures through this medium more than any other?
You may have noticed that a few of us are very supportive of Second Life as a medium to explore the technology and to see the future of the web. Web 3.0 even.
This link takes you to something that is currently on the IBM main homepage. Which makes it (for us) very significant.
It is focusing on the fact that many of us know that some of what would be considered game technology actually has many more uses. I say this as a gamer for over 20 years. In some ways gaming changed the course of my career in that it is what interested me about computers in the first place back in the 1980’s.
Part of the IBM article mentions the embedded reporting of Wagner James Au who has been able to document the rise of web 3.0 from within web3.0 itself.
In reading his blog I have found out a fair few things, but I had not come across his other articles here that document Web3.0 and Blog2.0 from his point of view.
It is very insightful and well written. It also strikes a chord with many of the things I have been saying so maybe I am a little biased. See what you think though.
I finally got to try the llhttprequest, it was in a 10 minute gap in the day, when my daughter who is 3 today decided she only wanted to play with Grandad.
Anyway, I did not intend to do things ‘properly’ but I did want to see if the new outbound http would let me add function to what I had already. Extend rather than port the XML-RPC inbound code I already had.
The existing “legacy” or “chesished” second life objects were 4 different instances of objects with my weatherrss script in them. Just to explain the objects in second life can and could open a channel making them available to be talked to from outside of second life. The outbound mechanism was only email.
Anyway this led me to create these objects, and cut and paste their unique ids into a piece of externally hosted PH. This PHP did a call to a well known weather service and then sent it into SL to the set of unique ids I had added to it. One click 4 objects get updated
The problem was triggering this, getting second life to send an email as a way to ask for a refresh was not great. I had a webpage with various URLs that were precanned calls to my PHP with various country location parameters.
Anyway the new 1.10 Second Life let me put a call in an object in an llhttprequest. So I simply got an object to use the same URLs as in the original webpage.
I now have an object in SL that can take user input and as my PHP to update all the various weather instances I have.
Obviously there are better 2 way mechanisms, like why bother using the XML-RPC at all, but this one liner let me exploit what I had and gain massive extra function.
It would now be very easy to create a map or globe with hotspots. Trigger external events by avatar presence and sensor events etc. All very useful.
Tonight Second Life had a major upgrade. There are all sorts of nice things, but it is not very often we get a point release of a piece of software and all the users go WOW! Thats an exclamation not World Of Warcraft.
Because second life is as much a development tool as a place to hang out and try things, getting a new tab and set of properties for objects, or new functions in the code becomes instantly interesting.
One of the main things under the covers is a new httprequest function to let objects talk to the rest of the (www)orld. I was a bit short of time tonight and attracted by something much more shiny and engaging though. Flexible textures and primitives.
Everything in SL used to be flat, or made of lots of prims to make surfaces. Well now we have a whole new bit of physics to make wavy textures. I instantly turned my rock solid St. George England flag into a nice wavy flag, and then resized it to a nice england cape.
Things like this really inject a whole new set of ideas, and a chance to revamp some things.
At last a business is emerging to combine second life and 3d printing
A few people may have heard me harp on about 3d printers over the last couple of years, yes even before blogs 🙂
We have seen a few ideas and hacks that let you get opengl renderings out to a 3d printer. I had talked about buying one anyway and running it in my garage.
Things being what they were I ended up in investing time and money in a Second Life which has had much more impact amongst my community.
Now though, things are merging, maybe it is time to start going RL to SL and back to RL all as a service. RL drives the creation of SL space and objects, those objects can now be recreated as RL objects.
Also as the TV show Lost seems to have started creeeping its way out Alternate Reality Game style (see post on perpexcity.com) with its http://www.thehansofoundation.org/ then maybe we have three trends merging? ARG in SL and RL but requring actual physical objects to be printed in 3d
Just for completeness. The Alternate Reality Game is a specific type of media experience. Notable for its weaving of various types of technology to deliver a message or story. The ‘story’ is usually not planned in advance , but the authors watch the fans as they start up wikis and blogs and websites and adjust their path and involvement based on that activity.
Unlike a lot of marketing, it seems to be based on not having much in the way of advertising to start off with. There is a reliance on a small clue (referred to as a rabbit hole) that the writers are relying on an observant and inquisitive person to pick up on. This then acts as a seed of viral enthusiasm. With the original finders feeling a sense of one upmanship or leaders of a community. Whilst still allowing the later adopters to pick up on the whole story.
We have all just been to an excellent UK based event. BBC Radio 1 is broadcasting in Second Life.
The event is hosted in a dome, there are lots of free dances and glowsticks as people from around the world are listening to the Chart Show.
It is a bit of a watershed in that this is commsioned by the beeb. The builders are Rivers Run Red
I had a chat with Foxdie Ghia and Fizik Baskerville who were both very helpful. It seems again to add to the radio listening experience, wandering around seeing other people dancing away and chatting, without distrubing the whole media experience.
It is great that the BBC are prepared to dive into this sort of environment and the event is so far well attended by a great many experienced (far more than me Epredator Potato) SLers.
I arrived with my england flag that I threw together for the world cup. I was going to make it wave, but the party was too much fun to bother messing around in photoshop.
It certainly helps convince the doubters of the power of the metaverse, and again stops it being some geek fest.
Well done everyone 🙂
Just go to secondlife.com and use the event finder for Radio 1, its hooked into the big weekend in Dundee, but will no doubt be around for a while.
The last few weeks have brought a quite intense immersion in second life. What started with just checking what the tools were like has ended up being a quite a movement.
Quite a few of us have found that the linden labs platform with a mixture of 3d model creation tools and a very rich scripted language is letting us explore many of the ideas that may have been held up or on the backburner. It would appear that the open nature of second life, the ability to protect intellectual capital, to build and expand on other team members work is causing many more innovative ideas to surface.
Some of these will start to appear here on eightbar.
Due to our immersion in second life we were invited to attend an opening event at a campus island created by NMC. This was an interesting event in that many of the people were very new for Second life, but you could tell the more experienced dwellers by the costumes and looks. The community aspect that we all helped one another along and shared ideas was very liberating. The nearest analogy is a wiki, but in 3d and with all the contributors being there and seeing one another.
I also have ended up putting some skin in the game by buying a private island (server) for us to share some of our ideas and the mere fact this existed has encouraged our own community to form around it.
Whilst it was very empty.
We soon had a board room.
But all work and no play makes jack a dull boy so we have all been out in the metaverse experiencing the richness of the user created world, such as live concerts.
Its certainly brought a great team together who have a common interest, and are finding ways to express all sorts of creative and technical ability.
A few of us have been exploring second life. I have a humble plot of land in the ‘metaverse’.
Being more techie than arty I have been exploring how to make the XMLRPC elements work, and seeing what potential there is in the scripting language that lives behind all these weird and wonderful objects.
The plan was to make a glowing orb respond to events outside second life. There seemed to be very few examples and lots of comments about things that did not work. However…… the orb on a stick in the right hand side of the picture is controlled by a form on a web page and some PHP.
So its state can be controlled by anyone accessing the page, rather than being actually in second life.
There is also some floating text (not shown) that hovers over the orb, the contents of this also comes from the standard HTML form.
The orb also emails a task ID I have elsewhere to tell me what the current message and state of the light is.
I believe that Linden Labs are looking at better ways for the objects to talk out of the ‘metaverse’ but for now it seems to work pretty well once you know the ID of the object you need to talk to.
Massively Multiplayer Online(MMO) used to be about dragons, character leveling up, the odd spell. Second life has changed the model an introduced some new patterns that are there to be explored.
MMO’s got a mention in IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook as one of the strands of conversation about the changes ahead for the world.
Games have always been a part of my life, I have grown up wth them. However I also do ‘serious’ computing. Now, though, it is impossible to ignore the elements in Second Life that provide real collaborative computing in an immersive commercial environment.
In this environment people make money, selling things to other people. Shops and malls are forming in the virtual world, people are providing services, writing code, designing objects all to exchange for the Linden $. The unusual aspect is that the L$ trades both ways with the real world. So you make money in game, you make money in real life. A real economy?
People are making money, but they are also being extremely creative and innovative. Its not a single big product or killer app that makes the money, its volume sales of interesting objects and function.
The environment also considers those who wish only to contribute and open source thinking is rife in the virtual world. As a creator of an object in this world (which is in effect code) you are able to place it in world, sell it, offer it to the anyone, give it to people but not allow them to alter it, make it a perishable item. In normal terms it has an extremely rich access control mechanism.
The guys can also scale, more people subscribe…. they add another server/world/island.
All of what is in the environment is created by the users (most of whom subscribe). Where else do you get thousands of customers to self build your product?
A few of us are in second life, taking a look around, seeing what is happening and actually experiencing it rather than just reading about it, enjoying as well as researching. The facts an figures are more eloquently explained in this Google tech talk. It may not or may not be the coming of web 3.0, but some of the potential that is being created and exploited here cannot be ignored.