Roo and I, at a recent press event, recorded some podcast interviews with Peder Bjerge from Danish Computerworld.
So in order for us to get over the shock of our real voices (I am glad Second Life is text based) you can listen to Roo here and if really ready for a shock me here.
Category Archives: Second Life
Editing your Estate Raw File
Over on the new Primdig Electric Sheep Blog is a good description of how to edit the terrain file for a private island. With lots more people getting these its handy for people to know the quick way to terraform.
My original attempt on Hursley island , way back in April, led to a massive earthquake and lots of objects getting returned.
The reason, well I got my Raw file, edited it, then when I went to save it Photoshop asked – “Interleaved order or non-interleaved order”, I thought I was being clever and changed from the default of interleaved. This meant all the mapping of the Raw channels was basically corrupted. As it applied the raw file I got some very very high mountains and very very low valleys. The high ones pushed objects up, out of range and returned them to the users.
Luckily we had only just got started, but I still shudder when I attempt a terrain file change on a live island. I am sure we still have some buried treasure on Hursley becuase of this too.
Things happen so fast even when they are slow in Second Life
This evening Yossarian, Jessica and I had a bit of a relax shooting the breeze and solving the worlds problems. We decided to hang out back on the plot in Austin that I rent from Jessica.
Whilst we were just gathering Timeless Prototype sent me a camp fire version of his multi gadget chairs. This fitted very nicely with the organic look I have going on Austin and added to the ambience.
Picture from Snapzilla – that I notice now is also able to push to Flickr too which is great.
Whilst we were chatting I had the TV on, and BBC 1’s imagine (arts programme) with Alan Yentob started to go down the web 2.0 root. Blogs, wikis, myspace, youtube etc.
It then finished on, the obvious one for us all now, Second Life. It looked like the Alan Yentob AV was flying around millionsofus. Its certainly getting more mainstream when it features in an arts show like this. It was odd to be in Second Life, shooting the breeze and also explaining the program as it happened to Jessica.
The whole session, and interlinking of so many threads should have been confusing, but somehow it all made perfect sense.
Alliance Navy Operation Peartree giving back to the community
Our friends over in the Alliance Navy have had a great idea of doing flyovers of public areas delivering presents to people. It is written up very well over here at the Second Life times.
I really love the idea that you can fly a large ship over areas and give something back.
Some members of eightbar are also members of the AN.
This is not a one off event, so keep an eye out for the anti-griefers delivering goodies in your local sandbox.
This is a mini photo cube of the drop ship and some happy residents from snapzilla
The alliance navy were there for our 3d Jam way back in September as this picture from Judge Hocho on snapzilla shows
IBM Virtual Worlds event in London and SL
As Andy pointed out, some of us spent much of today in both London and Second Life hosting a Virtual Worlds event for European press, which included a rather exciting global ThinkTank session.
We tried to make the day as interactive as possible, and after introductions and a real life discussion in the morning we spent a chunk of the afternoon immersed together in Second Life. It was a good opportunity to run a ThinkTank, in which we invited a wide array of bloggers and thinkers (including Ren Reynolds, Jerry Paffendorf, Adam Pasick and many more) to discuss Virtual Worlds, open standards, and the 3D Internet. Not everyone could make it of course (sadly some suffered from some recent issues with SL) but I think we ended up with 33 attendees altogether, covering a wide array of subjects. I’ve uploaded put the transcripts of the two discussion groups, both Ian’s group and my own.
I am already looking forward to running another one of these before too long. Thanks to everyone who battled with troubled teleportation to make today happen.
In other, but related, news: IBM.com carries a big flashy link to a big flashy piece on Game Tomorrow, starring Jai from the GameTomorrow blog (who, I see, even has his own MySpace page). Pretty timely stuff.
Nintendo at Reuters in SL
I managed to turn up late to Adam Reuters interview with Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime today. There was a good crowd when I got there and a few of us who sat not having pressed play on the audio feed. I feel such a Noob!
So I was not surprised I did not get my question in, which equally for Nintendo of America may not have been relevant. I managed to miss the 7 minute window on Amazon in the UK that took the preorders for a Nintendo Wii. This was a bit dissapointing, but I was on the page from 9am but had to do some work and managed to miss the 7 minutes that the console was available.
The Wii is yet another console powered by an IBM processor, like the 360 and the PS3, so I should have viewed getting one as work, but Second Life got on the way.
I also wanted to ask if Nintendo will mind seeing Avatars that look like the Wii Mii that people will be able to create on the Wii. Large bobble headed manga style AV’s
All pictures from Snapzilla
At the event I bumped into Moo Money who asked me if I had received her IM. It is slightly unfortunate that my two islands tend to notify my of things not being able to be dynamically created because they are so full with my fellow eightbar members builds. This in turn caps my IM message delivery and so I tend to loose a lot of IM’s. Now my home email gets them, but as I have been busy inviting the now 600th eightbar member my mail tends to fill with “has accepted inventory offer” combined with “object x has exceeded parcel limit”. So in the middle of all that and the other spam I tend to miss some requests from people. I apologize and will get on top of that!
Things to do with a Scion
A while back I bought some Scions from Toyota. I had not blogged about them much, but as Algernon was doing a demo I thought I would perform in front of his audience. Its flippant, but only took a few mins, what I need now is some buses.
All pictures from snapzilla
Fab Fabjectory
I have been laid up with chickenpox for the past week, which has meant no blogging, no Second Life. Today was my first day back at work, though only from home as I am still infectious. So it was a great start to the day to be in to sign for my parcel from Michael at fabjectory. A few weeks a go I stood for a capture session in SL, and am now the proud owner of this excellent epredator potato figure straight out of a 3d printer.
Michael did some work to make sure my custom Reeboks came out, and they are very very good.
I decided to wear Judge Hocho’s eightbar t-shirt with my real life leather jacket.
The plinth is also printed with the avatar name, a nice touch.
It is great to have something like this, having wanted to get something going with 3d printers for a good few years, and to have this blended with Second Life is even better.
It has been great to catch up on all the coverage we got for the innovation jam results and having just taken a tour of Second Life its amazing what changes in a week just in our spaces.
Innovation Jam results
This years Innovation Jam was the third of IBMs jams. It was mainly web based, with over 150,000 people (IBMers as well as their families, business partners, universities, clients, …) apparently generating over 46,000 ideas.
Of course, as you’d expect, some of the fun happend inside Second Life too. This was a joint effort between IBM’s Virtual Universe Community and the NMC, with the Alliance Navy providing security and joining in the discussion too.
All the ideas generated went into a multi stage selection process, in which they were filtered and refined down, with $100 million in funding to make the top 10 ideas happen.
As was already reported by Reuters (as well as Business Week and, well, pretty much everywhere) this week…
Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Palmisano (right, with his Second Life avatar) is set to visit Second Life on Tuesday, Nov. 14 following a “town hall” meeting with some 7,000 employees in China
The 14th is finally upon us so I thought you’d be interested to hear what happened.
The event itself was a ‘townhall’ IBM meeting, held in an IBM location in China, in front of more than 6,000 employees. Sam Palmisano presented in person, but when he started talking about Virtual Worlds and the 3D Internet, he first handed over to Irving (who recently blogged about signing up to Second Life) whose avatar was surrounded by a decent sized bunch of IBMers from across the world.
Later, Sam’s avatar (samatar?) entered as well, and, nimbly assisted by our own Rob Smart, delivered his message both to the IBM China employees gathered there in person as well as those of us in the Second Life portion of the event. Rob was also joined in Beijing by Holly Stewart and Ian Smith, whose tireless work recently resulted in their being invited to attend (read: be camerapersons and generally make it all work) in person. Huge respect to John Tolva for his tireless efforts in making this event happen too. John has written an excellent post on his blog about the logistical challenges of pulling something like this off.
I didn’t get any great screenshots of the Sam avatar (I hope to add some more later), but here’s a quick grab of Sam and Irving presenting together.
So what are the ‘winning’ Innovation Jam ideas Sam announced? They are…
- Smart Healthcare Payment Systems
- Simplified Business Engines
- Real-time Translation Services
- Intelligent Utility Networks
- 3D Internet (building a seamless, standards-based 3D Internet)
- “Digital Me” (personal content service)
- Branchless Banking for the Masses
- Integrated Mass Transit Information System
- Electronic Health Record System
- “Big Green” Innovations (new business unit)
You can read the list in full, complete with an explanation of each one, in a recent IBM press release.
As with so much of the recent Virtual Worlds related work, this was a lot of fun to be part of. It doesn’t look like much, but it is a bit of a milestone, and will no doubt increase the internal interest in Virtual Worlds still further.
Because of the timezone, the US employees attending virtually were up late (1:30 AM EST) and those of us in the UK were up early (6:30 AM GMT). While the rent-a-crowd were excitedly waiting in Second Life we were listening in to the event over a phone call and getting gossip from those embedded locally over IM. The atmosphere was tense, but also slightly hysterical due to the late night/early morning/what on earth are we doing nature of the event. Total madness of course, but what else would make us all want to get up at crazy times and dress up in suits?
Matt Biddulph’s virtual 3D printer
Matt Biddulph, the brains behind the Second Life Flickr screen and the Last.fm BBC Radio 6 hack (which I mentioned here on Eightbar a while ago), has come up with something even cooler. By way of introduction he points out that…
Many people find the creation of 3D models in SL to be rather tricky. This is because there’s no built-in way to import polygon data as a mesh of 3D coordinates from an external modelling tool. Imagine if there was a factory object that could read a list of coordinates and spit out the results straight into the world, like a virtual 3D printer.
First of all, I love the virtual 3D printer analogy. What Matt seems to propose is automatic creation of primitive objects, such as those used in POV-Ray or Second Life, from arbitrary 3D data. Doing this efficiently is pretty much the unsolved problem in this space at the moment, as nicely summarised by Troy McLuhan in a comment on a 3pointD post earlier this year.
This is something the Prim.Blender project can’t do, requiring you to build with SL-aware prims within Blender instead. My SketchUp hack gets very slightly closer, but in a very crude and limited way (so crude and limited it is still not publicly available, despite having been Slashdotted).
It looks like Matt already has something working. I can’t wait to learn more about this.