Last night Yossarian Seattle and I went along to the Globe Theatre build by MillionsofUs for a very interesting event.
MillionsOf Us are doing a lot of interesting things as you will have seen.
The event was an interview by Wagner Au with LongtailChris Anderson.
The pre-event gathering and chatting outside the globe was great and the audience was a veritable whos who of Second Lifers interested in this side of Second Life.
We all chatted before the event, everyone saying hi as one by one people teleported in. As I have written before these pre and post event gatherings are as important as the actual event.
We had all gathered about 30 mins before the event so there was a great deal of chatter.
We then all were ushered into the lovely build that is the globe theatre. Wagner and LongtailChris walked up and took their seat on the stage.
One of the nice things is whilst you take your seat you can still dash around moving the camera and taking snaps without distrubing the flow of the event.
Rodica Millionsofus was there to take and schedule the questions from the audience.
Wagner started the interview and Longtailchris did the elevator pitch for the concept of the long tail.
I had to laugh when Spin Martin said “So if the long tail book stays at the top of the charts for too long does the world implode” that was worth a L$25 positive rating point.
I also liked Spin’s group tag ‘Eric Rice aka’ Spin Martin.
Many of us ended up holding a virtual copy of the book by Falk Bergman. This book is cleverly able to be signed by the author as well as adding to the atmosphere of the event.
Several of us on the front row looked like right swots with our books out. As you can see with Yossarian here, its an effective look with a book.
Once again I need to restate the point that the interactivity and the sense of being there generated by this sort of event is really engaging.
With the interviewer, interviewee and audience all aware of one another just like theatre.
Anyway, we tended to sit and listen and then let Rodica introduce our questions for us. Marshalling a crowd like this is an art form in itself, and we behaved well in general.
Given the timing of this in the UK it was toddler bathtime at about 7:30pm. So as the event wrapped up I was getting RL calls to come and help.
Its a bit strange shouting, hang on I am just going to get my book signed by Longtailchris.
However, given my wife is an economist, when she realized who it was and what the event was she was very interested and supportive, and I guess the PR and marketing works as she needs to read the book now. So its not just me who is susceptable to adverts in Second Life
Anway a great event, great to see everyone there, see you at the next one.
I am sorry I could not hang around and maybe go and see Versu in Second Life. It is a pity this real life shop window build was not a few weeks ago as I would have certainly made it along to there given I was in New York.
Category Archives: Second Life
Bloc party
Last night I attended the GreaterIBM bloc party in Second Life that was mentioned a couple of days back. It was great fun – and testament to the hard work that the organisers put in to making it a success. Here are some pictures of what you may have missed.
The attendees begin to arrive at the SkyPOD.
Exploring.
The audience ready for the start of the formal presentations.
epredator during his presentation.
Chatting at a breakout session.
Complex system modelling in Second Life
I have known Turner Boehm in RL for a long while, so I was more than happy to see he enter Second Life with eightbar. He was straight in modelling and scripting as I would have expected. We had the dematerializing tardis a little while back, but now he has got serious as I indicated he would, not that Dr Who does not count as serious!
Anyway, he has built an modeller in Second Life that, driven by external complex system information ,produces a self organizing atomic looking structure showing how (as in this case) multiple software systems could be interconnected.
In full mode the model is able to be manipulated in realtime. I had seen the original as was impressed but after this SL update I popped to North East Hursley island and had a chat with Turner whilst sitting on this fabulous dynamically built structure.
The elements and linkages have text associated with them to indicate the nodes and links in the model.
The whole thing is very scaleable, imagine a whole sim full of 15000 nodes and links.
For the techies and architects among you I think you will get where he is coming from.
Everyone else, it looks cool too I think.
Those custom Reeboks and the next party
Before todays Second Life downtime for maintenance, I thought I should have my more casual look upgraded with the uber cool custom Reeboks (just search on Reebok in places)
You buy blank white shoes and then approach a booth where you custom up the colours and they are sent to the shoes you are wearing. They are a good price too.
Very nice work by Rivers Run Red
They look great, and they are certainly sweeping across SL. They will be hard to not wear even at low prim events!
So there is the non “predator” me. I do need to redo my jacket as it is getting famous too but it was a 5 minute go at clothing way back all those years I mean months ago!
There were a fair few trainers and neat shoes at the CNET follow up conference with Chris Melissinos from Sun as well. There were a lot of us from Eightbar there, and a veritable whos who of the metaverse today. So these events always serve to strengthen those social networks even if I was sitting at home trying to eat my tea without dropping pasta sauce on my keyboard.
It was nice that lots of us knew and some of us had recently met in real life.
As you may have seen some of the guys running the GreaterIBM initiative are having a get together in SL tomorrow, I get a real kick out of seeing the spread of interest and the gathering pace of change that we all seem to be part of.
So good luck to all the guys running it. Events in themselves are a valuable experience to run in this environment.
IBM Virtual Block Party
Thanks to Peter Finn for pointing out this recent press release about the Greater IBM block party – an alumni event running tomorrow.
On Thursday, October 12, 2006, IBM is holding a first-of-its-kind Alumni block party in the virtual world of Second Life … The virtual block party is part of a larger IBM program called the Greater IBM, designed to maintain connections with IBM’s network of alumni around the world.
…
Hundreds of IBMers — across its services, global business consulting and IBM research labs — have been working together in Second Life for more than a year. Their focus is on applying synthetic world and game-like universe techniques to real business and social applications.
Exciting stuff. Keep an eye on the Greater IBM blog for more details too.
Sun are having a press conference in SL now too
As reported in a few places (but 3pointd is where I saw it) Sun is having a press conference in SL.
Its great to see some other major tech companies come into this space. We know there are a few of them out there in various shapes and sizes, its just we have been a bit more public as IBMers over the past year blogging and experimenting with what this all means. I thought we had done the first fortune 500 press conference, but I suppose we had a more direct one to one with each of the particpants over the 2 days, though the event we were showing was real SL interaction across the world.
This is a big area and there are a lot of avenues to pursue. The important point will be, as with the web, open standards.
Don’t forget to relax in Second Life as well as work
Well after the hectic coast to coast US trip, and coming back to some amazing pieces of news that seem to indicate that a lot more people in a lot more places are even more serious than we could have hoped for about this whole Second Life/Metaverse explosion, I finally get to write a blog entry on it all.
Its taken 9 months (or 5+ years depending what yI start counting), and there is a way to go but it is certainly is exciting times for the entire industry.
In all of this rush of potential, having bought 2 islands, planning things, seeing events, touring the SL world and blogging about it I had lost somewhere to retreat too. My public first land was a bit too small, and I am letting some friends us it as a sandpit.
I now rent a small plot from Jessica Qin on Austin island.
Its good to be the customer.
I had put a rather bad treehouse up, but tonight I started on my “organic art” project.
I decided not to terraform at all, but use what I had on my plot. So here is the start.
Its a start, going for curves and twists in prims, a nice simple pod to sit in.
Just blending in and chilling.
Next week it all gets hectic again. Off to London continuing the flow of the meetings in the US with as many of the key agencies and people in this whole new business, then lots more meetings RL and SL, calls, and somewhere in all that we get to build on our newest island (once the Alliance Navy have finished their training mission, as I lent it to them as part thanks for attending our 3d Jam )
Hi to everyone I/we met on the US trip. In keeping with the rules of customer confidentiality and business meetings not being blog fodder, it was great to meet you all, and great to meet lots of likeminded talented people.
Wonderland and Philip Rosedale at Picnic06
Over at Wonderland is a great write up of Philip Rosedale’s talk at Picnic 06 a cross media event. Of note are the statistics. These are constantly getting bigger when referring to Second Life.
In a meeting I had this week the statistic was quoted that the Second Life virtual turf is the size of Boston. In this regionally adjusted pitch its the size of Amsterdam 🙂
I particlarly like the quote “We hear a lot of anecdotes about people improving their real lives after having done it first in Second Life.” As someone whose entire job has changed to focus on this very real emerging technology and let me make a lot of new friends and contacts with some very inspirational people inside and outside of the company I work for, I would say i am one of those anecdotes!
More Travel, now in NY and geeking out at the Wired NextFest
Well my international jet setting has taken me form San Jose including popping down to Fishermans Wharf in San Fran, back over the US to Danbury for some great meetings with the IBM Innovate Quick team that Roo and I are part of now as Metaverse Evangelists.
We are off to Somers and Southbury as Roo has just arrived in the US too.
However, today being a Sunday, I took a GPS enabled trip to NY city in my hire car.
I have not been to New York before so I was not sure what to expect parking wise. The GPS did its thing, I aimed at the Empire State Building as I noticed there were a lot of parking garages around.
I passed a convention centre on the way to west 34st. Lo and behold there was “Wired Nextfest” on.
Well, much as I wanted to see the sights, events like this need to be visited. So I did.
It was relevant as well as Second Life appears in Wired in a massive spread this month, and I had been reading Wired at Washington where I was delyed for 5 hours on my way to NY.
Anyway, there were some really awesome things to see there. I dashed around but saw lots of amazing robots includingan Einstein one that walks very spookily and a very human animatronic. A door that opens to be the right size to fit the person going through, an art installation of 50+ nabztag rabbits sponsored by Atari. A VR ball like a giant hamster wheel for people to interact with a simulated world, the virgin space plane, robot football, loads of display that reacted to people in the space, brain ball in action (using brain waves to move a digital ball in a contest of wills), lots of bio solutions fuel, building light. Clever displays, interesting gestrure based military devices, scanning equipment, a bionic suit the works in fact.
I did go to Times Square and up the Rockafeller building so I did not just geek out.
There are some mini videos of things from my little pentax. Very rough and one is not rotated properly.
Anyway the next few days are full on metaverse days and nights including meeting up with some very cool SL people over in New York, more on that later.
It is odd that the all things metaverse help us to not travel, but somehow I am now in jet lag hell becuase of pushing these technolgies so much. Its odd how things work out!
Google Sketchup -> Second Life export
SketchUp is great. Not only is it free, but it supports Ruby as a scripting language, and provides plenty of interesting APIs and reasonable (though not very well inter-linked) documentation too. It’s long been discussed, in conjunction with Google Earth, as a potential virtual world, and rival to Second Life. While it will be fascinating to see how that develops, and whether they become more comparable over time, what interested me much more in the short term was some way of getting 3D data from SketchUp into Second Life. Dave did this recently with PowerPoint, which and it reminded me just how much I wanted to do the same thing in SketchUp.
What I really wanted was SketchUp -> Second Life exporter. I didn’t want to buy SketchUp pro (though I thought about it), because even that wouldn’t solve my problem. More recently, I saw that Blender 2.4.2 makes it possible to import SketchUp’s (proprietary, binary) .kmz file format. This is cool and potentially very useful, especially when you consider the Prim.Blender project allows you to draw SL prims and export them. Ideally, it would also do the hard work of creating simple SL style prims from the complex 3D data. This is not an easy project though, as discussed at 3pointD recently.
Eventually I gave up my search for a basic SketchUp -> Second Life exporter and realised I was going to have to write one. I’m really not a Ruby guru, but I surprised myself by knocking something up in 20 lines and no time flat. Ok, so it’s not very good, and it doesn’t bring us any closer to the nirvana of complex models being automagically generated using the minimum number of prims, but it was so easy that I’m very surprised not to be able to find anyone else taking this approach already. (Perhaps someone will fill me in it has already been done and I’ve simply missed it.)
So, what is it?
What I wrote was a short Ruby plugin for SketchUp. It writes out basic model information to a text file, allowing it to be imported again (as a notecard) into Second Life. From there, an object parses the notecard and re-generates the model in-world. It does not support the full power of SketchUp by any means, and takes some judicious short-cuts to avoid generating zillions of prims. In erring very heavily on the side of simplicity, I’ve made something that you’ll either find delightful or frustrating. Each face in your SketchUp model, you end up with a flat, rectangular prim which represents the bounds of that face. Imagine if every face of every shape in SketchUp was simplified down to a rectangle which marked it extents. That’s what my script does. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. The interesting bit of the Ruby plugin looks something like this…
model = Sketchup.active_model
file = File.new("/testfile", "w")
model.active_entities.each do |entity|
if entity.typename == "Face" #ignore everything but faces
# (e.g. we won't pay any attention to edges, points, etc)
face = entity.bounds # For now, make a rectangular prim
...
...
While it works very well for fairly basic models…
Something more complex ends up being made to look fairly ugly. Curves and non-regular faces are particularly badly hit…
Future developments will include colour/texture support, as well a bit more thought about the mapping between the SketchUp model and Second Life prims. I’m sure there are loads of things that can be done to improve it. I’m already enjoying it as a faster way to put simple things together though.