Category Archives: Second Life

My latest Second Life toy – a Last.fm player

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I’ve been a fan of Last.fm for a while, and a really big fan ever since I noticed that Matt Biddulph, while he still worked at the BBC, pulled a very nice hack to update his ‘sekrit’ user every time Radio 6 plays a song.

Anyone following Eightbar in the last few months can’t have failed to notice that we’re getting pretty interested in virtual worlds and the metaverse. Second Life is not the only virtual world out there, but it’s a popular one. Since it makes it fairly easy to build things, and now lets you make HTTP requests from within scripted objects, it’s a pretty handy environment for knocking up 3D artifacts which render web data in slightly more interesting ways than, say, the average RSS reader.

Roo\'s last.fm player on Second Life

In between enjoying Second Life’s third birthday celebrations, I created this ugly beast. My Last.fm feed watcher (despite its similarity to a squashed fly – those are supposed to remind you of speakers rather then eyes) displays the title and artist of the last song I listened to. Eventually it might provide a more complete interface to show more information about my listening habits, but for now I’m happy to keep it simple.

Its 2:15am and I am at a virtual conference session

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I am currently watching a streaming video session at the electric sheep company’s media island hooking up with san fan and the real conference. At the moment they are piping in Dire Straits which is the only problem so far!

supernova conference

A few of us have a had a good chat and made a few contacts, so its doing what it needs to. Over 40 people here to, and its running well.

Happy Birthday Second Life and well done Supernova

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It is a strange concept that the users and providers of Second Life are having a party, a virtual one. Its been a focus for the past few weeks to gather together plans and venues for various celebrations for the third birthday.
It is an inidcation of the sense of ownership and community, combined with the type of platform this is that causes this sort of outburst of planning and activity. There are even sites in world that are advertising the various events. Something for everyone. Speeches, music, tutorials, races the whole shebang.
I hope I will be able to attend a few events, as happens with the real world, its good to be seen at these things.

It looks like the Supernova conference (which has IBM as a partner and Linda Sanford from IBM speaking) is going to be held with a virtual extension in Second Life. The electric sheep company have done the build and I believe there is a Yahoo branded HUD to go with it.
This link is the SLURL for it June 22nd 5:30 PDT
So hopefully a few of us will be able to attend the conference without having to fly to the US.

Chain of events, links and circumstances. Regina Spektor in SL

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OK, Regina Spektor has, with Warner Brothers previewed her album in Second Life. (She also uses Myspace for such things). Now, I had not actually come to this a fan. Not becauase its not very good, but just because I had not heard her work. Bear that in mind as I gush forth with a tale of serendipity.

So being into all things SL I had noticed some blog entries about the upcoming album in SL event from a major artist, it was on my list of things to do but I had not until tonight been. It only happened a few days ago BTW!

Chain of events….. My Flickr RSS feed for the second life pool had some pictures from Pathfinder Linden (who is Community manager/Rep for Linden Labs). So I saw the photos, clicked on the tiny url which led me to the SLURL. This sparked up my second life client and ported me straight to the location. A small New York style loft apartment. A really nice build by Aimee Weber. Taking up a suprisingly small amount of real estate.

Regina Spektor Album preview

A reel to reel was playing very high quality music that instantly caught my attention.

reel to reel

So I am sitting in a loft apartment in New York, which is effectively a 3D album cover listening to an album preview.

That would have been enough, yet somehow the words of the song playing were so spooky that it is untrue. Song 4 – “On the radio”. The lyric being something like “On the radio we heard November Rain, that solo is really long but is sounds pretty nice. We listened to it twice, cos the DJ was asleep”

November rain (Guns and roses) is my Wife and I’s “song” we had it played for the first dance at our wedding. She is away this weekend doing a charity walk so the whole thing brought a lump to my throat. Soppy I know.

Anyway, Advertising works but not always on me, but if we could bottle these sort of connections and make it seem like fate or somehow personal. Well……?

So I will be buying the album, just I am not sure. Do I download it for my iPod, order the CD on Amazon, Walk around town and enjoy the experience of shopping for it?

BTW I just noticed that the album on the table in the apartment is clickable, it opens up the album sleeve, click once more and it flips it to show the lyrics. Beautiful.

Marketing executives get a futureshock

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This article which I happened upon via the river run red, red papers has some very interesting briefing level material for marketing executives. Rivers Run Red are one of the top design and delivery agencies in the Second Life economy (and some others). They did the radio 1 gig, the xmen iii premier and a few other things.

The CMO article says watch these things as they will be changing the future. Some you may recognize from our previous blog posts about other work we do here.

1. Internet Data Mining
2. Virtual Worlds
3. Decision Markets(Attention Markets)
4. Neuromarketing – (admittedly not our specific bag, but medical imaging falls into this)
5. Automated Behavior Recognition – Which revolves around sensors actuators, motes and data mining

Yes just one article, but interesting how Second Life/Web3.0 etc is linked with the elements of emerging technology

Just so this does not get too serious though.
Here is me shooting myself in the head playing russian roulette in SL
Robby Dingo's russian roullette game/social development tool

OK So Second life is not a game, but you can do games in it

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In talking about Second Life to people, and in particular the late night building sessions with new people coming along to my Hursley item all the time to ask how things are going, I realized that in all the protestations of ‘this is not a game it just look like one’ I was starting to get asked why it was not used for games too.

Well those of you have have experienced the mainland in Second Life will know games exists. There are casinos and gambling games to get your precious dollars from you virtual pockets. There are racing leagues and race tracks. Large scale quake style combat arenas.

My personal favourite though is “Les White” and his Sim invaders. A cabinet that looks like the real thing and rezzes the space invaders in 3d above the cabinet. There is something very circular about all that as back in my youth seeing space invaders got me into computers. I hope thats a virtuos circle not a vicious one!

Its a nice example of function in a box. Homebrew coding mixed with old school design, re-rendered for web3.0.
Game3.0 anyone?

Also check out Wagner James Au’s review of Russian Roulette sweeping SL

sim invaders by Les White

Can you guess where this is ? Second Life meets Real Life

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This is a little sneak preview of some things that I have had some success with in Second life

tennis ball in flight

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?

Culture clash in Second Life

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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?

SL Projects to watch out for

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The community around Second life is building up and there are more and more skilled people joining in, as a result some pretty interesting projects are starting to emerge in the secondlife forums, here’s a heads up of a few that i think are especially interesting…

Second Life Protocol
First up there is the SL Protocol Reverse Engineering effort being run by Reuben Stein, this has fired up an interesting discussion thread on the SL forum, the initial posting sparked some serious debate with Reuben being accused of all sorts of things including illegal reverse engineering and opening up SL to a host of security problems. Luckily Phoenix Linden stepped in on behalf of the SL development team to clarify that Linden Labs were in support of the Reverse engineering effort providing it was good natured and not to the detriment of the community.

After this post a few more people emerged and admitted they had been looking at the protocol for some time, a few had actually written bots that work in SL (something that was not widely known before). In addition it was revealed that the entire protocol was described in a file present in everyones install directory and protected only by a simple bit of XOR encoding.

One of the most interesting things to come out of the project (or be uncovered by the project publicity) is the libsecondlife library project coded by Eddy Stryker which provides a C API for writing Secondlife clients, I’ll be having a play with this soon if i get time.

Offline Builder and .obj importer
The Offline builder is a Second life plugin written for the popular Blender an open source 3D editing tool. It gives you a panel in Blender that gives access to the primitives types and options that you have in SL itself.

This tool written by Jeffrey Gomez has tremendous potential, it’s in beta stage at the moment and the functionality to import the objects you create into SL isn’t built in yet, however the ability to build offline and import in will certainly lead to more ambitious projects and a greater audience of content creators.

For the time being Jeffrey has written a 3D model importer script which you can use to get objects inside SL.

Whats next …?

Offline scripting
Another amazingly useful bit of tooling would be a virtual machine to test Second Life scipts out in, I haven’t seen anybody having done this yet but please let me know if you have. I guess that some people are waiting until Linden Labs adopts Mono as thein game scripting engine.

SL offline chat client
I know that some people have already started looking at this one, but with the sudden amount of information available on the SL protocol it’s only a matter of time before IM clients and plugins start to appear.