General Computer Stuff

Second Life in a Browser?

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We have all heard about people putting text only viewers for SL and OpenSim in web browsers. The idea of using a browser to visit virtual worlds is to avoid having to download and install a viewer, thus making it much easier to get people into virtual worlds.

Well, it seems there is a full viewer being built on HTML5. It is being tested with OpenSim now.

Maria Korolov has an article up about it on Hypergrid Business: PixieViewer puts OpenSim in Browser. Now that is something.

Maria says, “Because it uses standard HTML 5 technology, it should be accessible on mobile devices such as Android tablets and iPads, though users were having problems getting it to work today.”

So, that could give us a 3D viewer for SL on mobile devices.

Maria says a special module is needed for Pixie Viewer to work. She says this module is server side. Whatever, she speculates it will not be compatible with Second Life unless Linden Lab adapts the module to SL. I would think that would be something the Lab would do. But, that probably depends on how much work it would require.

An interesting aspect of the technology is that a 3D scene in a browser can be sent to a 3D Printer to generate a RL model. Now isn’t that fun?

More on 123D

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I just found 123D Catch and wrote about it in: New 3D Modeling Tool – 123D Catch Review. 123D Catch is a program that runs on iPhones, iPads, and desktops. It allows you to turn photos of an object into 3D models that can then be ‘printed’ as real physical models. Of course Second Life™ users would use the result as 3D models with textures for import to SL.

However, 123D Catch is only part of a suite of 123D programs being created by AutoDesk to capture the consumer design market. We have new technology like Cubify 3D Systems that can turn 3D models into real life objects.

The suite of programs is free and consists of:

  • Catch – Uses photos of real objects to generate a 3D model.
  • Design – Create 3D models on your Mac, PC, or iPad
  • Sculpt – 3D sculpting
  • Make – unique projects using incredible slice or fold techniques.
  • Creature – Used to create… well… creatures.

 

The Catch Video:

[youtube 6aU2s85Zw3A]

Available for iPhone, iPad, and Desktops. 

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New 3D Modeling Tool – 123D Catch Review

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I came across an article on a new way of building 3D virtual worlds. (Thanks Hamlet NWN) Well, may be not so new, it came out in 2011 I think. But, the process, new to me, is being used to create the independent adventure game: Rustclad. The development team has a video out showing the process they are using and early scenes from their game.

[youtube pj-Gpe2oh_4]

You can see they are using a more organic style than we typically see in Second Life™. Sculpties were introduced to Second Life to enable the creation of this more organic style. I am not sure we have ever taken advantage of sculpties as intended by the creator of them: Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden). May be I’ll ask him some day.

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Second Life RAM Disk

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You probably know that most of the data in our computers is saved to magnetic media hard drives that have spinning disks inside. The disk has delays as the read heads must wait for the disk to rotate the wanted data under the read/write heads. It can take the heads 4 to 12ms to find the data. Then the data can only be read as fast as the next bit of data comes to the read/write head.

Inside a Typical Hard Drive
Inside a Typical Hard Drive

Newer solid state drives (SSD) have no moving parts. So, there is no delay waiting for disks and/or read/write heads to rotate into position. So, rather than waiting several milliseconds the data is available in less than a millisecond. If you put your Second Life cache on an SSD, you will have a faster more responsive cache… places you have previously visited will render faster.

While conventional hard drives are cheap and can store terabytes of data on a single drive, the SSD’s are expensive. The cost per gigabyte of storage is about 100 times more than for conventional hard drives.

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Login2Life Video

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If you have not yet seen this video, check it out. This is about how people are using Second Life™ and World of WarCraft™ virtual worlds. The video runs 1:27 hour:minutes. This is primarily in German. But, most of the people are speaking in English and the video provides German subtitles. Unfortunately the German, Japanese, and other language parts do not have English subtitles.

I’ve placed a trailer first. It is all English. It runs 2:31 minutes.

[youtube BFalissUWGE]

There are apparently some legal issues with the display of the main Login 2 Life video on YouTube. I didn’t understand what that was about, other than I am NOT supposed to say who tipped me off to the video. But… thanks for the tip.

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Crazy Fish Test

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Ener Hax has a post titled: use fish to test your hardware graphics! With a title like that I had to look. Ener has found a site with a test for graphics processing of HTML5 graphics. It uses fish as a test of hardware handling of HTML5.

HTML is the Hyper Text Markup Language and the ‘5’ indicates the version. I think the HTML5 test gives us an excellent way to compare desktops and mobile devices.

Comparing Performance
Comparing Performance

Your web browser knows how to render HTML. In most cases that means displaying formatted text and pictures along the lines of what one would see in a magazine. HTML had its beginnings in 1980 and the concept originated with Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN back in the day. Tim implemented a browser and server that could display, deliver, and react to HTML. By 1995 the use of HTML was spreading.

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