Dorkbot

The Dorkbot session that has been arranged for 6 July 1:00 pm PDT / 22:00 CET at the Odyssey Simulator sounds good, particularly to people with an interest in machinima:

JJ Ventrella (a.k.a. Ventrella Linden) will present the avatar puppeteering project. A project motivated to bring more expression to the avatar, by enabling a more fluid and direct way to manipulate the ‘physical avatar’. This is a Linden Lab project that unfortunetely was ‘put to sleep’ as Linden Lab decided to focus on the stability of Second Life and internal opinions differed over how compelling the feature really is. Last month however, Linden Lab released the client source code of this project, to allow other people to build on it (and convince them otherwise).

Apart from anything else, the name is great!

Alts and identity

There's a lot of discussion on the SL Educators list at the moment about the use of Alts (multiple avatars) and their role in allowing people to form multiple online identities.

On Liquid Learning, Steve Warburton has an interesting post on the subject, Loving your avatar: identity, immersion and empathy. In it he plots a path of avatar identity and empathy (using a graph of time against investment), suggesting that there are two key break points which prevent some people from getting fully engaged with a MUVE such as Second Life.

Well worth reading.

For the record, and just in case you notice them around, I now have several work-related alts, though I must admit that I only tend to use them rarely. They are:

Lieme Sideways
Cliperty Clip
Kinda Telling
Oscar Mummfuzz
Man Anatra

Labrat Ninetails

Alrightme Ansome

The first 5 have been created for an experiment I hope to run looking at the impact of bots on search engine ranking.

Labrat is intended to be an in-world AI bot driven by libsecondlife and an external PandoraBot, though I haven't done the necessary coding work yet.

Alrightme Ansome was created purely to try out the NMC orientation experience.

Avatar aging

SignpostMarv Martin suggests Hair Plug, an open standard for dynamic prim hair, noting that if it existed the following hair-related scenarios would be possible:

a Hair Plug wig could grow over time, and need to be trimmed

require regular maintenance, especially for more complex styles:

• Watch your avatar let it's hair down to retie a pony tail
• See loose strands of hair start to form, then use a brush & some hair spray to get rid of the strand
• Shampoo greasy hair

Hair that goes gray as your avatar gets older

Neat idea.

But why not go further... how about an llSetAppearance() function in LSL that would allow a scripted object to gradually fatten your avatar over time unless it gets enough walking exercise :-)

Second Life brain power

Is this - using brain waves to control SL avatars - for real? If so, it is amazing.

All a user has to do to control his/her avatar is imagine performing various movements. The activity monitored by the headpiece is read and plotted by an electroencephalogram, which relays it to a computer running a brain wave analysis algorithm that interprets the imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then translates the data into signals which can be used to control the movements of the user's on-screen avatar in real-time.

(Found via John Lester's Facebook profile.)

Attack of the 50 foot avatar

We're thinking about having a new bathroom at home (I'm talking about RL here!).

I wondered about building a virtual replica of our bathroom in SL so that we could experience what different layouts might look like. As it happens, this was a pretty pointless exercise from the outset since our bathroom is so small that there aren't actually many options in terms of layout, but I thought it would be fun to try anyway.

So I measured up the bathroom and began building a replica of it inside SL.

Now... hang on a minute... I know I said the bathroom is small - but it ain't that small. Blimey, I couldn't even fit thru the doorway! I double-checked all my measurements. Yup, they looked OK.

So what was the problem?? Well basically, I'd set my avatar height to 90 (using 'edit appearance') when I'd first joined SL, which as it turns out makes me a fairly enormous 7 feet tall!

OK, so I'd created a giant in SL without realising it. I set my height down to 50, and things felt better (in terms of fitting into my replica bathroom), though still somewhat out of proportion. However, when I went along to Secondfest last weekend and mingled with other avatars I felt like a miniature poodle! I felt very short compared to most other avatars there.

Here's a chart mapping the avatar height setting to height in both centimeters and feet and inches (for us 'old money' types) as far as I can tell:

100 = 225cm = 7'4"
50 = 200cm = 6'7"
0 = 175cm = 5'9"

So to set my avatar to something like my RL height (5'10") I need to set my SL height to about 5. But my guess is that doing so will make me one of the smallest human-looking avatars in SL??

So why am I telling you all this? Well, various people have suggested using SL to model real-world architectural projects such as the designs for new schools and so on. Similarly, we are funding a project called SLEUTH to build SL replicas of historical theatres.

It seems to me that the unrealistic default avatar heights in SL are problematic in this context. Either everyone needs to set their avatar height very low (which ain't going to happen) or replica buildings need to be scaled up by about 10%?

Is this other people's experience?