Virtual Goggles and carbon emissions

I meant to blog this a while back but never got round to it. Carbon Goggles is a novel experiment by Jim Purbrick of Linden Lab that allows people to tag in-world representations of RL objects in such a way that their carbon emission data (pulled dynamically from AMEE) is displayed floating over each object.

The project, which was initially developed during a 24 hour period at the Mashed '08 event in London) uses a HUD (Heads Up Display) that computes where the object is in your field of view, then positions the text to make it look as though it is floating over the object.

The video probably makes things clearer:


Carbon Goggles from Jim Purbrick on Vimeo.

Very clever.

I've been wondering about taking the underlying HUD visualisation software and using it to display Second Friends information (e.g. a RL name) over any avatar in your field of view who happens to be one of your Second Friends.

Urban bubbles

Wow... this is very cool. Digital Urban, a.k.a Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith, a Senior Research Fellow at CASA and team leader of the Virtual London modelling group, has created

six 'Urban Bubbles' on Second Nature Island, each with a staircase leading to a viewing platform. These panoramic spheres provide a quick way to visualise local locations, data points can be subsequently mapped inside the scenes to access any relevant information.

The bubbles are located in a sandbox area above Second Nature. See the Digital Urban blog entry for more information. The picture above shows me standing inside one of the bubbles. These are well worth seeing.

The work also includes visualisations of city datasets

with a key and information point which when clicked display additional background information on the data provided. While early days it does lend itself to a simple representation of data sets within the collaborative environment which is Second Life.