Recently in OpenSim Category

We've finally decided to get a public sim on OSGrid in order to better showcase some of the work we are doing on OpenSim. We have our own internal OpenSim network (nicknamed DadenWorld), as well as individual developer worlds, but to make things more publicly available we decided it was simplest to go with a hosted service from Dreamland Metaverse on OSGrid.

The sim is called Daden Open - you should find it in your map search box on OS Grid. Our intention is not to build a specific island there, but rather to cycle through some of favourite OAR files - perhaps changing the island once a month or so.

To kick things off we've uploaded the refugee camp OAR file we did a few months ago for a trip to the UN. The sim is pretty passive but we've put in a simple information bot, and also showed the sort of question mark task markers we use with PIVOTE in SL and OpenSim to show how tasks might be identified and triggered.

Feel free to head over and take a look, and we'll let you know via the blog when we update the island with a new OAR file - probably you 20 parsec stellar neighbourhood model will be next up.

Finally completed my Empress Marava Far Trader build in OpenSim. The Far Trader is one of the work-horses of the Traveller role-playing game.

The really neat thing is not so much the spacecraft (which I could go on detailing for ages) but what can happen outside it. Since Opensim allows 256m prims, and doesn't place any restrictions on linking distances, you can build a whole (simple) sim as a single object and put it in a rezzer and rez different environments around you or your (static) spaceship - ideal for different sets and when you want to automate things rather than loading manual OAR files (although an LSL controller OAR loader might be nice!).

So you start on a barren planet:

You close the loading ramp on the empty landscape and head for the bridge.

You then head off into space. A touch of a button on the pilots console de-rezzes the world and rezzes the starscape in a 256m diameter sphere (ought to work on a suitable brown-out transition for take-off and landing). So the view out the window changes but more importantly if you don your EVA suit and walk out the airlock you now find:

(need to do a nice jump transition too!)

Then you head down to the starport. Again a touch of a button derezzes the stars and rezzes a whole spaceport ready for you.

I'll work up a few other environments but you get the drift. Quite apart from the role-playing side of this it also begins to make a nice vehicle for STEM based education, sending the students off in their spaceship (or minibus!) and then rezzing different outside every time they open the door.

Full image set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/burdenshaw/sets/72157626207815093/

One of our ongoing interests (helped along by a current research contract) is in how we use virtual worlds as immersive data visualisation spaces. You may be familiar with our Datascape virtual war-room, but our current focus is on plotting large amounts of data over  a sim-sized area. The challenges here are a) to get enough data points in and plotted in a reasonable amount of time and b) work out how best to represent them, c) how best to interact with them and d) how to navigate through the dataset.

We started using our existing SL plot-bot to plot objects in OpenSim - the downsides of that were plot range (you have to move the bot with 10m of each plot point) and getting data in (notecards limits you, HTTP is too slow/cumbersome.) But by doing a pre-sort of the data we could get the bot to plot about a data point a second over the whole sim and brought about 1000 data points in. 

Another approach was to use a programme to write an XML object file which Hippo could then import into SL as a single object. That gave us a nice 1000 object cube (see below), but was again a bit cumbersome, particularly is you wanted alignment and positioning with the sim itself.

We then started looking at RegionModules in OpenSim, as they appear to be th sensible solution, but it looks like they've been borked for several releases, and we'll have to wait for 0.7.1 for them to work again.

So the latest work has been using LibOMV to control a bot and get the bot to build the points. We were very pleasantly surprised to find that the bot can rez an object anywhere in the sim, no distance limit, so reading a data file and plotting points became almost easy. A shot from a test run is shown above, the bot plotting points every 0.5m across the sim at a rate of about 10 points per second. Admittedly it only got to just over 4000 points before it gave up, but that was on my laptop. Over the next weeks we hope to get to reliable plotting of 10,000+ data points. We'll keep you posted.

By the way the terrain file is an outline of the UK we brought in a while ago - combining a RAW file like that with some 2D overlay textures and the data plotting and we begin to have the beginning of quite a nice system.