We have always (as land owners) had the ability to set video parcels in Second Life. This has of course been a bit of a pain with only one video stream, or web page display allowed per parcel. Now we have new media sharing abilities. This has already been implemented in some of the other platforms, but most of those are less user generated in their content.
I tried a few extensions out to ideas, in particular powered by the fact that SL will play interactive flash now not just flash movies as before.
http://www.text2mindmap.com http://www.duckfeetdesigns.com/flocking.htm and http://www.habbohotel.co.uk
I used a mind map tool on the web and mashed it with wearing a sphere for a presentation. i.e. you can wear interactive web applications now
I dropped myself into a flash based flocking display where I controlled the direction of the fish.
Finally I popped into Habbo Hotel.
There are of course a few issues and gotchas with interacting with flash. The experience is not totally shared. The browser URL is shared, but not all the interactions. This is only to be expected. I am not complaining, but I know that this will confuse some people. A web interface is inherently single user even if there are multiple users of a system.
Loggin in and personalizing your view of a system is not going to change others views unless the controlling website knows whats going on with this virtual world and multiple users hitting it in context.
There are a lot more things we can do now though, website based HUD’s(I have a transparent twitter hud on right now), textures stored off world (though we are limited to 8 player surfaces at the moment so this could get clunky).
With the combination of SL being able to create HTTP Server objects too we have quite a loop of connectivity.
This is very exciting stuff as many of the projects over the years that I have been involved in move data around and in and out. Things got a whole lot easier I think.
Things that sync au naturel like Etherpad, Twiddla and Solvr work as expected except when popups are involved.
Gah, should have added Google Wave as the least likely app I’ve encountered yet that works, at least in part. I assume it’s in sync.
I did not risk google wave 🙂 some of the waves I am in seem to grind my machine back to the sand it came from.
As you rightly point out those things that are geared up to push data synchs back to a client should work fine. The old web on a prim used to work fine for seeing those sorts of things, so i am glad that is not broken.
Its a pity about popups though.
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Actually things like twiddla and etherpad worked using the old parcel media too. Granted you had to open another browser to add content, but everyone in view of the panel could see the updates in real time since the underlying Javascript engine was working fine. One of the funniest moments I’ve ever had in SL was playing pictionary using twiddla. Now you can actually interact with the panel itself, I think pictionary parties might become the new social event 🙂 There’s even a product to be made here providing some structure, scoreboard, categories, timers (and a new name that isn’t pictionary obviously…)
Ah yes they worked, I did a lot with media parcels way back. I was surprised the first time when I saw our javascript time updating on a page I thought was screen scraped.
We had some problems with flash that was dynamically generating things (the wimbledon web scoreboard) back in quick time land, and then by the time we had web page parcels it was done a different way.
You would think that whilst pictionary is great SL is the greatest rapidough set you could ask for 🙂
I wonder if people playing primtionary will have to be given viewer-related handicaps? 🙂
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