I keep finding myself bemused by the anti-slviewer2 comments in Second Life. Yes a few things are in different places, the colours have changed, but….. you get to interact with content in a whole different way with the media containers and true web on a prim. It may be that many people not being builders will not find a space to create an surface and mess with the texture settings to get access to this great addition. However I have shown a number of people some very powerful things very very quickly. For me that is all win!
Yesterday I was in world when we had the great British Airways storm the front moment as their planes headed to an ashcloud closed UK. We all became plane spotters on http://www.flightradar24.com/ watching the stacking trails as the natural disaster met health and safety met commercial pressure. I augmented my experience by happening to be in SL and stuck a web on a prim under my previously created gas cloud sculpture. It just added to the experience. Not only watching live flights and a historic moment but being logged into my favourite virtual world and embedding the data into it.
The real kicker though is how easy it is now, in particular with googles new google draw to work on shared diagrams. Yes whiteboards are just a click away. Being a web app you can also have people contribute who are not in world with you. You can leave a diagram and come back to check multiple updates later or work on it all collaboratively seeing the effect of one anothers work as it happen. You know just like standing in a room with someone doing a chalk and talk. I still prefer to use in world objects to get most points across, but sometimes, just sometimes scrawling on a wall does it for me.
I hope that if one thing good comes out of the air travel confusion it is a whole host of people asking “isn’t there a better way to work than emailing these attachments around and having telephone calls”. Of course many of us know there is, and regularly use them.
The ability to do up to 8 shared screens, so above we have both a whiteboard and my previous post and video on working differently available side by side. The option to use a forced privacy method by having the web page as a hud gives all sorts of options. I am still experimenting with how wearing the web can be used for some interesting effects too.
Its all good, give it a try.
slviewer2
Mashing up web and Second Life Viewer 2
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.