RL invades SL

... In a positive way.

Per accident (err, youtube's related video suggestions) I stumbled upon videos from the fine folks of UC Berkeley - they're doing some pretty cool stuff actually. On their grid of 40 Opensim servers and in SL.

Like Ortho-Mapping for example. In other words: mapping orthoimagery (aerial views, in this case of the earth) onto terrain.

Watch the videos below to get a bird's view of the Berkeley area:

From the text going with the second video:

Real-life geographic information is modeled at three levels, or scales of detail. The (1:42) Level 1 build mimics Google Earth with globe-type data at 1/42 scale. The (1:16) Level 2 build adds LiDAR first-return data to include the tops of every building and trees at 1/16 scale. The (1:3) Level 3 build is the best we can do, solid geometry 3D graphic primitives and real-world textures hand-tuned for optimal streaming at 1/3 scale.

"Mimicking" being a bit of an understatement in this case, ha! I can see Earth Grid fed with real time real life data before me already.

Teh Sikrit Lab

... is how I affectionately call my offline Opensim region, which despite it's limitations and quirks I have installed to do some prim tinkering for import to Second Life.

After all it has it's merits when it comes to building - no lag! No expenses for texture uploads. And of course the sheer unlimited amount of prims available (45000 per region). Which means after a week I have still some left for more achievements such as the Office Chair Xccutive or this Tower PC.

Click here to view Flickr Set.

(Second) Life Like

Among the virtual worlds out there, there's a number of grids that share a lot more than being accessible with the same client softwares (Viewers) - they are based on the server code developed by the Opensim project, which in short reverse-engineered the SL server code after LL open-sourced their viewer code ... so they are basically compatible with each other and Second Life.

With significant limitations though, they all have the feel of what SL must have been like a few years ago, before I joined: sim-crossing is a pain, physics are poor, scripting is limited, no search, most have no currency, and so on ...

But still, thanks to free upload they are a alternative to the beta grid for testing animations before uploading them to SL, or sculpt textures etc. - which is what the standalone version of the Opensim server software is extremely useful for. It installs your personal region on your PC, which makes anything quite fast and lagfree (unless you pack your region with scripts that lead to errors which will make things go bad). It's also possible to host your region(s) on the net for public access, or connect it to existing grids, something I can see great potential in.

Had I written this post a week ago I would have mentioned the Openlife grid as the most important of these alternative public grids out there. Only, Openlife has dropped out of the Opensim project recently to go proprietary, locking out all other viewers than their own, pissing off users of the various existing viewers including Second Inventory, a backup tool that allows creators to transfer their content to other grids. 

Hence they are not on this current list of Opensim grids: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List. (And hence I removed it from my list of grids to visit on a frequent basis.)

Advantages of Opensim over SL : a region in an Opensim region can support 45000 prims - compared to 15000 in SL; prims can have sizes larger than in Second Life; end of list.

At some point interoperability of grids is an aim of the project, but this will need a lot of sorting out of how to handle assets when crossing grids beforehand.