NMC Campus Observer

Dr Tower Talks About SL 3D Viewer

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Feb 2, 2007 11:58pm

Today I gave a campus tour to Doctor Tower, actually one avatar representing a group of people at the University of Michigan 3D Lab — remember these are the folks we mentioned a few days ago who have developed the stereoscopic viewer for Second Life based on the open source SL code.

Apparently they were projecting their view of the SL world on some really large high resolution monitor, which they reported made the buildings just gleam gorgeously. We did audio back and forth via TeamSpeak.

They were wanting to hear more about how NMC Campus has been used, and had a lot of questions about the modeling and building processes, of which I had to wax eloquently based on my experience of creating an endless number of plywood cubes.

On showing them the Gonick Amphitheater and describing the media features and how it has been used, their center’s director spoke up and remarked that shwing videos and slides were not much of a stretch from real world. He was wondering how someone might instead be able to place 3d Objects in the stage, manipulate them, perhaps to show an audience ow something was built or how it operates.

While I waffled a bit saying this is exactly what one can do by rezzing and objectf rom their inventory, Dr Tower did juts that and pulled out the board model shown above, twirling it around. That was helpful!

We did show them the newer buildings on our expanded campus, including the Machinima school, which has working versions of the holodeck concept (the main theater can be instantly reconfigured into about 7 different theater arrangements) and the Life Sceinces building, where we accidentally rezzed into a holodeck created version of the trauma center we are working on with people for University of Tennessee.

Taking to Doctor Tower

At the end, I asked permission to talk to Eric, one of the developers of the SL 3D viewer. There is a recorded podcast, but must apologize for the poor sound quality, as their voices had a lot of background noise (it sounds like a fleet of helicopters). They spoke a bit about why they did the project, and what the complexity was. Their biggest concern is that future updates of the SL client from Linden Labs, to them, looked like they’d have to re-program all the changes they made to be compatible with Second Life.

SL 3D Viewer Interview

Anyhow, they are an interesting group obviously with a lot fo 3D experience. We hope to see them again on campus!

Update: A few days after the meeting, Doctor tower emailed a photo to show the visual set up they used at the UM3D lab to watch the demo- triple the screen width using some clever projection systems!

Story filed under: Audio / Video

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)