Just wanted to point to a neat little video over on blip.tv where Matt Biddulph gives a short presentation on getting real world data into Second Life. Always of interest to me. There’s also a related post discussing this effort on Joshua Kaufman’s blog called “Building Bacteria in Second Life” (Link) that also get’s into Spimes (something else of interest to me).
I first became aware of Matt’s work via the eightbar blog. However, since then I’ve not stopped by his blog very often. My bust. He recently posted a neat little video showing the now open source Second Life client hacked to read input from a hardware sensor. From his blog entry (Link):
On the left you’ll see an Arduino reading analogue values from a potentiometer and feeding the results in via the USB-serial interface to my Mac. On the right, you’ll see a modified version of Second Life that is feeding those values in via my avatar’s chat channel. An object in the Second Life world is reacting, with perhaps a half-second lag.
Hooking into Second Life isn’t new, but it’s still relatively unexplored. And along with the recent press release (Link) announcing the joint effort between Philips and SL developer Rivers Run Red to create something inworld that utilizes Philips’ amBX technology, the kinds of dual-direction development I’ve been discussing recently (reLink 1, reLink 2) take on slightly more meaning.
via New World Notes and 3pointD