Darb Dabney’s OpenSim Blog

I’ve made some steps (more like ramps) toward completing stairways into the Berkurodam BART station, and am closing in on a deadline to get the site looking dapper for a CalGIS talk . Sadly, some RL snafu has arisen with the first round of textures that I surreptitiously shot inside the BART station on 20070126. Only a couple of them are still available to me. A second round of surface textures are hale and hardy and ready for rectification.

In other developments, one of my class’s project teams from NDNU’s Business Administration 295 “Spatial Analysis for Policy Making” class has stepped up to the plate and should be building a 1:1 building to explore the utility of a shared virtual space. Joe Linden’s announcement on 20070227 of Vivox integration into the SL client makes their project even more interesting, as soon as we’re able to get headsets available. The GIS lab now has the instructor workstation going great guns on Dell GX 620 with an ATI/AMD Radeon X1300 Pro PCI Exress X16, and appropriate ports open between the GIS lab and the SL grid. Next step will be to see how far we can get the SL client working on Dell GX 520’s with the Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics sans dedicated memory, now that the GIS lab can reach the SL grid. I’m well aware that the SL system requirements say this will fail - but for now we must hope. I have found web posts saying that SL has worked on a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop with this graphics set. If that’s the case (or it works well-enough for learning) then we’ve got a 22-seat Second Life lab ready to rock. If not, then we may try to equip a handful (maybe five) with the HIS X1300 PCI Express X1 cards and go from there.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Pathfinder Linden during his office hours a couple of weeks ago, and enjoyed a chance to describe my wish for seeing functional Paris Metro-like transit stations working in SL.

And most pleasurably, I took a fair number of hours in the past five days to savor Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and got a number of enormous kicks from reading it.  After all, I was working in applications of machine vision from 1986–1989, had a friend in high school with a katana, have good memories of RL motorcycle riding, have been in a helicopter wearing a survival suit, skateboarded, kayaked, hooked cables onto helicopters, and wondered long and plenty about how to bring religions into historical coherence.  When reading it at this late date, after four months of SL activity, it all just adds to the joy!

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