Simulator GIS – Darb Dabney’s OpenSim

This blog has been shamefully quiet, but Darb’s efforts have been continuing. Just a touch stealthier than before.
On ScienceSim.com, I found a pleasant roost from which to enjoy the solstice sunset.

visiting a rabbit on Shengri La Spirit

Today, the third day of SLCC 2009, Philip Rosedale and Mark Kingdon provided the telephoto and wide-angle views of the road ahead for Second Life.

Union Square as seen from SLCC 2009

Philip summarized his message to a backdrop of an abandoned and decrepit  Detrioit home thus (as best I heard it)
“TRY and recognize that we are at the very beginning, and together, you guys and us, will have to weather a tremendous changing as we move from where we are today
to where this thing is, this kinematic and imaginary global kind of new digital world.”

Mark had a fine intro where he disclosed a moment of discovering his passion for in-world activity while building
“…it was at that point that I got a second island, and the land addiction began.”

Sessions today included morning Art track’s “Plastic Reality”, running over the start of an enterprise session that I really wanted to hear all of: “Enterprise and Virtual Worlds: The Value Proposition” moderated by Dusan Writer.  I stuck around for Schott Homan’s Purdue case study, caught a share of Patio Plasma’s “Building Interactive Science Exhibits, Tools and Techniques”

Lindens greeting the Woodbury College MC&D party bus

This morning I learned that Linden Lab has reached 320 employees.   For the keynote, Philip Rosedale introduced a certain avatar named Kurzweil Tomorrow who held forth for an hour on this fine futuristic topic in a notably tenor tone.

Friday's Keynote presentation

Today I saw sessions involving reviews of pay rates for virtual-world workers (hint: not good).  Enterprise SL usage with an emphasis on enhanced usability through rapid and effective training, and is supported by 24 Lindens who activley leverage existing technology.

At lunch and shortly afterword, I learned much more about the Meerkat Viewer.  I saw some of the Machinima presentation and received a wonderful DVD of MaMachinima Festival 2009 thanks to Fab Outlander of Orange, and greatly enjoyed the informative panel about blogging SL moderated by Hamlin Au.

The evening offered a fine party bus thanks to Woodbury University School of Media, Culture, and Design that cycled between the convention and Linden Lab offices, where we left our marks.  On our return, the Odd Ball was just starting and offered fine and fun conversations with trance and a truly cosmic parallel dance club in SL.  The resident SIMGIS intern, Rat Dawg, snagged a copy of the brief novel AFK by Huckleberry Hax

Creative output from the Woodbury College party bus

In the midst of a sidewalk-coloring party

It was a wonderful day and tomorrow looks to be grand as well.  For now, it’s rest!

I enjoyed a relaxing morning on the way to San Francisco, but was befuddled to find that the registration process was not open today – tomorrow morning bright and early it will be.

In today’s workshops, I enjoyed presentations about SL-enhanced educational programs, including scientist-mediated field visits to observe solar eclipses http://tr.im/wnNN and Museum virtual worlds http://tr.im/wnO7.  I was intrigued by the anecdotal experience of good internet connectivity made available in the Gobi desert during the solar eclipse that allowed field scientists to visit in-world from a very remote tent.

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In a panel discussion moderated by Catherine Linden, the business track covered the topic “Building Community”.  Successful community builders described their experiences in the areas of community for disabled individuals (Virtual Ability), folks looking for a safe and predictable place (Dublin region with pubs and live music), corporate client community (enhanced for Nokia), and user community development (Orange mobile).

Lessons learned in connection with Nokia: communicating that the corporation is not nameless, faceless, but consists of real people with real feelings—helping to give the corporation a face, provide a hangout and community focal point.  Oh, and have parties!  Good events, with a good event manager, can lead to media coverage and grow a buzz that feeds brand recognition.  SL is a tool, and one that requires use to stay hot.

Lessons learned in the Orange experience: Staying true to the mission of not being intrusive, and not marketing at a level that is detrimental to the community ecosystem.  Make it regular with weekly community events, so that people might miss a week and still be able to rely on having a place to go when they can make it.  To the big brands: SL is not a 3D commercial marketing tool.  It’s a good forum for meeting people interested in the company.  The Orange effort was an experiment to involve people who were interested in the product, not for marketing.  Orange can afford a mainstream media marketing campaign—but with SL the goal was more to get to know those who will be the next customers.

Lessons from the Virtual Mobility experience:  Academics research their topics before acting.  For example, the term Virtual Community was coined by Howard Rheingold.  In the book, Rheingold noted that sustainable virutal communities require four essential characteristics: 1) adequate population, with 2) adequate time to spend in the community, 3) a sufficient level of human feeling, and 4) development of a web of personal relationships.  The interpersonal relationships are what make the community real.    Further items of importance to a well-founded virtual community include: 1) coherency of membership, 2) influence of members on each other, 3) integration and fulfillment of needs, and 4) shared emotional connections.

Community building is about communication, and as most attending this session agreed, communication in SL is not the same as in RL.  Virtual Ability chose to grow slowly, and their board of directors keeps them focused on their mission and vision; SL is known for its defocusing effects on residents.

Lessons from the Blarney Stone Group (Dublin region) in SL has over 10,000 members.  They serve as a community gateway, a first place to go to find helpful people.  Recently, it was noted that some residents who passed through a couple of years ago have been returning to check in (and enjoy a pint).

With Orange as well, the goal was to grow community slowly, not fast, and keep the connections on a personal level.  This involved direct in-world presence to provide a one-on-one connection with those arriving at the site.

With Virtual Ability, some sources of drama can be falseness – role players who are not themselves disabled yet are presenting as such.  The risk they create is that in communicating with the community they may project mythologies (rather than speaking truth from experience).  Also there is a small but dangerous group of predators who actually target the disabled community.  One of Virtual Ability’s strengths has been their inclusiveness to both the disabled and those not yet disabled, and not to require disclosure of one’s status with regard to disability.  With that mix of membership, the predator community can not find themselves certain of actually communicating with a disabled member of Virtual Ability, making the group a more resilient target.

Also experience notes from Virtual Ability: be certain to separate one’s personal and professional life in Second Life–especially when it comes to accounting for business expenses.  Also, be certain to maintain a contingency plan for leadership.  Virtual Ability does this by rigorously assigning co-leadership to key projects and distributed leadership in other works.  All projects have at least two leaders.  One never knows when loss or unavailability will strike, so planning ahead is really important to maintain a viable community.

From Dublin: One needs a very clear idea of what that community is about, as in “I want it to be thus.  These are the rules.  This is where I want it to go.”  Get people around you whose judgement you trust, and listen to them!  Before there are too many requests to handle personally–delegate!  Get others involved with growing leadership.

From the Nokia efforts — don’t pick someone from IT to manage your community building efforts.  It’s not about technology, but rather get someone who is a good user of the technology and who can put it to use.

From Orange – be sure to have a clear idea of what you want — make it sustainable with appropriate finances and staff.  Remember also that you in an SL community must live with your own already existing communities as well.  Be sure not to work as an island, but rather connect with these existing communities.  The alternative is rather lonely…

What makes a good event?  From the Nokia experience – use a topic that is slightly controversial (e.g. consider the corporate reaction to furry avatars). In any case, don’t be boring!  From the Dublin experience – create consistent events, rather than trying for killer events.  All and Catherine emphasized: “know your audience”.

In the realm of user questions, it was noted that the SL limit of 25 groups per resident has been a challenge for those very active in community creation.  For a large group with hierarchy such as Dublin, the group limit is easily exhausted for the executive director when dividing up multiple teams at multiple venues.  Others find that with large and unwieldly groups, it would be very desirable to allow Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to effectively subclass the group.  This would solve the problem noted in Dublin.

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The last panel of the afternoon for me was the Linden Documentation Team.  John, Kate, Jeremy, Rand, and (in-world only) Torley were available.

Key point: the SL knowledge base is moving out of Parature and into a public wiki.  The MediaWiki solution (as used by Wikipedia) will be used together with its FlaggedRevs extension to allow revision control.  This means that the knowledge base will be more directly editable by us residents.  Certain policy-related and service pricing-related articles will remain locked for business liability reasons.

In a creative blast, the Documentation Team has released a graphic novel version of introductory concepts called “discovering virtual land”. They were kind enough to print out hardcopies enough for us in the room, which they graciously signed.

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After a short walk to Yerba Buena Gardens along Third Street, it was wonderful to gather across from SFMOMA and enjoy the Linden Lab Luau.  There seemed just the right number of folks to fill the space and still get a chance to visit with much of the crowd, including some people who have been very successful with SL.

Afterwords, just  a block away the evening was wrapped up with the Blarney Stone on Tour, where Sellers Markets was filled with happy folks and a train of live musicians (streamed into SL of course) at the open mic.

Now time for some rest and an early registration tomorrow morning.

I’d read about this, but never before experienced the agony first-hand.  Extracting funds from SL, the wait for funds to arrive at PayPal was a bit slow.  In fact, in the time it took funds to go from Linden to PayPal, a bamboo shoot in my back yard could have grown taller than me (that’s my RL not SL height!), and would have been over 2 meters tall.  Anyway, Process Credits are quite lacking in symmetry with how quickly credit charges can flow into the Linden realm.

During this week of waiting my random prims have been cleared out from Amida and nary a trace of Berkurodam BART Station remains besides a video in Gualala.  The video screen was actually entombed by a neighbor, who may not like it but did not send any message.

Anyway–for me this week is all about generating maps and graphics while keeping up with work.  I’ve generated a 50cm terrain grid for parts of my county where perhaps 150,000 people live.  With computational process improvements I should be able to make production stable enough to generate a 25cm grid.  The point is to model terrain slope and aspect within urban parcels.  OpenSim can pack 64 terrain megaprim sculpties over each region to refine terrain more than the built-in 1-meter postings, and display 10cm orthoimagery at full resolution.

Last year, I used first-return LiDAR data of the UC Berkeley campus to generate a 25cm grid for 10cm imagery.  Now, I’m working with bare-earth LiDAR data from FEMA, topographic contours (densified to 1.5m vertex spacing), and most importantly, photogrammetric terrain and water break lines.

Throwing all those data into the mix, the data are built into an ESRI Terrain Dataset, from which I generate TIN and GRID models at various reolution and extent.  The ESRI ArcGIS 3D Analyst Terrain-to-TIN generator breaks down after about 10 mega-faces (so would I…)  And the ArcGIS Terrain-to-GRID generator seems to drift into Windows-unconsciousness after about 1.0 giga-cells.  So for the grid, I break it down and do the pieces, then merge the tiles using ERDAS Imagine, because the ESRI ArcGIS raster mosaic function does not produce output grids much over 10 GB.  As annoying as learning these ArcGIS limits can be, it is very satisfying (and instructive) to see huge swaths of seamless terrain with great detail once it all comes together.  Thanks to the break lines, many driveways and most home building site cuts and fills are resolved.  And it will be a lot of terrain by OpenSim standards–enough to calibrate terrain for over 20,000 contiguous regions–not that I ever expect to build it all at 1:1 scale!

Not to ever underestimate the value of a good location, I’m happily Linden$ed-out and set free of tier starting next month.  Somehow the word got out:

Large parcels help to market themselves

After a 32-month run of parcel ownership in Gualala, Vitersonus, Amida, and finally Stanford, I’m keeping a postage stamp in Gualala, a boat ramp in Amida, and a tiny refuge in beautiful Stanford. A few of my favorite prims remain here and there, granted clemency for the moment by Governor Linden.

Looking out on what was once Darb's land

edfa

Looking back on what remains for Darb

Still, the heart of the outland remains tagged with a certain connection to the region’s namesake (or the region’s alley’s namesake)

Die Luft der Freiheit weht

Sometime, it just isn’t worth it. Such is my new view of tier, in the context of what matters to me with immersive 3D and GIS. For about six months I’ve continued my hold on some land in the classic Stanford sim of Second Life, without quite being able to work out the boundary changes to just barely squeeze in a 1:1 scale model of a single large building. Even if I had been able to get the parcel into the shape that I needed, I still would not be able to model the structure’s dome with a prim that naturally had the large radius required. Not everyone is trying to model a Frank Lloyd Wright public building; perhaps the land can be better used by someone else with an architectural focus.

I’m scaling back ownership this week to the tier-free 512 square meter level in Second Life. I’m also building up a freshly configured Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope 32-bit server (dual 3.4 GHz Xeon – 4 GB, HP DL360 G4) to do some more serious sort of work with OpenSim. In the past five months I’ve developed some terrain data that can handily provide 1-meter postings over more than 500 square miles. With that much to publish, I really need much, much more than 1/8 of a sim, even a suberbly cool sim like Stanford.

View of beautiful Stanford sim with pond features

The orange area is available at L$20/square meter

So if anyone reading this has use for a great 7520 (< 1/8 sim) mainland location in Second Life with over 40 meters of terrain sculptability, it’s available for L$20/square meter. Discount available for OpenSim community members or known GIS people. With the world’s economy as challenged as it seems to be, I’ve decided that it’s time to focus on where things matter most, and for me now that’s OpenSim more exclusively.

updated 2009 05 26

I’ve been waiting for some property boundary issues to resolve in SL, and it’s sort of pitiful to see how long that can take.  It’s with ever more regret that I find myself on the Mainland.  But that hasn’t kept lots of real-world interesting stuff from taking shape.

The following video is not new.  In fact it’s about a year old, but somehow I hadn’t seen it until tonight and I found it somewhat encouraging. Thanks for O’Reilly and Where 2.0 for bringing these two on stage together!

And the following pean to Google Earth did inspire me, personally. Hey, I was reading road maps at 5, covered my wall completely with National Geographic maps at 10, learned to navigate with nautical charts at 12, read aeronautical charts and completed an urban planning project at 14. Sometimes, it’s fun in rare moments when it’s dark overcast and I’m in an exotic place for the first time and I don’t know the way north; more often, I’ll savor the feeling of knowing which way is north while dreaming.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, the global set of county terrain is being compiled into an ESRI Terrain Dataset. This will include over 360 million masspoints, merging both interpolated 2-foot interval contour vertices together with FEMA LiDAR mass points, plus break lines and waterlines from photogrammetry. The goal is to use the ESRI Terrain data as a format to stage everything together to produce 30cm grid interval DEM in the urban areas. With luck, we’ll have that ready about the time that the latest photo mosaic finally gets loaded into ArcSDE successfully. Maybe grids from the Terrain can help create very detailed 3D county models. Hey Wei – we still have inverted terrain in Google Earth at the quarry on San Pedro Point! ;^)

<<updated 20090424>>

As my patience with Second Life wanes, and I wait for more architectural input for my next SL build project, I have a dark OpenSim server with no fixed IP.  I’m having stability issues with the Linux SL client, but have upgraded the workstation to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.  Google Earth client there is more stable, the NVidia drivers install themselves (sans Envy), and everything Ubuntu-wise seems to be getting incrementally better by the quarter.

I’m grinding some large images that have taught me that one very special difference between Windows XP variants and Windows Server 2003 is the latter’s ability to open files on the high side of 80 GB.  I’d never quite realized it before but the moderately massive mosaics that I have created in years past (edging toward 250 GB single files) actually depended on Server 2003 to get created.  Once the destination file exists, then XP can take it from there, and in all cases Windows Explorer can copy the monster files.  But in that tenuous moment when a mosaic first grabs its space on disk for a huge output—one can’t seem to do that with XP.

So while I’m enjoying Google Earth on Ubuntu, there is something cool that I go back to Windows for, and that’s the new Google Earth browser plug-in.  Since I’m gaining a bit of facility with the keyboard shortcuts in the full-stop Earth client, these all carry over to the plugin.  My first test page has been stood up here and I’ve been deep into four continents with it so far.  I understand that the plugin is only available for Windows and Mac systems at this time.  If you can,  Enjoy!

http://earth.jedi.bz 

Also, as I get even faster with my keyboard navigation of G-Earth, I’ve actually seen some artifacts that are quite familiar from OpenSim.  While zipping about between the Gulf of Yakutat and Canada’s Mount Logan, at certain viewing elevations I can accelerate the point of view forward quite fast.  Doing so in this very mountainous terrain, I saw blocks of terrain standing up along what look like sim edges, resolving in a few seconds as more (sculpty?) bumpmap arrives.  This is the same sort of artifact I’ve seen with terrain sculpties and sometimes, with region crossings in OpenSim.  Also, I’ve found a couple of wild terrain grid errors in G-Earth.  In one, a quarry dug hundreds of feet below sea level, right next to the sea, is displayed as positive elevation (absolute-value terrain, anyone?).  In another, a boundary between US and Canadian terrain has a glacier flowing uphill onto a plateau.  Go figure.  Blame Canada! ;^)

Terrain has been in the mix for me quite a bit these past four weeks.  I’ve worked on pushing ESRI ArcGIS 3D Analyst to its limits of masspoint digestibility, trying hard to bring everything into focus at the same time that everything is sinking down to NAVD88 datum.  An abundant set of waterlines and terrain breaklines have helped to make possible some terrain models that appear to be as good as any one is likely to get from photogrammetric data.  As with LiDAR source, I’m working toward a 30cm gridding interval to sample any reasonable-looking TIN models.

One fascinating aspect of the terrain model is where it ends.  There appears to be a new 1:1200 or 1:4800 shoreline that can be sussed out of some combination of 2.5-foot elevation waterlines, 2-foot elevation contours, and related artifacts.  In fact, it’s a great patchwork of artifacts that must be stringed together.  In the tidal flat areas, there is also plenty of need for validation with multiple photos (hopefully shot at times of lower tides).

Adding to the data bulk there’s a new ortho in town, 30cm natural color flown just about two years ago.  There’s hope of extracting it from the grip of California HARN coordinates after it is all mosaicked.