Only the four-story Administration building (wing), not the two-story Hall of Justice. I’m tired so I’ll let the shot speak for me.
photo from 2009 01 30
To me, it’s mildly amazing to realize that F.Ll.Wright’s design fits so snugly in 1/8 of a Second Life region at 1:1.00 scale. The Civic Center Administration building is a Real-Life building that can be visited, providing an easy way to get a true RL immersive sense of its scale. Building at 1:1 scale in Second Life for the first time, this has been my first experience of transferring that awareness into the multi-region contigous space of the very beautiful Second Life. Sure, I’ve built large areas at 1:1 using draped LiDAR data, but to have a rather large single building (or at least its footprint for now) in context with existing builds that I’ve seen for months, well, at the moment SL seems larger than I’d thought. That shift in my perception of SL scale may be the contrast between flying (quite fast as it turns out) around 40 to 100 OpenSim regions versus walking around the site and knowing how long it takes to traverse the RL building.
Anyway, check out the build’s progress at secondlife://Stanford/100/235/30
Today the (San Francisco) Bay Area Automated Mapping Association hosted a wonderful URISA Certified Workshop given by Tim Case, describing Best Practices and Project Implementation Methods for 3D Geospatial work. The all-day event provided a very broad and even-handed overview of many 3D technologies that hold promise for the near future.
With this presentation as an extra boost for my focus on a new build, I’m gearing up with even more enthusiasm for a new build in the Agni grid Mainland. I’ve also tuned the Berkeley parcel for sale. Its price amounts to about US$382.00, and that price is set to help cover purchase costs for the next build’s likely parcel. The tuning involved reducing the parcel size by 64 square meters, so that the three Gualala parcels total 4608 square meters, or exactly the maximum amount allowed for Linden Lab’s US$25/month tier rate. With that size, it would be possible for an interested party to purcahse the Berkeley BART station and maintain it for $300/year in tier (the Linden land property tax).
Also, based on today’s Geospatial tag, I’ve noted just this morning two mentions of the Berkeley BART build. The New World Notes item by Wagner James Au 2009 01 19 was wonderful to find after our in-world messages last month. For clarification, while true at the time of that conversation, no longer do I work for City of Berkeley. The TidalBlog item by Peter Miller mentions interesting developments in the overlap between simulators and geospatial models, as well as some shots from his visit to the Berkeley BART model. Thanks to both authors for their posts!
The iconic Berkeley BART station has been listed for sale (all build objects included) in Second Life. In-world, simply visit the region Gualala 192 / 50 / 24 to take a look. Under the covers, there are three parcels that are augmented by ample protected Linden land, including a picturesque road and bridge, a boat channel, and a canal. The land took two years to consolidate, and involved about eight parcel purchases into the three now joined for sale. Two of the contiguous areas separated by the canal have been bridged using meticulous construction methods.
But the best part about this site is the 1000-prim Level 3 build. It’s a precise model about 1/3 scale, so that most Tiny avatars can walk around inside it. Surface details, building exteriors and station interiors were shot in 2007, but look as good as new despite Gualala’s drizzly climate!
The station is on offer starting 2009 01 14 for L$116,800. Proceeds will be used to support a non-Berkeley build in a nearby region.
Green areas show the three areas joined to make the parcel for sale
Parcel areas with trees and transluscent prims for some scale context
Steep view of Berkeley BART station build
Shallow view (westerly) of project site from boat channel
After two years, it seems time to work on a new big build. In the interest of conserving SL resources, I’m looking to get enough from selling the Gualala land and Berkurodam build to purchase adjacent land for a new build at the Stanford site.
I’m interested in selling the Berkeley build to architecturally-minded SL folk, so that with a properly sized and shaped parcel, I can do another RL scale model build (not based on any location in the East Bay). Work circumstances have changed and I’ll be spending much less RL time in Berkeley, so Inquiries are welcome care of darb (at) simgis.com.
Unfortunately, the public-facing OpenSim server that was loaded with the 40 region 1:1 scale UC Berkeley model has now been taken offline and is in search of a data center slot.
Meanwhile, just to prove that I’m still around the metaverse, I’ve made my first meta-machinima. Using the YouTube MP4 streaming service, which is apparently available for any uploaded video, one can map a texture into a video stream as part of parcel media settings on Linden servers. This machinima was shot at the Gualala Level 3 Berkurodam build.
But still, the machinima is much easier to share world-wide!
On Friday I had the great pleasure of sharing some of the SIMGIS work with an interested audience at UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility. I recycled an earlier slide show to get started, and had intended to use the machinima video as a presentation tool. Thanks to the resources at GIF, in a half-hour before the talk I was able to download the SL client, establish a connection, and provide a live tour of all three levels of GIS data-driven immersive modeling. I was able to answer questions using the SL client’s edit mode, demonstrate in-world physics, and provoke a few “ooh” and “ah!” comments from the inquisitive crew assembled for Geolunch. Thanks to Kevin and Marek and Brian for venue, equipment, and provocative questions, respectively!
So that others like them might get a better idea of what’s up with Simulator GIS, I returned to my principles of “improved production values” around video work, and have made another pass through the machinima rush that I posted on 11 December. This time through it has enough title work to help explain what’s up and why I shot the features that are shown. And it’s got some audio as well. In the process of burning prints to take to Geolunch, I think that I’ve found a way to boost my resolution on YouTube to full screen. Whether that works will remain to be seen. I’m attempting a 640 x 480 x 6 fps with stereo 32 kHz sound. The Apple .mov print comes out in the range of a half-gigabyte, so it should work.
If you can see the embed version, it should appear below. The video link to the machinima rush from the 11 December posting is deprecated. I’ll redirect to this more finished one.
Hey, I don’t know if it can, but I’m going to give it a try. Here’s how I am making an attempt to support a lecture Explorations, Publishing GIS Data as Immersive 3D Services to an academic brown-bag lunch.
On the edges of geospatial informatics, professional GIS practice, and video gaming systems, there is an Outland that too few have been frequenting: shared third-person (immersive) eD models of real-world spaces. These offer an engaging mirror of our world that can present GIS data with great fidelity and connect it in important ways with ordinary human experience.
Now for the video rush. I’ve seriously backslid on my better-production-values efforts, and haven’t yet spliced two takes, added titles, nor dubbed in sound. But I did reboot my annoying Windows machine before running FRAPS and the SL client, and things were reasonably OK. All this work was shot in and near the Second Life regions of Amida, Muir, and Gualala, with some Limantour in the background. Compared with my earlier “Levels 1, 2, 3″ machinima, this one spends quite a bit more time focused on the benefits of Level 3 builds, and I actually had things pretty well rezzed during the shooting.
Silent though these pages be, much has been thought. I’ve had some quality time with inquisitive Lindens and learned to expect some sort of standalone Linden server product along about 2009. For me, that’s a game-changer as it’s hard enough to suggest (at work) creating content without also keeping up with an open source thread to stand that content up upon.
This past week I’ve made a real-life geographic shift for a family event, and learned that I’ve got a relation involved in the study of architecture. That insight has reinvigorated my interest in Jon Brouchoud and some of his writing here. The notion of architecture as it is currently an academic subject, versus architecture as a current professional practice, and the disruptive possibility of widespread virtual world deployment—this is a notion not so different from geographic science as an academic subject, GIS as a professional practice, and the possibility of immersive 3D disruption of the status quo.
Others in academic circles, including University College London, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), published a Working Paper about the time this past summer when I was so focused on my 1:1 immersive build. It was gratifying to see the CASA acknowledge Second Life technology’s place in the world of neogeography and geospatial informatics.
Sitting side by side yet somehow abstracted from mapping, gaming and digital earths
is Second Life and other similar virtual environments. Second Life and their like are
easy to dismiss as pure distraction and entertainment. Yet look under the lid of
Second Life and it contains one of the most powerful geographical data visualisation
kits available
And the fine writing and attention to detail of Jon / Keystone was spotlighted in NY Times’ Style magazine this past weekend. It was a pleasure to share that link with architecture students!
It’s a big world, and immersive 3D systems must balance the tradeoff between quality and performant physics, and an economically practical level of large land areas served up to relatively sparse users, if we are to identify applications that consume vast tracts of GIS data. Spanning that scale will require that standalone Linden servers have the ability to shortcut some of HAVOK’s demands to pile in many more than four regions per physical server. After all, if I can get 100 regions stood up on a 1 GHz Celeron using OpenSim, then a four-threaded dual 64-bit Xeon server really ought to do the same for standalone Linden regions, right? I surely hope so.
I’m finding little time for keeping the OpenSim instance current. For me, there’s been a lot of problems with the more recent (last six weeks) versions simply working on first try. Also, since I have so many hours invested in the content that was created at rev 5411 that I’m a bit skittish with the bleeding edge updates.
Most recently, I’ve had the experience at osim.bargc.org of having only a single region be accessible at a time with the latest 1.21.6 SL viewer. So I vacillate between thinking “how convenient and attractive to use hosted Second Life Grid servers” and the hot-rodder thoughts “My 40-region sim is worth $7525 up front and $1610/month in tier for a nonprofit, so I can be tough.” I do tire of keeping the OpenSim server up and running with its load of content, yet with this real-world economy even avatars need to be frugal, no?
Thanks to Gualala neighbor Misty Rhodes for background
One thing about these tiny builds is that they’re easy to see from one end to the other, so why not make a video of these miniature builds in Second Life? I offer this for the amusement of Geospatial Information Service (or Geographic Information Systems if you prefer) folks who may be introducing themselves to immersive 3D. International GIS Day will be here in a couple of weeks, so I’m posting this now.
I’ve also challenged myself to improve my video production standards. Who knows, maybe more than 1300 people will view it if I make it more fun to watch with a bit of editing and title-based metadata? Nothing deep is intended with the score, it just caught my attention as matching the length of the machinima rushes tonight.
I’ve tried to improve the video with some titles to explain what’s being seen at the Level 1 (bare earth with draped ortho) 1:42-scale build, Level 2 (first-return reflective LiDAR gridded surface with draped ortho) 1:16-scale build, and Level 3 (full immersive 3D vector features in Second Life primitives with real world textures) 1:3-scale build.
If the embedded link does not work, the video is hereколи под наем which is at http://www.youtube.com/v/6joRvDH52jU
