Wandering warthogs in the East Africa Traveler Safety Simulation
Yesterday, the Hypergrid Adventurers Club (HGAC) visited the Center for Global Health’s East Africa Traveler Safety Simulation. About 20 of us made the voyage, initially gathering at JokaydiaGrid and then travelling together as a group. This was the first HGAC trip in a long time, and it was wonderful to see so many familiar friends as well as some brand new faces.
If you’re a fan of the Hypergrid, you should definitely check out the new 1.8.3 release of the Singularity viewer for OpenSim and Second Life.
In particular, take a look at this section in the update notes. The fact that it is a very brief sentence seriously belies the magnitude of its significance.
- Fixed a problem with long teleports in OpenSim (“4096 bug” SVC-2941 FIRE-11593) (Latif)
Latif Khalifa has fixed the bug that, since the beginning of time, prevented Hypergrid explorers from jumping to places more than 4096 regions away. No more mandatory intermediate hops! No more “cannot reach destination – too far away” messages!
I encourage all explorers of the Hypergrid to please take a moment and thank Latif on Twitter. His hard work has resulted in a major improvement to the use of the Hypergrid and the evolution of OpenSim as a constellation of easily accessible interconnected grids.
Which brings me to the topic of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club. Since my presentation at the OpenSimulator Community Conference, I’ve received a great deal of interest in possibly restarting our tours of the Hypergrid. Many people reached out to me, and the outpouring of interest was very inspiring.
So I’m rebooting the tours! Our next tour will be Saturday Sept 28 at 10pm EDT. For all the details, please join and read our Google Group.
Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Question: What does the middle initial “B.” stand for in Benoit B. Mandelbrot‘s name?
Answer: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
This is recreation of a blog post by Brian A. White. Brian’s blog went offline sometime in 2009, and recently it was suggested that someone republish this useful tutorial to make sure it can be found by search engines and does not someday completely vanish from the Internet. So here it is.
Some of the links in this article are dead and not available in any existing archives. I’ve left those in but
crossed them out.Fortunately these dead links are not critical to the tutorial, and I was able to update the other links that have changed since this article was written. Brian, wherever you are, thank you again for writing this and I hope you are well.
Attending the Opening Keynote Presentation
This past weekend I attended and spoke at the very first OpenSimulator Community Conference (OSCC13). It was an amazing event full of outstanding presentations, great networking opportunities, and spectacular venues with tons of attendees. It was also truly remarkable to see how far OpenSim has evolved and matured as a virtual world platform.
I’ve seen my fair share of online conferences, and this was the most professionally managed and engaging online conference I have ever attended. To everyone involved in making this event a reality, thank you!
And thank you all who attended my presentation. I apologize for not having time to answer all your questions, but if you leave a comment on this blog post I will be very happy to reply.
Lastly, for those of you interested in me possibly restarting the Hypergrid Adventurers Club tours (I got a lot of positive feedback at the conference), be sure to join the HGAC mailing list and post that you’d like to attend a future tour. If I see enough interest, I’ll definitely start them up again.
Please read on for my own presentation summary, video and downloadable slides. You can also watch recordings of all the other presentations in the Conference Archives.
“Exploring the Interconnected: How Past Dreams evolve into Future Reality”
Join us to hear more about how dreams from the past can dramatically change and evolve into something completely new. In this presentation you will hear all about John’s initial experiences in Opensim while still working at Linden Lab, the creation and mangement of “Pathlandia,” initial explorations of the Hypergrid, and how it all fits in with what he remembers as Linden Lab’s original vision of an expanding Metaverse of self-hosted and interconnected virtual worlds.
ADDENDUM 9/10/2013: Be sure to read this blog post: “The Future of Conferences.” It’s an outstanding summary of the conference by Crista Lopes, the inventor of the Hypergrid and one of the conference’s main organizers.
Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
ye olde prim
[Update: You also do this with the Firestorm viewer. Just Export your prim object using the Collada format. Details here on the Firestorm wiki.]
This is pretty cool.
The most recent version of the Singularity viewer (version 1.8.1) adds a particularly interesting feature:
This means you can now take a prim-based object from within Second Life or Opensim and export it to your hard drive as a mesh object (either .obj or .dae file format).
Heisenberg and Schrodinger are driving down the highway. Suddenly, they see police lights in the rearview mirror. After pulling over to the side of the road, two policeman walk up to their car.
“Do you have any idea how fast you were going?” asks one officer.
“No,” says Heisenberg. “But I know precisely where I am.”
The policeman glares at him. “You were going 90 miles an hour, smartass.”
“Damn! Now I’m lost,” says Heisenberg, pulling out a map as Schrodinger starts to laugh.
The officer grows irate.
“Get out of the vehicle !” he yells, and begins searching the car while his partner pats down the two physicists.
After a thorough search of the vehicle, the officer returns to glower at the two scientists, now handcuffed and sitting on the curb.
“Did you guys know you had a dead cat in your trunk?”
Schrodinger sighs and rolls his eyes.
“We do now, idiot.”
In Jibe 2.0 we’ve included an easy system that gives you the power to use iTween to create multiuser networked events. This allows you create shared experiences between avatars using interactive and complex object animations.
Watch my tutorial to learn more!
Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid, Inc.
Here’s a short tutorial video that will show you how to create avatar sit locations on any object in your Jibe world. It’s a very powerful and flexible system where you simply drag and drop sit locations onto anything in your multiuser Jibe world, allowing you to easily create collaborative meeting environments that encourage avatars to gather together in groups.
In this video, I also review how to avoid the accidental misuse of a script that could potentially cause your Avatar to fall through the floor. Safety First!
Creating Sit Locations in Jibe and Unity3d from John Lester on Vimeo.
You can also find this tutorial video in our Knowledge Base.
Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Chief Learning Officer, ReactionGrid
I’m eagerly awaiting my own developer version of the Oculus Rift, which should arrive in about a month.
My plans are to immediately start working on how to best integrate it with Jibe and Unity3d.
In particular, our newly released Jibe 2.0 has a built-in 1st-person perspective mode that is ideal for things like virtual reality headsets.
Exploring a multiuser Jibe 2.0 world in 1st-person perspective.
Keep an eye on this blog for future details.
Needless to say, I was very excited to see the folks at iFixit posting a great teardown of the developer version of the Oculus Rift headset.
If you have an Oculus Rift and would like to brainstorm with me on how it can be integrated with multiuser virtual world applications, please drop me an email (john.e.lester@gmail.com) or post in the comments.
Perhaps we can also schedule a Team Fortress 2 game while using our headsets!
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Chief Learning Officer, ReactionGrid Inc.
P.S. ReactionGrid’s Lead Developer Matthew Bertrand is also getting an Oculus Rift dev kit. He’s pretty psyched about it, and we all expect amazing things from him!
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 