Open Habitat Team's Blog Posts:

Just had a thought that I need to capture before it escapes:
Could you run OpenSim as a shared application inside Wonderland? This may seem like an insane idea, I realise. Why would you want a 3D environment inside a 3D environment?

Well, I'm thinking about the draft evaluation of the first pilot by Steve and Marga, and one of the important issues that has been identified is the need to know when to do 'distance', and when to do 'blended'. I think that OpenSim standalone is just right for teaching building skills in a real life blended learning situation (Ian & Graham tutors), and Second Life is best done at a distance (Cubist and Kisa mentors).

Wonderland is closer to a blended learning environment, in that you are your real life self, speaking with your real voice, and you can interact properly with an application (interface elements and all) like you do in an I.T. lab. That's why I think it might be interesting to have OpenSim standalone as a shared virtual application. I can teach some building skills at a distance without it getting muddied by the whole role play and social complexity thing.

Well, it's just an idea.

Quick note to Open Habitat project:
The new Browser Tutorial that Linden Lab are introducing as an alternative the to current Orientation island/HUD solution will need to be considered in relation to our first pilot. I sense new opportunities for smoother, better designed noobs inductions. Need to test.

Now then. A 3D head tracking controlled operating system. That would be interesting. Webcams are pretty widespread, so it would be easy for Apple or the Linux mob to create a head tracking powered 3D desktop. It would seem that many of the benefits of stereoscopic displays can be provided by a realtime head tracking, but at a fraction of the cost and/or inconvenience (nobody really likes wearing those glasses for very long, however spectacular the stereo vision is.).

Now imagine that a friend's 3D head-avatar (see previous posts) pops up on your 3D desktop (well, he'd have to knock first). He can see what's on your desktop, and his 3D head rotates around so you can see which bits he's looking at. You can show him how to do something cool in photoshop, or show him something on the web, accompanied by a VoIP-conversation. Click a switch and you're looking at his screen, and he can see your 3D head-avatar on his 3D desktop.

This is the sort of thing I'm on about:

I'll have a search and see if anyone has done it with Second Life yet.

I've been messing about with the open source, cross platform ARToolKit. This uses your webcam to detect the relative position of a special pattern that you print out. I've also just stumbled on this face detection API that does a similar thing, but without the need for a special pattern (other than your face). The second video on this page suggests an interesting creative possibility. The API is a low level C library, so it would probably be fairly easy to integrate it into a hack of the Second Life client. The idea is that you would be able to tilt your head to see round objects slightly. This would be a massive help when building things in world, as you would get a much better sense of the relative position of objects in the 3D space.