All in the HUD

• Immersed as I increasingly am in the virtual world, one of the things I now use more than ever are the HUD devices. Some you waer normally, but others you attach to your screen add features to the interface. Sadly, there are only nine positions available and my HUD count in the inventory now numbers around 40. We rapidly need some kind of HUD for switching HUDs I think.

• I'll come back to this is due course but would love to see comments on readers own favourites. Mine at present are ...

• SLOOG - Provides channel command to keep landmarks and tag them. GRIDMARKER - similar thing but uses drag and drop of landmarks from your inventory and gives you a publishable RSS feed. I use former for private (ish) bookmarks and the latter for public recommendations.

• SLICKR and SLBROWSER. First is an on-screen button and latter is a pop-up browser. Combined, these two enhance SL search facilities. SLICKR records your history in case you forget to landmark, whilst SL BROWSER privides search that will take you to the "exact" location of what you look for.

• BLOGGER and BLOGHUD - both allow me to blog directly from in-world. The fomer is not actually a HUD, rather it is a droppable object that you code with your "blogger.com" blog on the web. As owner you can then post directly to your blog, but best of all it acts as a launcher for your blog when anyone else clicks on it. The latter is a dedicated in-world blog which provides you with an RSS feed. It's on-screen HUD is a dream because the main tags are predefined, so you can use it quickly to post from wherever you are in SL. Other users can quickly find out whats happening too.

• On a side-note, there are now a number of RSS readers you can place in-world in you have somewhere of your own. I finally found one the other day which is only 1 prim and ideal if you have a low allowance. Sadly, that is the one which I have not got working yet! Have seen it working though.

• Twitter users have two in-world choices. SLTWEETS has an awkward interface but acts as an on-screen Twitter client much like "Twitterific" and its ilk on the desktop.Lately however, I have switched to SQUAWK - this does not use any screen real-estate and gives channel command access to not only Twitter but also Jaiku.

• 2L will have voice functionality in chat shortly and, desite a few bugs, works very well on the beta grid. One of the first HUDs I ever used however was SECOND TALK which enables the use of Skype running parallel with SL. You don't need a HUD for that of course, but wearers of the ST device can instantly scan for other users in-world and patch into them without all the normal Skype address lookup. Skype does need to be running already in the background though.

• MYSTITOOL is one of a whole breed of plug-ins that offer an animation over-ride facility, but it has extras which include launching yourself a temporary sky sandbox, avatar radar for 100 metres and chat distance radar separately. Animation over-ride is great for getting out of pickles, butI also like an animation controller at hand. This allows me to move and make gestures of my choosing without searching for them all in the inventory when I want them. I dumped the basic oneI was using yesterday when I purchased a more powerful new one. Guess - what? The one I bought is malfunctioning already!

• So a word of warning here. I have actually "purchased" three HUDS so far to replace those available for free. None of the "bought" ones have done what they advertised, whereas all the free ones seem to work like a dream. There must be a moral in that story somewhere.

• Finally, there is another rather awkward HUD called BABBLER which I make a lot of use of. Simply put, it provides language translation facilities in chat - esstentil when hosting multi-national events. When working properly (it IS buggy) it does a pretty good job of translating what you are saying into a number of different languages. Less impressive is some of the drivel it emits when trying to interpret others around you.

• I've added a couple of new links in the bit below these posts. You can find the links to what I've mentioned here in those listings.

• As I said, comments are welcome. I suspect this is a subject I will be returning to a lot. I'm still exploring details about an educational HUD called SLOODLE even as I write here.

So, until .....