tools

What you're watching is SLTk Pro (website) render an object in Second Life that was designed in Autodesk Maya. The software itself works as a plugin, augmenting Maya to enable the in-world rezzing function as well as all of the extras like texture application and joining multiple sculpted prims. If you'd like to see some of the neat things they've created you can check them out in-world (SLurl) or download the 15-day free trial. A 3dsMax version is on the way as well!

Importing data into Second Life, rather than using the in-world building tools, is certainly an idea whose time has come. It doesn't have to remain on a small-scale either, but can apply itself to the world's largest structures:

(The real action begins at about the 4 minute mark!)

Metaversed readers may remember our previous article on AI Design Studio's "Henshin", the software that imports AutoCAD files to Second Life. There's something awe-inspiring about seeing an entire building snap itself together, isn't there? The third version of the software is about to be released with a far more friendly user interface.

What if you're not a designer? What if you don't have advanced design tools like Maya or AutoCAD kicking around your hard drive, but you really want to fill a SIM? If you were a member of the Things To Do group back in June, you'd already have your answer:

If you can't build, at least there's Sim In A Box to make your life easier. Sure it's a prefab, but let's face it, you probably didn't design your real life home either.

Thanks Mike!

A Linden Lab sponsored project undertaken by Seattle based i3D will soon provide Second Life scriptors with advanced unit testing functionality. Scriptors will be able to plug individual units of code into the system and stress test and debug with verbose reporting. They'll even be able to track individual functions performance within different units, helping to narrow down bug hunts, and tune performance of complex apps.

I3D were apparently contracted to build the unit testing system by Linden Lab when the two firms met at a LinuxFest expo in Seattle this year, and are getting ready to recruit beta testers.

Jacob Sullivan, aka Navillus Batra will demonstrate the new system at next Friday's Metaversed Geek Meet (no Geek Meet this week for various reasons..) and invite beta testers.

Metaversed readers may remember our earlier article about AjaxLife, a chat program that interfaces with the virtual world of Second Life through your web browser. Created by UK teen Katharine Berry, it has been universally heralded as a truly brilliant third party tool. Not bad for something you just "throw together over the weekend in a language you don’t know". Now, it's about to get even better. AjaxLife has gone open-source.

What this means is that independent programmers and developers can look at the code itself and contribute bug fixes, updates, and added features. This puts a powerful tool in the hands of the community, and will certainly spawn dozens of spin-offs. As always, we'll keep you up to date on the more interesting developments.

Links
Try out AjaxLife
The Google Code site

Katharine Berry, a student in the UK, has created an in-browser AJAX application that allows you to log into the virtual world of Second Life, but without all of the laggy graphics. This is a great way to pop in-world for a moment if you just want to chat with other residents, and as far as anybody else will be able to tell your avatar will look just fine (although mostly immobile).

While you can't yet initiate new IM sessions or use the Search functions (these are coming), you can reply to any incoming IMs and participate in local chat wherever your avatar happens to be. You can also teleport your avatar to other locations via an on-screen map, although once there you can't really walk around.

The interface is really simple, really fast, and works in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and newer versions of Safari. You can take it for a quick test drive by clicking here.

Late on Tuesday evening, amid Linden server problems, way up high on a large Mystitool skybox in Second Life, Cadroe Murphy, a student by day and virtual worlds tool builder by night, demonstrated his new bezier curve building lathe tool for Metaversed.

The tool which is based on Cadroe's famous ShapeGen code works by using "handles" that allow the builder to manipulate the outline of the final shape very similarly to tools like Photoshop. Once you're happy with the final curve (see first image above), you can start to build out the final shape.

The final shape can be a full 360 degree construct, or just a slice of that, making building curved shapes larger than 10 meters (if it was less, you'd be better of using a single sculpted prim) a piece of cake. Like the ShapeGen tool however, the quality of your curve depends on how many prims you can spare. The final shape you see here in this last pic used almost 600 prims --- Ouch!

You can get Cadroe's Lathe tool for just $300L at SLX

A new site for data miners and virtual world enthusiasts has just launched. MMOGData.com is an ever-growing catalog of all types of virtual worlds that tracks revenue models, subscribers, genres, ads, and more. The specific criteria are sure to change over time as this has just launched.

This comes just as 57 Miles and I were discussing doing the very same thing at Metaversed, but it looks like Vortal (aka Phil White) beat us to the punch. Vortal comes to us from his online gaming services company PSFEI, whose website keeps locking up my browser so use a bit of caution there...

In what I hope will be the first of a long running and useful series of profiles of companies and tools that help businesses in Second Life, I spent a pleasant half hour of so talking to Alidar Moxie, a real world web developer who's producing some very cool tools for Second Life.

Alidar, who's company is called Mechanized Life and builds web apps for NASA subcontractors demonstrated three applications that I think would be great for many companies in Second Life. The first, was Calendar Cogs, which uses the Google Calendar API to dynamically list up to two weeks of events at a time and comes complete with "kiosk" and HUD.

Calendar Cogs allows you to display a list of events you have in a Google Calendar, but it also allows you to update those events via the HUD, and even subscribe to other events that are using the Calendar Cogs system. When touched, the kiosk "chats" a list of upcoming events to you, and if wearing the HUD, you'll be given an option to subscribe to any one or more of those events. I can see this working really well businesses that hold regular inworld events, and indeed serveral clubs already use the sytem and the American Library Association have also been looking at it.

One thing I've been looking for, and even experimenting a little with myself is a good way to display RSS in Second Life. Mechanized Life's RSS QT Screens may be just that. Text rendering can be a tricky business in SL, so Alidar has used SMIL to render the titles of RSS feeds in Quicktime. Im not sure it's a perfect solution, but it's not a bad one for sure. The screens look attractive, are fully customizable in terms of look and feel and could be used for all manner of notices and updates controlled by a blog or similarly RSS enabled application.

Lastly, we looked at the RSS Sensor, which is an ingenious little device that sits invisibly on your land and monitors visitor activity. It takes that activity, filters it through your customizations to the tool and outputs an RSS feed that you can use to track traffic. The thing that excites me about this is the prospect of pulling its feed into something like Jaiku and getting realtime alerts when people come to call :) I think I've just found myself a project for show and tell at the next Twitter Users meeting hhh!

Mechanized Life joins a growing list of gadget and tool shops in Second Life amongst my collected landmarks. If you want to visit them, and see these neat tools for yourself, use this teleport link. If you want to suggest other places, companies or tools that you'd like to see covered in this series, please email 57@metaversed.com

Jim Gustafson just gave me a very early demo of a new presentation tool for Second Life educators, and businesses that need to present to groups. Right now it's very beta, but the potential is there for sure. The package consists of a screen and a deck, the screen shows the visuals, and what you want to say is put into the general chat.

I can see this being great for SL teachers that have to give regular classes, but also, as Jim has planned, given a bit of tweaking, for business as well. As soon as it's complete we'll let you know, but if you want to check it out as it stands now, you can grab a copy for free inworld at EduIsland 2 [TP].

In an interview with PixelTrix owner Cherub Spectre this evening at the ITE expo organized by the V3 Group in Second Life, I found out that the company, who make all kinds of cool gadgets for businesses in the Metaverse,  plan to release a "top secret" product that they say will "revolutionize" Second Life next year. Hyperbole is cheap, but Cherub seemed most sincere when we talked about this and promised Metaversed a first peek at the new product as soon as possible.

Ms Spectre was on a panel earlier today talking about robust user experiences, and her company specialize in providing tools/gadgts to smooth out interaction between customer and business in Second Life.

A new tool written for Windows in C++ aims to turn your Second Life chat text into voice. Calhoun Hock, one of the guys working on Speech Tools as a translator (they're from Hungary) told me that once installed, the software reads the text you're chatting from the SL client, and runs it through a text to speech engine and outputs voice. The obvious question, is how will Linden's plans to bring voice functionality into SL in June impact the company...

Well, they dont see this as an issue. Though Calhouns English was a little difficult to understand, the impression I got was that they have other uses for their software.

They'll be presenting later in the day though, so if I learn more, you'll see it here!

I met Vissi Kurri, the inventor/owner of i3DNow at ITE 2007 in Second Life, which is a communications and presentation suite of software that helps people manage virtual meetings and presentations in the SL. Their product is called the collaboration suite and it's simple, but potentially very powerful. It comprises of:

• A whiteboard that interacts with SL objects and can be used by multiple Avatars as a kind of scratchpad.
• A slideshow viewer that handles Powerpoint sides seamlessly with no need to port them into SL itself.
• A blackboard, apparently just simple board display unit
• the HUD meeting manager. And it's this one that I really like...

The HUD meeting manager essentially acts as a control panel for the entire meeting. It manages who can attend, who can see what , cues up media and manages conversation flow. This part of the suite alone makes i3DNow's collaboration suite interesting to companies looking ot conduct meetings and presentations in the virtual realm of Second Life.

I've been promised a full demo, and a look at the technical side of all of this next week so look out for a full review in a few days...