vr – Les said, the better II

Virtual Installations

I’ve spent much of today trying to figure out how to do make virtual sound installations in Second Life. From what I’ve seen for sale, it’s probably possible. But SL is not a sharing sort of community. It’s more of a capitalist system. If you want to upload stuff, you’ve got to have the Lindens (10$L / file). If you want land, you need Lindens. So you can get them by sacrificing real money or you can make stuff in SL to sell (but it will cost you to upload the raw materials, so you have to recover your costs) or you can get a virtual job.

there’s no better way to relax from spending all day staring at a computer screen at work than to come home and stare at a computer screen doing my second virtual shift for (semi-real) play money. No wonder the IRS wants to tax this game. No wonder the NYT and other papers are happily wildly inflating the numbers of regular users. No wonder corporations are busily putting up ads. They love this. It’s a model they get. Money buys stuff. There’s no weird “sharing” or other hard-to-grok economies. People sell stuff to each other and so rich folks and corporations get all the cool stuff because they can invest in finding and paying people to create it for them. Second Life is a lot like Real Life.
I think it is on the upswing and will continue to grow, but probably without me. I would have put in the effort to photograph my favorite shirt to upload it as a texture map for my avatar to wear (in human speak: I was taking pictures of my shirt so my player could wear it), but I’m not going to pay for the privilege of generating content on a private network. I’m not opposed to paying for things. I pay for flickr. Because my free account had upload limits that I wanted to exceed. I wanted to exceed them because of positive experiences I had after I uploaded some stuff without paying. First I got positive feedback, then I gave out some money. The new economy is not dead. First, prove to me that you’ve got something worthwhile, then offer me more if I pay you. It’s a good model.

My Avatar isn’t wearing underwear

I joined Second Life recently. I have a sort of a fascination with VR environments. I used to run a MOO (like a MUD but object-oriented). I wrote about a bajillion objects for the MOO. Unfortunately, most of my objects cannot be ported to the visual world of SL because they violate the TOS. Alas.

Anyway, about 3 years ago I did a sound project associated with the MOO. I have the idea that I could do virtual installations. SL has about 100K active members, so it’s not a large potential audience, really. But I think it’s got legs. I joined after reading an article about copyright issues in the Washington Post. I don’t know if this means SL has jumped the shark or if it has just broken into the mainstream.
It’s funny how just wearing such a goofy outfit virtually makes me kind of uncomfortable. Back into normal pants (and no wings) right after the screen grab. I’m so uptight. I can’t let my inner-gay shine through. alas
In other news, work is afoot to turn the wiimote into a general HID for things like gameplay use. That would allow me to practice using it and play a game at the same time. w00t. There’s also plans underway to make it play nicely with SuperCollider. I’m all over that.
To my non-american readers: I’m sorry about the insane amount of idiom. I’m like a 19 year old Canadian coming home from the US and getting drunk.

Glossay

VR Virtual Reality
MUD Multi User Demon – a text based virtual reality simulation. It allowed the users to modify the environment.
TOS Terms of Service – an agreement that I have to follow
jump the shark pass the high point of it’s popularity. Something keeps getting cooler and cooler until it jumps the shark and then is embarrassingly not cool.
wiimote new kind of remote control / joystick for the new nintendo game system
HID Human Interface Device – a joystick or silimar
w00t hooray! yay! super! wow! a happy noise. only sort of cynical at the same time.
all over that in favor of

Moo song

I’ve decided that my midterm SuperCollider project will be a program that logs into the MOO (telnet xkey.com:3333) and interprets MOO text somehow into sounds. for this, I will need to create a $room, which will be called the Music Studio and a $player for my SuperCollider program to use. It would be better if the MOO and SuperCollider could communicate through some other means, besides a fake player. But I don’t think MOO objects are allowed to make network connections and I can’t think of another way to log in. (If you know otherwise, please let me know.)
anyway, the SuperCollider program will log into the MOO and from the text, create sounds. There’s a few ways to do this. I could scan the text for particular key words, which would cause particular actions. for instance, the word “teleport” usually signifies that a new player has come in, and so when “teleport” comes across the network connection, some particular responce could occur. Or, I could do statistical analysis on the network text, changing the texture of the music based on the frequency and length of the received text. for instance, a lot of text arriving quickly would indicate that there’s a lot of activity on the MOO and perhaps the program could respond by creating a dense texture of sounds. another thing that could happen is that $plays (and other objects) could have an optional “themes” property, which would contain information meaningful to the SuperCollider patch, so it could look at your theme property and, in Wagnerian style, play your theme while you are in the room.
If you have any suggestions or ideas about how you would musically represent MOO communications, you should pass them along. to be fair, the patch output will have t be streamed, so $players can listen. so think also of what musical noises might convey useful information. If you have a desk job and can sit with headphones on, would you like to hear it play something that tells you that somebody just logged on or one of your friends is talking?
One of the local guys is giving me and old PC with linux on it, so I can set up a test streaming server. Alas, it will probably not have a fixed IP address until it passes a certain amount of testing, since xkey must be stable. Or, Mitch could put a stable RedHat PC in the CN kitchen that could get nightly builds put up on it. The PC currently there is having some sort of disk problem.
This project probably wouldn’t work well for Stony Brook, but that’s ok. I have a final project after this one.