CyberTech News

Lasse Öörni was the tech lead for the realXtend viewers 0.1 – 0.4. During that time he has learnt to know SL Viewer quite well. He is technically skilled and did many almost heroic development efforts when SL Viewer was forged to realXtend Viewer.

Lasse is an interesting person, and he is definitely not just your ordinary code developer. I just finished the book he wrote in a month, just before the launch of realXtend 0.4. Download the book: Agents of Metal.

Agents of Metal is an action-packed, violent story wrapped with conspiracy theories and aggressive metal music. The story has feelings and emotions, even a spark of love, so it is not just a single minded shooting gallery.

Have you ever wondered where the heavy metal music came from to some of the realXtend videos? Lasse is also a one man band; he plays guitar, bass, drums and sings vocals. Rex Ping plays one of Lasse’s songs, Vision Never Dies in the earliear article Rex Ping introduces MP3 player for realXtend. You can download the whole pack of Lasse’s songs here (free for non-commercial use).

Lasse, what was the biggest single thing you did to rexviewer (I bet it was OGRE integration)? How do you feel about it?
Yes, integrating & getting OGRE to coexist with the SL’s renderer. I’m not totally satisfied of what I did, considering how OpenGL driver bugs seem to cause crashes on some graphics cards, but at least it was a good learning experience.

What do you have to say about SL Viewer? Does it have a future?
For its original intended purpose, I don’t have bad things to say about it, and it certainly has some nice parts of code, like the UI. Yes, I believe it has a future.

What do you think about rex NG? What is your guestimate when there could be first public alpha version ready?
We’re only starting implementation, it’s certainly exciting to see where it will go. Anything I say is just a very rough guess, but internally we’ve planned some kind of essential tasks like basic rendering to be done in the summer.

How did you fit together writing AoM and making final crunch for rexviewer 0.4 at the same time?
I always write at evening or night anyway, and actually the crunch was somewhat relaxed as material support etc. critical tasks had already been done, so it was not too hard. Distractions, like Far Cry 2, were more of a problem.

What would you do differently if you could (with rexviewers 0.1 to 0.4)?
I would avoid the dual OpenGL contexts with whatever means necessary.

Anything you would like to say to ctn readers?
Well, stay tuned for the rex NG viewer, and Agents of Metal part 2!

realXtend download, Ogre3D, opengl, realxtend 0.4, rex-ng, sl viewer

It always lifts spirits to listen to good music while building your virtual world. It is easy to play web based MP3-files using XSPF track lists. 

Screenshot of the player in action.

Before we continue, let me introduce Rex Ping. He is the new realXtend based virtual superhero and from now on he will guide you through all the mini tutorials. He is on trial for now at CTN. Here are some pictures of him:

Rex has more muscle power than brains, but hey, virtual stuff can get heavy for a virtual guy.

Rex: “Hey, nice to meet you all. Jani, just go on and write the instructions. I have things to do, but I’ll come back for the screenshot…”.

Oh well, maybe I will get someone with more brains next time. But back to the MP3:

To get your music to play, do this:

1. upload your music to web (I can webhost your small demos, ask jpirkola@gmail.com)
2. make a xspf playlist and upload it to web (example xspf)
3. get web musicplayer from http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net, upload swf file to web
4. upload a new texture to realXtend server (get a blank server here) and apply it to a new prim
5. edit texture properties, set it to refresh once per second
6. set the mediaURL to point to musicplayer swf and set the other parameters as in the example below

http://www.cybertechnews.org/musicplayer/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=metal.xspf&autoplay=true&repeat_playlist=true

You can take a look and take the files from http://www.cybertechnews.org/musicplayer/

The played music will be heard evenly, so it is not spatialized. It also plays in full volume and there is no way to affect that, except editing the mp3-files… The player can be embedded to a web page, and it is ideally used with webscreen. 

See more about playing media in realXtend:

Browse the web together in realXtend
Show your slides in realXtend: The easy way 
Watch YouTube videos from realXtend

realXtend flash, hosting, howto, media, mp3, music, realxtend 0.4, swf, webscreen, www, xspf

NEWS RELEASE FROM RADIO ARCALA

The Finnish Amateur Radio alliance Radio Arcala (OH8X) has been studying the potential of promoting Amateur Radio in a variety of Virtual World environments by approaching the millions of young people who spend their time increasingly in well-known internet locations, such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Second Life and others. The OH8X group early on bought an island (private server space) and built a complete virtual amateur radio station in Second Life.

After learning the limitations of commercial settings and available tools, they soon found out that there is a need for open architecture and improved tools. Hence they decided to have a key partnership in development work to create an open platform called RealXtend. It has gained a lot of ground among those working on next-generation Web 3D applications. The future World Wide Web is definitely heading in that direction.

While involved in the RealXtend platform development project, they are also busy working on their own Virtual World radio station, the first of its kind. The features include a meeting place for the Arcala team and their visitors to meet and operate the simulated OH8X/CU2X stations in the Virtual World from any place in the real world. Each and every feature of the real ham radio station is modeled, and interaction between the Virtual World and the real world connects them together.

“Everything sounds complicated at first glance”, says Juha Hulkko, OH8NC who spearheads the project. He adds that the young people of today spend their knowledge and their time in these virtual settings. So, it’s up to us to have a look at virtual space as a way of approaching the youth in their own familiar surroundings.

“We have been encouraged by the experience of seeing others enjoy the free platform introduced to boost application development”, says Juha, OH8NC. Just recently, a cluster of universities in the United States joined the Immersive Education Initiative which in turn has selected RealXtend as their platform to initiate their future distance learning in Virtual Reality. This confirms that taking Amateur Radio there is in line with the evolving world in a setting where young people ultimately meet for fun and education.

Juha, OH8NC and Martti, OH2BH will be co-speakers at the Visalia DX Convention, sharing their OH8X strategy and taking you on a tour to see first views of Amateur Radio in virtual space and to taste some of the applications.

(See also previous CTN article about Radio Arcala: Remote control of a radio station using realXtend)

OpenSim, realXtend amateur radio, immersive education, radio arcala, Real Life control, realxtend 0.4, RL control, Second Life, www

You can connect to Second Life using realXtend viewer. It is not at its best that way, but still there are some nice features worth writing about. One of them is the possibility for inter-grid teleporting, as I wrote in teleporting with realXtend. Another smaller yet interesting feature is that it is possible to import and export the avatar appearance.

Many people have spent a lot of time in tweaking their avatar appearance in Second Life. SL Avatar has 144 settings:

• Shape, 77 settings
• Skin, 26 settings
• Hair, 39 settings
• Eyes, 2 settings

Bringing your avatar to OSGrid is clearly a non-zero effort. Using realXtend appearance import/export, the work is made significantly easier.

The export gives you a XML file that can be saved to a local computer (it is actually just a text file, not xml inside). You need to have “worn” bodyparts and clothing on when using the import and export facilities. Textures keys are exported but currently not able to be imported, because different grids will have different keys, and there is no way to match them up.

To Export:

1. Start editing your appearance
2. Click the Export Button,
3. Select a file name for the saved data

 To import:

1. Start Editing your appearance
2. Click the Import Button
3. Select a file with the saved data
4. Make changes to textures
5. Click SaveAll Button

This is tested from Second Life to OSGrid, and to a standalone Opensim. Textures need to be upload separately and set manually. Many thanks to Ewe Loon for the code patch!

Note: The avatar appearance import/export works in Opensim and SL, not with the realXtend’s own free form mesh avatar. realXtend’s own avatar is stored on a separate server which makes it easy to be used at different realXtend servers (ie your avatar travels with you when you teleport around), which makes this kind of import/export unnecessary.

The avatar appearance import/export can also be used to back up your sl avatar easily or you can even send your sl avatar settings in email.

OSGrid, OpenSim, realXtend avatar, avatar portability, backup, howto, OpenSim, OSGrid, realXtend, realxtend 0.4

In the previous slideshow howto article, the process of bringing a powerpoint slideshow to a realXtend virtual world was explained. The process was, although technically sound in many ways, also a bit cumbersome.

There is an easier way, especially if your slides are not top secret. 

In the picture above you can see the result. I am taking advantage of the webscreen I presented in an earlier article - Browse the web together in realXtend. 

The process is simple. Upload the slides to http://www.slideshare.net on your account. You get a URL for every slideshow. To protect your slides from public viewing, it is possible to define slideshows private, and you can get a URL for them too. 

Now use that URL with the webscreen or as a texture MediaURL to show the first slide of the presentation inside a realXtend world. Now there is one problem to overcome – there is a lot of stuff that does not belong to the slide, just like with Youtube videos (check also previous article Watch YouTube videos from realXtend). Now it is time to use slide offset and repeat -properties to show only the slide portion of the web page. Take a look at this picture to see the exact settings you need to do. As a sidenote, this works with Youtube as well.

To change the slide, you need to append slash + slide number at the end of the URL. Look at the first screenshot to see an example. This can be done using the webscreen, or simply manually changing the MediaURL.

realXtend powerpoint, realxtend 0.4, RL control, slides, textures, video, webcast, webscreen, www, youtube

Now it is possible to watch your favorite Youtube videos from the comfort of a realXtend world. Rendering web pages to a prim or 3D object has been working already from the first realXtend release. Now the realXtend 0.4 release brings the possibility to make the rendered web pages flash content to show in real time.

Test User watches Guns and Roses “Welcome to the jungle”.

To make this work, you need to make a prim box for the screen and upload a placeholder texture. The texture is used to mark the place of the web page so it can be anything as long as it is jpeg and a small one.

When you see the texture at the prim, go to inventory and edit properties of the texture (see example above). Set Media URL to http://www.cybertechnews.com/test/gnr.html which is a web page with a black background and the embedded Youtube video – feel free to copy the code if you want to make your own pages. I used “autoplay=1″ parameter to start the video automatically, otherwise the video just stands still.

To make the video show, set the Refresh rate to “60″, which is how many times per second the screen is updated.

Note that the video is not synchronized between viewers, but if you want to share a video with your friend, just restart the video and you will get a simultaneous experience. Simplest way to restart is to go again to texture properties and hit enter at the MediaURL field.

realXtend realxtend 0.4, youtube