tziteras

This really long post is all notes put together from the past weeks and refers to the blog post a few weeks back (scroll down and you'll see it!) where I pitched the stories of various types of robot's adventures through a near future world, and some people suggested I do something with it. So I now have a Patreon page up and running to make the webcomic conceived in the last 3 posts here, and I've asked some more artists to join in, as well as having spent loads of evenings reading scripts by people like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrisson. And I've written a draft comic script of some pages of the first chapter of the webcomic, but it's really basic and has hardly any dialogue. If you want to collaborate, I'll share it with you :) At some point they liberate a water starved place and storm a storage depot to access these bottles Why 10 episodes, 25 pages each? So in researching how a script might have to work, I tried to see the natural progression that...

Here is my thinking on this: Devobot is an IronPython framework that allows you to trigger animations, movement and chatting to a Second Life or OpenSimulator based avatar using the open source libopenmetaverse library. I used this software in my bot work in a recent archive / 3d model of the Pompeii Court of the Sydenham Crystal Palace . PySerial on the other hand, allows IronPython based serial comms. Serial comms can also be done via .net frameworks - example is in C#, but it should be a good reference for an ironpython version. An arduino microprocessor can be hooked up using an adapted version of the light sensor tutorial on http://arduino.cc/ - but for example, triggering animations or chat responses according to the light level or to other sensors I might be able to think of. Maybe eventually growing in complexity until, naturally, a wiimote is added for IR tracking. So the question is - will it work?

I just wrote this blog post as a generic look at the history and uses of virtual worlds, with focus mostly on SL, but I'm about to change it drastically to just be about SL and it's uses to most of the clients we have at work - mostly quangos, charitable organisations and meta-academic groups. Meanwhile, here is it's full original and sometimes unfinished text I Robot These days I have been mostly building some robots. To be precise, I am making a few Victorians, some roman slaves, and a roman tour guide and host. They will be there to welcome visitors, and to provide entertaining commentaries as a backdrop to a historical reconstruction. But these are not your "ordinary" robots, made of metal and silicon: they will live their slightly repetitive existences only within the confines of the Second Life virtual world. The project I'm working on uses this 3d environment to recreate a Victorian model of an earlier Roman building - the Pompeii Court, which was in ...

We live at such a key time, when on one hand we're waking up tragically to the effects of our use of fossil fuel and our extraordinary growth in the past few hundred years to this blip where revolutions can happen at any point, and go unnoticed, because it's given us an incredible luxury as well. As food prices increase and the skies punish us, we are more in touch with all our friends, family and community than ever before through the benefits of telecommunication. I mean the Digital Revolution, or whatever is at the base the geekiness of ham radios, and at the top the equally geeky virtual worlds which start to take a strange grip on the real world - Second Life, Facebook, Myspace, Email, Instant Messaging, Texting and all the other ways we have added to the written and oral communication we had before. In a sense, all the virtual worlds are just an elite's pinnacle at the top of the incredible communications we're capable of as a global population, aided at this time...

Yesterday I attended a very fun and immersive Second Life talk by Art Fossett, the in-game avatar, accompanied by his on-earth alter ego, Andy Powell of Eduserv. It was fun mostly because he'd organised it to take place on Eduserv island, in the conference room, and invited friends and colleagues to attend online. They kept chuckling like a misbehaving class, turning into dinosaurs, cartwheeling around, and calling him Chubster behind his back (on the projection screen, but he could spy them from his laptop so he caught them out). All very innocent fun though and it complemented his talk quite well. The presentation was organised as a series of t-shirts, which took a while to res the next topic name on the avatar's chest. Interesting for the links it turned up, although they kept mentioning something called slideshare, (which I guess I should google!) where the slides will probably turn up soon enough. There are a lot of mailing lists following Second Life activity in higher e...