Speaker 1: Blue Hair Episode Number 16. Blue Hair is behind.

Speaker 2: Hey everybody, that was Jeff Smith with the Jingo and this is Jedrick Moriak on Second Life, so now there’s Lewis Moten in the real life. So, I’m coming back to you with the Jingo Hair Pod Show with new and improved news virtual world stuff, scripts and what not. So, first thing on the list would be the, um, Torley Linden posted recently about a new program called, krpano, which is a Flash, Panorama Viewer. Um, you may have seen them talk about, um, AutoStitch, which is a program that merges photographs together and in the past Torley has taken many photographs from a single point location on their island and then auto-stitch them together to make some really seamless textures allowing you to view the whole island as a static image. Um, I’ve taken a similar approach following Torley’s lead and I took a lot of pictures of my own sim and then I went ahead and I put them on the inside of hollowed out spheres and the effect is that you can actually look at all different angles of these spheres and it actually looks just like the island and I created them and called them little like snow globes and such because you can put actual like particles inside and have it snowing and have a little scenery on the inside with the background of this actual, um, simulator that you created.

And then I went ahead and I took a step further and took some pictures on the woods behind my house in real life, auto-stitch them together, thought I’m in the second life and made, uh, snow globes of woodbridge. Okay, so what is this have to do with the Flash Panorama Viewer? Well, as you can tell, the stitched together photographs are pretty much panoramas.

Now what Torley has done with this new program is they took the images that they stitched together, used the plug-in and then created an interactive viewer so that when you look at these images in this flash plug-in, you can click and move your mouse around, click drag and the camera actually starts looking around. You can zoom in, zoom out, so it adds a whole other level to the experience of actually starting to feel like you’re in the second life environment. This would be probably more important for people who do not have access to the second life viewer or they cannot access the second life servers due to firewall restrictions or company-wide policy regarding software installed on computers. What, why would somebody want to get into second life who’s in a business that has nothing to do with second life? Mainly for demonstrations of builds that are there. Think of a potential client that you want to say you can do this such and such a thing in second life, build up mock-ups, showing them a two-dimensional picture is one thing, showing them a interactive picture that they can start looking around is another.

They’re not in second life yet, but it gets them a whole another step further towards that environment to be able to understand what’s going on there. So I tried out myself and I found out that the maps that I created had to be resized to a 2 to 1 aspect ratio, which is pretty simple. And if you don’t have spherical images, you can get away with just taking six pictures, top, bottom, left, right, from back, and the program will take those images as well and create an image for you to look around. There is a demo version and if you start using the demo version, you can only use it on your local hosts website. If you’re running a web server on your own computer, or you can actually view it from your file system. However, if you upload the file to a an actual web server other than your local computer, it’s not going to work. For that, you would have to buy a license. The license costs 30 euros, which I think is about $43 USD. And that allows you to host on two domains. If you want to host it on any number of domains, you don’t know where it’s going to end up.

It’s going to cost you 90 euros. Where you’ll notice that when you run it locally, you’ll be able to see everything and navigate, zoom in, zoom out. The only difference though is you’re going to have this watermark of this Karpano demo version all over the texture itself and in the center of your screen.

So it’s definitely not going to be useful other than just demonstrating the capabilities of what can happen. Okay, so this will also run on Windows Mac and Linux for converting your images to the proper format. And then Flash pretty much runs on almost anything. Next on the news is RealLife Plus. And there was a Virtual World News story that I was reading about. VirtualWorldNews.com is a place that I often subscribe to to get my latest news on pretty much all virtual worlds, not just Second Life alone. And they were talking about RealLife Plus, and they’re having a lot more staff come over from the V side. V side is an application That’s like a second life in, it’s a virtual world.

You can walk around and interact with people. Characters or avatars are very much cartoony in V-side. Now from real life plus, there is no client just yet. And it looks like they’re kind of upgrading V-side to real life plus.

I’m not quite certain what the deal is there exactly. But the main avatar on the front page of real life plus looks a little bit more realistic than V-side. But it’s still cartoony. The proportions of the face remind me so much of IMVU, if you’ve ever used that. And IMVU is more or less a chat client kind of 3D chat, I would say. I created a account on real life plus. I wasn’t able to create an account on V-side because it just won’t let me download the client. But real life plus lets you create an account.

It looks a lot more like there’s a lot of social interaction there. You have images that you can upload. You can change your profile picture. You can comment on other people’s walls.

You can talk into forums. The main thing that’s missing is an actual 3D client. So it seems like a lot of things are up in the air and just a whole lot of smoke and mirrors and just saying, uh, vaporware in a sense. And saying, hey, we’re working on this, but we have nothing to show you. So if I might be wrong, I don’t know.

But I don’t see anything just yet. According to my impression of V-side, I was able to go to YouTube and find some people who have demonstrated how V-side works. And from what I understand from them is that it’s a very easy to use program.

They did not have to have friends talk them through how to use V-side. Whereas they commented that in second life, they actually had to have people explain how to use things. And, um, you know, I’m personally finding out more things about second life as time goes on. And I’ve been out there almost four years now. So, uh, second life does have a lot, has a long term learning curve, I suppose, but I’m more or less learning really, really advanced things.

Whereas I think at first people need to learn how to move the camera away from their avatar, how to, I guess, walk, how to open things, how to touch things, how to interact, basically. So, um, I’ve included my profile on RealLife Plus in the show notes and you can comment or add me as friends on the RealLife Plus, if you’d like. Okay, so the next thing that I would like to talk about is this new game that came out. I was looking at the X-Straight SL marketplace, the newest stuff coming out, and there was this game called Clued Up. I took a look at it and it pretty much like Clue.

There’s a little bit of difference though. I went ahead and I checked out the game and the author was actually there and he played a little bit with me. And it looks just like the game of Clue, except you have suspects who are named after Linden. So you have Lavender, Peaches, Chalky, Sandy, Emerald, and Sapphire. And you’ve got to guess which one of these people had killed Governor Linden in the Governor’s Mansion. They have different weapons, a watermelon gun, an orbiter, a blunt prim, pose ball, bling ring, and an asset server.

How you can use these things to kill somebody is beyond me. But maybe that’s a story for another day or you can check it out for yourself. Some of the rooms were renamed or pretty much all of them. You have the telehub room, a skybox, holler deck, dungeon, dance club, hot tub, sandbox, office, and there’s a room that’s called Games Room. However, it wasn’t always called that. Right above the words Games Room is a thing called, it is a word that says Casino and it’s all crossed out. So I think that’s kind of a play on the old gambling van a couple years back or was it two years or one years? I’m not sure, but you know, it’s just a hilarious thing that they like to do to make the game even more fun. And you can actually sit down, you get a hide offer to you, you wear the hide, and you can use the hide to move your characters around.

And you can suggest who you think may have been the killer weapon where it was, or you can accuse somebody of doing that. I actually, Krett Mariner came over and we played a full game. And he had a little problem where he, he accidentally accused who did what and where.

And the poor guy was wrong and had to sit through the whole game until I was finished running around. So if you would like to play, I’m going to have an hour of game time, reserved on the Woodbridge Island. And you can come here on, where is it? Saturday, right?

August 1st, 2009. The Raging Woodpea Woodbridge, just look for green dots or go to X54 and Y98, if that helps. It’s also going to be listed in the Second Life events and on the Five Islands calendar. So I think I’ve talked enough already for this episode. It’s been a long time, not too much to talk about really, but I think I’ve got all my facts straight here. Okay, so until next time, this is Degic Moriac, also known as Lewis Moten. And you can come to my blog, DegicMoriac.wordpress .com for more episodes and pretty much just everything new, Second Life with images and such. All right, so signing off, later.

Speaker 2: Yeah.