Canvas viewer

Neil Canham has a nice review of an earlier version of Tipodean's web browser-based Canvas viewer and a tweet from Neil alerted me to a new upgrade. The browser is based on the Unity3D plugin and would seem to do the same trick as Rezzable's viewer, viz convert scenes on-the-fly to Unity format. After a misstep when I rezzed under the ground at ReactionGrid, I created a log-in hyperlink to one of my sims on New World Grid and came inworld without problems. It took a minute or so before I got control of the avatar and textures continued to rez for a while. While the graphics quality doesn't compare with a conventional third-party viewer (perhaps it's pitched at low-end hardware?) and the flight animation was a little quirky, ease-of-access was exemplary and I would very much like to know maximum useful concurrency and whether the viewer will ultimately work on mobile devices. As you can see, the giant sculpted protein rezzed fine though the surface touch on the giant genome didn't seem to work. As with the Lab's new Basic Mode in the SL Viewer 2, there is no access to inventory.

As with Rezzable's offering, there is a question as to how the browser will be monetized (it has adverts on the launch page at present but that may not suffice) but I think it is looking rather promising.

Lead balloons and other more interesting stuff

Well, my VWBPE11 talk went down like the proverbial steampunk lead balloon, not helped much by persistent voice problems and a crash mid-talk. The moderator was very supportive, however, and I had fun, even if the tiny audience (as opposed to audience of tinies) didn't. The content was also probably less-than-engaging for many although giving the talk straightened out a few things for me at least.

A few other developments of note:

• Kitely: on-demand, cloud-based OpenSim regions where login is via Facebook and you can upload your OAR and have a sim running for 100 students within minutes and pay per sim and per user (but not download OARs or hypergrid). To me the concept seems a little like Lively, viz a virtual set of (large!) rooms rather than a world or grid as such.
• New World Grid is releasing a new version of Studio that basically allows you to create your own OpenSim install very easily. I hope it's for 0.7.1 which is coming closer by the day.
  
• Check out the New World Innovations sim for demos of multi-body gravity simulation and molecule rezzing, both from C# region modules (you can teleport there via the boards in the building on the Welcome sim). Nice work by Olish Newman!
• The Hypergrid Adventurer's Club visited the Green and Wild sim on jokaydiaGRID today and it is one of the prettiest examples of landscaping I have yet to see on an OpenSim grid. Well worth a visit if you like a lot of soothing green on your screen.
  

Networks and particles

Given what's going on elsewhere, this all seems a bit trivial. Nonetheless, I managed to get the particle streams working with the Mycobacterium tuberculosis gene regulatory network. Clearly it's not the finished article but I think it might have potential. Incidentally, if watching lots of flickery particles gives you headaches or whatever, you might want to skip the video below. Otherwise, it's just my avatar flying round and watching the nodes (genes) shuttle into position. I thought it was kind of exciting but you probably had to be there.

Windlight settings in both cases are Torley's.

Rezzing networks

Not being smart enough to code an algorithm for this layout of Mycobacterium tuberculosis regulatory genes, I cheated. I let VisANT do the layout, swapping between layout modes and zooming in and out to minimise node size/overlap. I then used Sikuli to capture the position of each node by searching for the node and, in particular, the red selection handles that appear when search successfully concludes. With appropriate scaling and offset, these data (on a notecard) were then used by a rezzer to generate the inworld layout. There are redundant overlapping nodes (about 1800 in all) as ultimately I want the option to link them with particle streams and any one prim can only source one particle stream.

The rezzing takes some time but is fun to watch (well, it is the first time). I've no idea how Erich Bremer does his impressive quasi-instantaneous displays in Monolith and latterly Nexus but suspect that there's a lot of cunning prep work going on behind the scenes. However, the subordinate realization that llMoveToTarget can be used incrementally in such situations will hopefully get me round the different ways in which SL and OpenSim handle the 10 m rezzing limit. This impacts the giant genome as I will not have console access on this particular sim so cannot modify the requisite ini file as a way of getting round the limit.

The other discovery of note this week is that the Astra viewer (review) can be used to archive more than is currently possible with Imprudence/Kokua. This may help me to move content between my multiple OpenSim regions as they are not all on the same hypergrid/Opensim version and, as already mentioned, some do not have ready console access. The viewer handles selections that include multiple linksets and also moves object inventory (with the exception of nested objects). Ultimately I can't depend on a viewer-specific format but it does mean that in the short-term I can generate a build and oar archive file on my local system.

It is also worth mentioning a nice review of options for moving content from SL and associated backup strategies (Astra incidentally is not intended for use in SL).

Hat tips to Maria Korolov and Neil Canham for pointers to the two reviews. It just struck me that I forgot to check whether VisANT (or similar) can export node x,y data. Ah well...