My department at work held a rocket day this week, I slacked off a bit and didn’t actually make a rocket but spent my time doing a bit of filming with Hanans new video camera instead…

On a project I’m working on at the moment (Meedan) we need to be able search for content by geographic area as well as by topic …. e.g. give me all the blog articles from the Middle east that relate to the Iraq war.

Luckily we already have a means to geo-locate all this content (handy eh ? ) so we’ve assigned latitude and longitude values to each article/ blog post /conversation participant.

All thats needed then is a means to search by Geographic area.

We’re using PostgreSQL a pretty heavy weight database baring a much closer resemblance to Db2 rather than MySQL. It has some pretty neat geographic search features courtesy of the PostGIS extension. This allows you to perform searches inside lat/lon boundaries of varying complexity as well as many other neat geo functions. These boundaries are defined in a markup called Well Known Text (WKT), for our purpose we search by polygons that are made up of lat/lon points that mark out the geographic search areas, both PostGIS and DB2 spatial extender uses this format.

So that’s all the big pieces in place, the only missing piece is a set of lat/lon points that define the areas we wish to search. I may have been blind or searching for the wrong terms but i couldnt find a set of this data anywhere on the Internet (please point me to a source if you know one). As we only needed the rough continent outlines I decided it would be a fairly trivial effort to make a tool to create the sets of lat/lon points in the correct WKT format for our searches.

Basically you click around the area you want to define and the hit ‘generate polygon’ this will give a nice WKT formatted polygon ready to use in an SQL query. If you want to delete a point just click on it a second time.

At the moment you just create an area generate the polgon and do the next one.

Next up I may add some storage so that people can share these datasets with each other or come back and change them at a later date.

For now here is the mapping tool. buy cialisbuy cialisbuy levitrabuy levitrabuy propeciabuy propeciabuy somabuy somabuy levitrabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy levitrabuy propeciabuy soma

Lots of interesting news coming out of the Virtual Worlds 2007 San Jose conference…

First up it’s the announcement of a joint partnership between IBM and Linden Labs to work on VW interoperability standards and technology. The official press release can be found here.

  “As the 3D Internet becomes more integrated with the current Web, we see users demanding more from these environments and desiring virtual worlds that are fit for business,” said Colin Parris, vice president, Digital Convergence, IBM. “IBM and Linden Lab’s working together can help accelerate the use and further development of common standards and tools that will contribute to this new environment.”

The second piece of news that caught my attention was the upcoming release of a custom SecondLife client from The Electric Sheep Company. Who have tied  in the release of their viewer to a cross-platform initiative around CSI: New York.

Usability of the current SL client has long been an issue and is one of the factors blamed by many for the high attrition rate of new users to SL.

The SL client has actually been open sourced for a number of months now, so it might be surprising to some that the release of an alternative or modified client has taken so long. However when more closely examined the reason is fairly simple, the open source client base has been a moving target for the OS development community with Linden making changes to the underlying network protocol used. This has now changed and the protocol template is now static, hopefully allowing alternate client developments to proceed with more confidence. Thats not to say the OS community haven’t made some fantastic contributions to the client, mainly in the areas of bug fixing and stability.

Now that the SL protocols are more stable and OS efforts such as the client, libsl and opensim are gathering momentum we’ll start to see some real progress towards a more cohesive story for VWs. The main thing now is to try and reduce the barriers to entry, and that means easy installs, better UIs and better integration with web browsers; so who’s going to be first to create a VW client running in a browser plugin ? Metaplace seem to be taking up that mantle currently.

John Tolva let out a quick request the other week on twitter for a Flickr photostream timeline, it sounded like a quick hack was possible using Simile and the Flickr API; both of which I wanted to have a play with for investigative purposes. It turned out to be nice and straightforward, the Simile API from MIT is flexible and simple to use, so much so that I should really spend a bit more tweaking my Flickr timeline to make it look prettier, but hey this is just a quickie

Well I haven’t done any machinima posts of late, but I can feel a few in the offing having just completed one concept video for a client and with the promise of a few more lurking not too far in the distant future.

The machinima I’ve been doing has generally been of the type you use when you can’t do a live demonstration of SecondLife, it’s been produced to either illustrate potential scenarios/concepts or show case existing business aspects of secondlife. The venue for displaying this machinima has been at trade shows or during large presentations.

Video and particularly Machinima seems to keep cropping up in my day to day job at the moment, a client I’m currently working for has a need for a streamed video service for use at events. We want something reliable but cheap that we can use for the occasional streaming of a live event etc. into Second Life (any suggestions welcome

The one service I have been playing with at the moment is a startup called Veodia (veodia.com) which is currently in beta. It’s very similar to another beta startup
called ustream (ustream.tv) the one distinct and important difference (with my SL oriented slant) is that it makes available the video stream in quicktime format. Meaning that it can be streamed straight into Second Life with no conversion faffing or trouble finding dedicated servers to run a Darwin streaming server on.

Ian pointed me at Veodia a few weeks ago, however it took my account registration email some time to materialise (it was trapped in Hotmails spam catcher) so I was a bit slow off the mark in checking out what format the streaming was done in. Kevin Aires as ever the video streaming investigator got in there and found it was quicktime compatible and blogged within IBM about getting a Veodia stream into SL.

After finally getting into my account yesterday I started up my softcam desktop streaming app, set up a quick feed on veodia, grabbed the rtsp link from a view source and set the media url for my land parcel in Ukanipo.

Here’s the result a slightly disturbing world within world effect…

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So what you are seeing here is the result of softcam capturing my desktop video display output, streaming it up to veodia and then it being streamed into SecondLife. Infinite loop complete. (ps the quality is better when you don’t go for this wheels within wheels effect)

So whats this useful for ?

-video conferencing: pipe your webcam into SL without the need to host your own streaming server.
- live demos:   do desktop sharing to a crowd in SL so you can do demonstrations from other apps (shared browsing or 3d app tutorials anyone?), simutaneously visible on the web stream too.
- world tours: get all your guests into one place with a screen in SL and then disapear off streaming your secondlife journey back to the assembled SL crowd.
- video link parts of SL: running a live event over several islands ? then provide video linkups between each of the islands so everyone can see what’s going on.

best of all veodia which is in beta is currently free, oh and it records too

Just stumbled across this in the sldev mailing list (ooh how retro ) from Argent Stonecutter, a cool looking open source avatar creation project called MakeHuman definitely looks worth following. The user interface seems particularly nice, I need to do some more investigation to see what kind of skin creation features it offers…

A nice post on Social Networking sites over here at wisdump, it does however make some assumptions that largely the same groups of users float from one networking site to the next leaving the others behind for dead. This may be true in some cases, but it doesn’t take account of the increasingly large number of broadband connected always on users and the increasing uptake of web communication as the de facto way of keeping in touch. True there are a finite number of users, so super rapid growth can’t be sustained in the long term, however this doesnt also equate to an equally speedy up and leave mentality. I think we’re still way way off the peak of adoption in social networking sites, and there are countless scores more to emerge and challenge for a place among the frontrunners.

Facebook is going along the right route to stay ahead at the moment, their new portlet like application integration APIs mean they can function as an aggregator for data from other networking sites. This level of flexibility is whats needed to stay in the front runner position, I’m wondering if they’re now the first fully social networked enabled portal site ?

The ever inventive and productive Dave CJ from our emerging tech department at work has been hooking up more of his demonstration lab to SecondLife. Tracking the state of everyday objects and visualizing their state in world allows for remote control of devices and a quick way to check up status of a remote site/home or factory type installation. There’s a nice detailed write up over on UgoTrade..

Google recently acquired a company called Neven Vision whos description on Googles blog is as follows

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don’t have any specific features to show off today, but we’re looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Neven Visions technology has also been used in conjuction with Logitech to produce Facial movement tracking technology for use with standard webcams, this sort of stuff would help really bring avatar to avatar interactions to life.

This stuff might look like kids play, but there is some serious comp/sci theory going on in the background here.

Another clever play in the virtual worlds space for Google, or just a coincidence ?

OK I’m pulling this straight from 3pointD, but this could be a biggee. Sony showed this video at the Game Developers Conference, a PS3 based vitual world using the latest physics and graphics engines.

In comparison to SecondLife it looks stunning and a lot more technology rich, the user created content aspects may not be there but the social aspects certainly seem to be. The stated ability to meet friends and head off into multiplayer games is a powerful one indeed, as a result the environment will no doubt gain traction and may become a strong differentiating factor for the PS3.

Anyway take a look at the video and form your own opinion.