Distance working

Just last week when I was thinking I had gotten away with being visited by the flu bug making its seasonal rounds, I found myself displaying all the usual anti-social symptoms and decided to give up the struggle and take a few days off. Such things will inevitably leave any plans you may have for classes most definitely suspended. This does not have to be the case at all with virtual worlds however. Here you can see a few of the screen images that I captured with my group during the day, while I was safely quarantined at home and they were in college.

There were a whole raft of questions that I found myself able to deal with from building to scripting that went way beyond the project that I set, a very enthusiastic group.

In answer to the most obvious objection of course about still working while officially off and not feeling so good either, I agree, but once you have caught up with all those programs on your Sky planner, it beats watching day time TV hands down.

regards, and fully recovered, Vega

Solar Panel up for grabs

To assist my students with getting to grips with scripting in OpenSim, they have come at this from C and Java, I have installed a basic solar panel. The panel, which is 1m square is as you can see from the screen shot producing 150 Watts of power. I have not completed the coding for the example and the task of my group will be to see if they can tidy up the script and include features for time of day etc. For their own projects, and I have now given them all individual energy requirements, they will have to re-size the panel and modify the script so that enough power is generated.

Once in place they should begin to get an idea of the physical impact that production of electricity from solar energy will have upon a living environment, not something we think about when all we normally see is a light switch or power socket. What will happen at night, when there will be no Sun and so no power? Speculate about a storage system, which means being able to produce a lot more power than you actually need during the day, hence a much larger panel! such arguments will form the basis of the final evaluation.

If you would like to see how it all turns out then please stay in touch.

kind regards Vega

Scanner project from Clive Pro

Clive Pro is about to run his HE project on our OpenSim. Below you will find a copy of the assignment scenario and requirement for the HE group, we actually ran a similar project last year, but then it was in Second life!

Scenario

You are working for a Web development company. A colleague, who has just left the organisation, was working on an avatar scanner system to interface one or more scanner objects in either of the MUVEs, Second Life or OpenSim, with scripts and a database on an external Web server. Your supervisor has asked you to take up the project and complete it.

Requirement

An avatar scanning system is required for the Multi User Virtual Environment, OpenSim . You are to undertake development on a standalone simulator called bromsim. The system is to consist of two parts, a scanner object that can be rezzed on any land in-world where the owner has create rights and a LAMP Environment where scanner data is held in a database on an external Web server. Multiple scanner objects can be rezzed at different locations in-world, but these all report back to the same central external Web server.

When a scanner object is rezzed, or reset, it is to automatically report back its communications channel id, object id, region and exact co-ordinates to the Web server, which is to store this data in the database. If there is already data for this particular scanner object in the database, this existing data is to be erased before the new data is stored. At regular intervals the scanner object is to automatically scan its environment for avatars and temporarily store their names and the total number of avatar’s detected.

An administration Web page allows the user to list the active scanner objects in the database and contact individual scanner objects. The user can then choose either to ask the scanner object for the names and total numbers of avatars detected during most recent scan, or instruct the scanner object to self-destruct, in which case its details are also to be removed from the database.

You have access to the following uncommented scripts that your
ex-colleague developed:

i) scanner - written in Linden Scripting Language and designed to run
within a scanner object in-world.
ii) register.php - Designed to run on the external Web server
ii) scanner.php - Designed to run on the external Web server
iv) scan.php – Designed to run on the external Web server

We shall be posting feedback on this project so please stay in touch for that.

regards Vega

Work starts on the project builds

The National Software Development group have started on their OpenSim builds for the Solar Panel project as part of their course work for this term. Most of the students in the group had already enrolled with our OpenSim, but for those first timers, I sat and demonstrated the building tools; probably about 20 minutes of instruction seem to be OK.