NMC Campus Observer

Web Imaging Screen Experiments

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Aug 15, 2006 08:28pm

One of the tools, features, tasks we expect teachers using Second Life is an easy way to be able to present visuals, either slideshows, or SL versions of (we hesitate to say…) PowerPoint. You can already see on NMC Campus a number of places where there are media screens, but they are set up now as high level tools that only the campus admins have access to.

There are other sorts of screen display devices you can find in Second Life, in packages like whiteboard screens, TV screens, etc– one of the slickest is the whiteboard by AngryBeth ShortBread (nice because it can be annotated, and yes, we are looking into using it).

A limitation of most of these is that images must be uploaded into Second Life (costing L$10 per image), and then dropped or moved to a device. With all of the imagery available on the web in places like flickr, we truly expect features to open up in Second Life that can access web-based images/media, and bring them in world.

Actually, the fundamental pieces are there via some programming protocols that allow SL objects to send messages to external web sites, and then receive data in return, and there are other functions that allow images referenced via URLs to be applied to certain “prims” or objects.

But is is still all very techie, so here at NMC we are trying to build some new tools that may help ratchet down the needed tech level to a more human level. We started today experimenting with the cool demo and code provided by Hack Diary that allows a screen to have its surface displayed with images referenced by flickt tags. Your avatar can message the board and share with it a tag you want images pulled form, and then each click on the screen will load a random image from flickr.

This was relatively easy; here are some snapshots of my screen hitting flickr images from the 2006 NMC Summer Conference (tag = nmc2006):

Okay, this is one possibility, though it means devising a unique flickr tag that no one else will use. But also, we can envision that one might wish to present images not randomly, but sequentially.

So we began picking apart this script, in hopes of being able to create a device that can load images from a specified web directory. This makes use of a modified version of the code that randomizes the banner images on this blog (modified to return data in the same format as the Hack Diary code).

It sort of works, here are some snaps of it taking random images from a directory on the NMC web site:

This is just some early experimentation, and some our first forays into SL scripting. Some things we need to make happen:
* set up a timer so images can load in succession (the screen must be clicked to load now, although that is likely the desired effect for presentation use– or perhaps create some sort of remote control?)
* set up options to present linearly rather than randomly
* address some display issues (I had trouble getting subsequent images to load in Mac OSX although they were clearly visible in Windows)
* create a way to easily assign the web directory where the slide show resides

Someone wishing to use this would need to load images in a web directory, and drop in a PHP script that i called to fetch the image names.

But bridging data stored on the web into SL is rather exciting. Also coming soon will be some experiments to bring some audio in via a podcast URL.

All of this is brought to you by the NMC Campus lab rats

Story filed under: Resources & Information, What's Happening

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