Call for Submissions: SLCC machinima festival in Tampa 9/7

Rhiannon Chatnoir is putting together an impromptu machinima festival/screening at SLCC in Tampa, FL for next Sunday, Sept 7th. If you would like to submit a machinima please send an email by this Wednesday to rhiannon@thevesuviusgroup.com with either a zipped attached file of it or a web URL where It can be downloaded it from. http://www.blip.tv is a good place to upload a movie if needed.

I'm looking forward to some great submissions and seeing you there.

Head Tracking in Second Life.

Our avatars usually are just standing around when we communicate via text or voice in Second Life, not adding any emotion or emphasis to what we say. Sometimes we enhance them with gestures or animations, but it never reaches the deep level of communication you can have with your real life face.

VR-Wear is about to change that, they have been working for several months now to integrate signal processing capabilities in the Second Life Viewer. The VR-Wear team is now able to connect a web cam and analyze your head motions in real-time and have them acted out in Second Life.

VR-Wear has released a short YouTube video showing the tracking of a head gesturing Yes and No. Their software will be released in September with a load of emotions and motions filters that will make your Avatar behave more like you. Maybe even exactly like you, but if really would want that is up for debate.

For the programmers amongst us will be the opportunity to participate and create their own versions. The project will be released under a dual license (GPL-like for non-commercial applications).

via Mobitrends.com

Mono and llDetectedTouch() will roll out, starting today (Aug 11)

Mono is coming: at the latest Volunteer Meeting, Periapse Linden has announced that Mono and llDetectedTouch() would be rolled out this Monday as SL server 1.24 is going to be deployed on the grid!

Cory Ondrejka goes to EMI Music

Mmmh so that's where he went!

Cory, I can wish you only good luck at your new role, and if you manage to bring EMI Music to start selling music in Second Life®, well, that would be something!

MapMania!

Yes, you've seen all sorts of maps generated from Second Life, from LL's own web-based SLURL generator, to things like SignpostMarv Martin's attempt at creating a semantic API for the whole of Second Life.

Deep into Google ads, I stumbled upon something funny, which is a small company selling high-quality prints of Second Life maps, all nicely framed, for you to display at home or office: Mappa Novus. Besides that nifty idea, they also generate all sorts of statistics, metrics, and analyse trends about Second Life, and display them visually, on graphs and charts or... on top of maps, of course!

AjaxLife for the iPhone

If you are unfamiliar with AjaxLife it is described as followed: "AjaxLife is a web app that allows you to log in to the Second Life virtual world from almost anywhere."
Of course there are some limits to this, most notably that you don't see the 3D world. Functionally you can do lot, for example chat, teleport, pay and tranfer inventory. This is usefull if you need to login to SL from a computer that doesn't has or can't run the Viewer.

To bring this functionality to even more devices and locations a iPhone version has been released. Though this version does not has as much functionality as the web app yet. So far you can Chat, send IMs to your your friends List and recieve IMs. This is a cool and quick way to say hi to a friend or answer a customer while you are on the road, or when you are at a boring movie for example.

To use it you can browse with your iPhone or iPod touch to http://ajaxlife.net . Or if you don't have a iPhone you can use http://iphonetester.com/ (seems to work best in Safari) and browse to ajaxlife.net/?iphone in it.

Pictures of AjaxLife via the iphone tester

There was some trouble with posting this and had to redo it 2 times, my apologies for the repeats in your rss readers.

How to stop the Tools menu from Hiding

The tools menu gets automatically hiding in the 1.20 release of the Second Life viewer. This was done to reduce the number of menus presented to the (new) users. It only becomes visible when the 'Build' window is open.

I like the idea of removing menu items, to make SL looks less daunting for the new User. It seems though that the change is unpopular with and it is going to be changed back in the 1.21 viewer. For the people who can't wait to have it back, Jacek explained on her blog how to have the Tools menu back permanently with just some simple copy and paste.

This trick is a simple one. Since SL looks for the Tools menu by name to find which menu to hide, all you have to do is change its name, and SL won’t find it, and it’ll stay visible all the time!

The really easy way (download the replacement file):

1. Download my pre-chewed XML file to “Second Life/skins/default/xui/en-us/”, replacing the existing one. On OS X, go to Applications, ctrl-click on “Second Life”, choose “Show Package Contents”, then put the file in “Contents/Resources/skins/default/xui/en-us/”.
2. Restart SL, enjoy.

The slightly less easy way (edit the file yourself):

1. Open up “Second Life/skins/default/xui/en-us/menu_viewer.xml” in your text editor. On OS X, go to Applications, ctrl-click on “Second Life”, choose “Show Package Contents”, then open up “Contents/Resources/skins/default/xui/en-us/viewer-menu.xml” with TextEdit (or your favorite text editor).
2. Search for: name="Tools" (it’s on line 590)
3. Change name="Tools" to name="Toolz" or some other non-Tools word.
4. Save the file, restart SL, enjoy.

Voila, your Tools menu will now be visible all the time. Piece of cake