Austin Tate's Blog

20th July 2019 marks the 50th Anniversary of the First Landing on the Moon. So a good time to revisit the Apollo 11 Experiences in Sansar… Apollo Museum and Tranquility Base… #Apollo50th

A Relay for Life event in Second Life took place on 30th June 2019 in the Blake Sea sailing area – “Raft Up 2019” – with the audience able to observe the activities from a floating grandstand…
Blake Sea – Haggarty – Floating Grandstand
Blake Sea – Crows Nest – Nearby Boat Rez Zone

SLT 9am-11am: Joy Canadeo Live DJ
SLT 11am-1pm Luke Flywalker: Live DJ
SLT 12pm SLCG** Rescue demonstration
SLT 1pm-Close: Benny the boozehound Live DJ
SLT 1pm LCC Cruise to the raft up
** SLCG = Second Life Coast Guard

The De Lacy Motor Club (D.L.M.C) in Yorkshire has been running rallies, car trials and driving tests for over 50 years as noted in my previous blog post. My wife Margaret and myself joined some other family members and entered the Seven Dales Heritage Run again this year for a nice run through East and West Yorkshire…

Best turned out car and crew… Ted Meek and Morris Tate in the 1968 Austin Mini Countryman…

Half Way Halt…

Entrants List

I previously tried the Michie Marine Balloon from Balloon from Michie Yokosuka on the Second Life Marketplace over the New Linden Homes Bellisseria Continent in Second Life. Some snapshots are in this previous Blog Post.

I replaced the balloon envelope texture with one that is the same as the “Vue Balloon” based on a real life event where a balloon “glow” took place in the University of Edinburgh Old College Quad in January 2006.

Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue) Balloon Tour

Supercar still works great in Flight Simulator FSX nearly 25 years since the first version of the add-on was created for Flight Simulator 5 using Flightshop Aircraft Factory in 1995… http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/GA/supercar-msfs.html

Bruce Artwick Organization, @microsoft / @dovetailgames @fsxinsider / @steam_games

Time to take the Bandit 50 Sailboat (from The Mesh Shop)out for a more extensive run down the West coast of Bellisseria, the New Linden Homes Bellisseria Continent in Second Life.

There are also some nice free sailboats in the Second Life Marketplace from Michie Yokosuka.

Having tried a range of aerial vehicles over the New Linden Homes Bellisseria Continent in Second Life, I explored some other vehicles from the same creator. I found several nice speedboats in the Second Life Marketplace from Michie Yokosuka – Michie Marine Sport Cruiser SD35 and MM Div(e) Speed Boat models.

Having tried a helicopter over the New Linden Homes Bellisseria Continent in Second Life, I explored some other vehicles from the same creator. I found a lovely free one on the Second Life Marketplace from Michie Yokosuka – a Michie Marine Balloon model – with ascent burner effects.

There are a number of people travelling by helicopter over the New Linden Homes Bellisseria Continent. So I thought I would try one out.. and I found a lovely free one on the Second Life Marketplace from Michie Yokosuka – a mm R44 Clipper2 model = appropriately with floats for water take off and landing. It has some animations for doors, rotors, etc. and a very nice down wash effect on the water surface.

The new airstrips, boat rez zones and car rez zones have now appeared on and around Bellisseria continent, the location of the New Linden Homes in Second Life.

• Daniel Voyager – Blog Post 24-Apr-2019 – Airstrip, Boat and Car Rez Zones
• Second Life Community Forum – Airstrips, Boat Rez Zones and Vehicle Rez Zones

I am using the ones at Norse Auk and
Coral Waters to try out Supercar.

Following me setting up a base in a houseboat on the New Linden Home Continent of Bellisseria in Second Life, I have been trying out a few vehicles, and thought I would reactivate my old Skydiving setup back from when I first joined Second Life in 2006, I used a skydive setup built by “Cubey Terra” (Seconbd Life Marketplace, Twitter: @stevecavers) to demonstrate some of the features of Second Life to colleagues and friends. See my Blog Post on this.

Skydive at Abbots Airfield in Second Life

You can go to at Abbots Airfield in Second Life to try out Skydiving. A free simple chute is available near the Skypod launch system. And “Terra Sports Chutes” can be obtained via the Second Life Marketplace.

New Linden Homes 2019 are available for Premium members in Second Life. Details via:

• Second Life Wiki – New Linden Homes 2019
• Second Life – Blog Post 15-Apr-2019

Ai Pad

Ai Austin established a houseboat style home at Damiano/92/20/0.

Customisation

Each Linden Home has a controller for the owner to alter visual appearance, décor, access security, etc. On the houseboats this is in the style of a lifebuoy…

Other Blog Posts about New Linden Homes

• Inara Pey – Blog Post 15-Apr-2019
• <a href="https://danielvoyager.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/new-linden-homes-have-officially-launched/"Daniel Voyager – Blog Post 15-Apr-2019

A black hole and its shadow have been captured in an image for the first time by a network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The image shows a supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 (M87), an elliptical galaxy some 55 million light-years from Earth. This black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/black-hole-image-makes-history

The image bears a remarkable similarity to the simulation which predicted what would be seen after image capture, combination and analysis…

A graphical depiction of the elements of a Black Hole are shown in this figure from NASA…

The Event Horizon Telescope has also already captured data which will allow the creation of images of other black holes, including Sagittarius A* at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

This blog post is a reminder that we can still view OpenSimulator and Second Life content in Virtual Reality (VR) headsets such as the Oculus Rift using the CtrlAltStudio viewer. Though it is based on an older version of Firestorm and does not support some newer features incorporated in the platforms, it still performs pretty well on most content. Details of the viewer, its capabilities and usage are in an earlier blog post.

This blog post is intended to provide some information and resources links for 3D computer modelling tools and development and delivery platforms to combine models to create virtual worlds and make these available to multiple simultaneous users.

3D Modellers

There are many such modellers, some licenced and some open source. A few are:

• Blender – an open source modeler with a variety fo ways to import and export a range of 3D model types.
• Sketchup – Sketchup models are scenes comprised of Collada (.dae) content. But exporters can create other 3D model formats.
• Autodesk 3D Studio Max – a commercial licensed 3D modeller.

World and Scene Development Platforms

• Unity
• Unreal Engine
• Amazon Lumberyard

Multi-user Delivery Platforms

• Amazon Cloud
• Google Stadia

Multi-aspect Virtual World Environments

Some platforms provide several of the above aspects.

• OpenSimulator – provides a way to do modelling within the tool as well as importing Collada (.dae) mesh objects, combine them into scenes or regions and deliver these to multiple users via a viewer.
• Second Life – provides a way to do modelling within the tool as well as importing Collada (.dae) mesh objects, combine them into scenes or regions and deliver these to multiple users via a viewer.
• Sinespace – A platform which allows scenes built in Unity to be embedded in a multi-user virtual world delivery platform, along with some basic in world content modification tools.

Virtual Harmony is an OpenSimulator-based educational simulation grid with contributions by Barbara Truman at the University of Central Florida, Cynthia Calongne at Colorado Technical University, Andrew Stricker at the Air University and NASA jet Propulsion Laboratory.

An award winning rich educational simulation involving 3D/VR elements and AI systems is available on the Huffman region…

Some details are at:
https://vharmonyarts.com/sitePages/topic/67
http://vharmonyarts.com:9000/wifi/index.html
LoginURI: http://vharmonyarts.com:9000 (Visit via Hypergrid)
Mars Expedition – Blue Skies Over Mars
hop://vharmonyarts.com:9000/Huffman/681/136/27

A presentation was given at the OpenSimulator Community Conference 2018…
https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/oscc18/cf/OSCC18 Blue Skies on Mars Stricker Calongne Truman.pdf

Following the success of film stars, comedians and others in recent popularity driven elections… a Non-Player Character avatar in the virtual world OpenSimulator is to be nominated as the next President of the USA.

A spokesman in the UK said.. “Bring it on… lets have an avatar as Prime Minister in the UK too”.

On 21-Dec-2018 the Nonprofit Commons (NPC, http://nonprofitcommons.org/) in Second Life held a Grand Opening of their newly renovated Community Virtual Library Nonprofit Resource Library along with ice skating to celebrate the last NPC meeting of 2018.

On 18-Dec-2018 Olivier Michel at http://cyberbotics.com let previous Webots users know that the platform has been made open source via GitHub…

Today, after more than 20 years of proprietary licensing, Webots has become free open source software, released under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. You can download Webots R2019a binary packages, contribute on GitHub, read the official announcement, and watch the video presentation.

Webots Resources

• Webots – GitHub Home
• Webots – Binary Releases

Webots has been used for some years in the Robotics classes in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and was used by AIAI for Project AIBO as described in this blog post…

http://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2014/04/05/experiments-with-webots-6-4-4/

Nautica is an exploration game based released by Epic Games in a watery world where your spaceship has crash landed and you have escaped in an escape pod equipped with a materials and equipment fabricator, materials analyser and limited storage (Inventory) facilities.

• Getting Started Guide