Austin Tate's Blog

Patagonia is somewhere I have wanted to visit for some time, and specifically to try to reach the base of a mountain in what is now the Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina near what is now El Chaltén (a town established in 1985). I have had an interest in rock climbing and winter mountaineering for some time and was a member of the University of Edinburgh Mountaineering Club in the 1970s, around the time that there was a controversial climb of Cerro Torre, a stunning Patagonian granite tower mountain, using artificial climbing aids. This was widely discussed in mountaineering magazines at the time (e.g., “Cerro Torre – a Mountain Desecrated!” in Mountain 23, Sept 1972)

We finally had the opportunity to travel to Patagonia in February and March 2017.

Our tour arranged, through Swoop Patagonia, took us via Santiago in Chile, through the Los Lagos region and Chiloe island, down to Punta Arenas in the far south of South America, then via coach up to the Chilean side Torres del Paine National Park, over into Argentina to El Calafate and the Los Glacier National Park, with a final bus trip up Ruta 40 to El Chaltén to trek in the foothills of Fitzroy, Poincenot and then to approach Cerro Torre. We returned to the UK from Buenos Aires in Argentina.

The Andes and Volcanoes

As we flew down the line of the Andes from Santiago to Puerto Montt we could see many volcanoes and two active ones… including Villarricia.

Chiloe and its NW Coast

We explored the NW coast of Isla Chiloe by Land Rover doing cliff and beach walks and birdwatching with Britt Lewis of Austral Adventures.

Magellanic and Humboldt Penguins share space and overlap in their ranges on islands just off Puyehue on Isla Chiloe.

Los Lagos Region

On 26th February 2017, there was a “Ring of Fire” annular solar eclipse whose path passed directly over us while we were in the Lagos Llanquihue, Puerto Varas, Osorno Volcano, Los Lagos (Lake District) and Tagua-Tagua lake region… but unfortunately at the full “Ring of Fire” phase the sky was overcast and we only managed to see a partial eclipse through heavy cloud.

We stayed at the Mitico Puerto Lodge on Lagos Tagua-Tagua and did a number of walks in the region…

Punta Arenas and Magellanic Penguins on Isla Magdalena

Torres del Paine National Park, Chile

We trekked with Explora Patagonia in the French Valley and up to the French Glacier, over to Glacier Grey and in the East side of the National Park to see Andean Condor, Guanaco, Rhea and Puma.

Los Glaciares National Park, El Calafate, Argentina

From El Calefate in Argentina, we had a trip up to the Perito Moreno Glacier to view the calving of icebergs into Lagos Argentino from the walkways and boat.

Cerro Torre, Poincenot and Fitzroy, El Chaltén, Argentina

We planned multiple days in each area as the Patagonian weather can be very wet, very windy and cloud levels very low. We planned things with Walk Patagonia to maximise our chances of seeing the peaks and especially Cerro Torre. Local guides indicated we had set ourselves a “High Goal” as Cerro Torre is surrounded by glaciers and situated at the head of a valley behind the Fitzroy/Poincenot towers and tends to hold cloud on its slopes and summit. But with careful monitoring of the detailed weather forecasts on Windguru on our final day in Patagonia, we woke to a rose coloured sunset on the very tops of the granite towers which we could see from our hotel.

We were then fortunate and achieved our aim on a walk up to Lagos Torre and overlooking the Torre Glacier and the Cerro Torre itself…

Birds, Animals, Plants and Rocks

We saw many Austral birds and animals: Andean Condor, Magellanic Woodpecker, Guanaco, Grey Fox, Lesser Rhea, Puma, etc.

More to come on geology, animals and sights.

All images © Copyright 2017 Austin Tate.

Unity Technologies Special Keynote, GDC 2017, San Francisco -- February 28, 2017 -- Today at GDC Unity Technologies announced that Unity 5.6 will release on March 31, 2017, marking the final installment of Unity 5. The company also provided an early look at Unity 2017, the next generation of Unity with version 2017.1 Beta arriving in April.

A “2001: a Space Odyssey” Sine.space scene has been created using the Unity3D VR Experience which uses 2001 movie related 3D models of the freely available 3D Warehouse Sketchup Models of the 2001 Space Station by Filip and the Orion III PanAm Shuttle made by Daniel M.

Maddy (Nibby Riddler) has constructed an artistic build in Second Life that is based on the Singapore gardens by the bay with it’s “Supertrees” and night lighting.

Visit via http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA15/179/122/22

See also Inara Pey’s Blog Post about the location.

Our own visit to the Gardens by the Bay early in 2016 is depicted here…

Third Unity-hosted conference convenes leaders and upstarts from across the industry

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - February 1, 2017 -  Vision VR/AR Summit 2017, the premiere event for augmented and virtual reality hosted by Unity Technologies will be held May 1-2, 2017 at the Loews Hollywood, Los Angeles.  As the third Vision Summit, it will once again bring together creators, artists, programmers and leaders in the VR and AR space for a two-day conference focused on laying the groundwork for and understanding of the future of the industry. 

First ever joint look at mobile, mobile VR and VR markets by SuperData Research and Unity Technologies shows the category equaling that of global box office sales during that time

New York, NY February 1, 2017 – The mobile games market generated $40.6 billion in worldwide revenue in 2016 – a sum equivalent to all global box office sales during the same time period – and grew 18% over the year before. Mobile games now account for half of the entire global digital games market.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - January 26, 2017 - Unity Technologies, the largest platform for creating 2D, 3D, VR, and AR games and digital experiences, today announced its worldwide Unite conference series. Focused on bringing developers and artists the knowledge and networking they require for success, Unity is holding eight Unite conferences globally in 2017.  Creators will be able to attend them in Amsterdam, Austin, Beijing, India, Melbourne, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo. 

The Sine.space RGU Oil Rig region using Colin Hetherington’s meshes is now accessible on the live server.. with a few enhancements to align the directional light with the water reflection and lens flare effects. See this blog post for details of the preparation of the region… http://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2016/11/18/sine-space-rgu-oil-rig-region/ and this blog post for details of the import of the RGU Diver outfit also by Colin… http://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2017/01/11/sine-space-creating-avatar-attachments/.

Update 3-Feb-2017: The “Oil Rig” region is now available on the live server via
http://sine.space/locations/oil-rig

Sine.space Blog post about the Oil Rig Region… http://sinewave.space/oilrig

January 18, 2017 - Unity announced that it has hired Dave Rhodes as Chief Revenue Officer for the company’s core license and platform business reporting to the CEO.  He joins from Paradigm, where he was Executive Vice President of Sales, Services, and Marketing.

January 17, 2017 -- Unity announced that it has hired Natalya Tatarchuk as Director of Global Graphics at Unity Technologies, focusing on driving the rendering technology and graphics performance for the Unity engine. She joins from Bungie where she was the graphics lead and engineering architect.

Retired, from full time work anyway. Returning part-time in March 2017 to continue to curate AIAI knowledge engineering resources and web site, and to coordinate the Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue) facilities prior to handover to colleagues.

OpenSimulator Fairy Tree House and Accessories by Ada Wong on Whimsical Isle, LFGrid…

ASTEROIDS!, Life of Us, and Heroes to debut in Park City

TV21 Annual 1971 published a story about a Pilkington Glass Age Development Committee design study of a “Sea City” for a community living offshore. A model was created and cutaways and renderings of the model appeared in the press. Details can be found at http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/sea-city.html

OpenSimulator Project

A possible project to build a virtual reality recreation of the model in the OpenSimulator virtual world platform or as a Unity3D VR Experience is under consideration…

Unity ProBuilder is a Unity3D plug in that allows the creation and manipulation of 3D mesh content directly within the Unity Editor. There are basic (free) and Advanced (paid) versions. The advanced version allows for complete UV unwrapping, export of models to OBJ, etc.

• ProBuilder Web Site
• ProBuilder Basic
• ProBuilder Documentation
• YouTube: Getting Started with ProBuilder for Unity

As a trial, and to provide space related outfits for the Space Station/ISS experience in Sine.space, I followed the instructions on the Sine.space wiki to create avatar clothing and attachments…

I used the freely available NASA 3D models for the Space Helmet and NASA Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU).

• Following and adapting the method described on the Sine.space Wiki page on making clothing & attachments:
  • https://wiki.sine.space/index.php?title=Clothing/Attachments
• and noting the item upload review guidelines:
  • https://wiki.sine.space/index.php?title=Review_Policies

In a new Unity Scene with the EditorPack-….unitypackage installed, the Sine.space “2015 Male” asset is placed at 0,0,0. An empty object to act as a container for the attachment is placed also at 0,0,0. The attachment itself is then brought in and positioned appropriately relative to the avatar, and then put inside the container object. Two Unity components are added to the attachment container object: Clothing Item Settings and Virtual Good. Instructions to complete those are in the Sine.space wiki page. The container object is then dropped into the Unity assets window to create a prefab. This prefab is the item that then can be selected and uploaded to the Sine.space content servers.

NASA EMU and Space Helmet on avatar at Space Station Region in Sine.space

Gender Specific Variants

At the moment Sine.space requires attachments to be gender specific, so separate male and female variants of each attachment need to be created and uploaded. In the Clothing Item Settings change the mesh model from “2015 Male” to “2015 Female” and adjust the position of the item to fit the different body shape and size, then resave the prefab and upload that.

Creating a Complete Replacement Avatar – Static Mesh and Non-Animated

It is possible to completely replace the standard Sine.space avatar and add in a mesh (static or rigged) by providing a “Costume”…

https://wiki.sine.space/index.php?title=Full_Body_Replacement_Costumes

Create an empty game object and add components for the “Clothing Item Settings” and “Virtual Good” as before, but keep the actual mesh to make the replacement avatar separate. That needs to be a prefab and dropped onto the Extended Settings -> Custom Skeleton -> Root template slot. The empty component is then made a prefab and uploaded.

On the advice of Adam Frisby at Sine Wave, he provided a custom empty animation controller… and this needs to be added to the Clothing Item Settings, with the slots filled in as indicated in the diagram to the right…

Simpler NASA Astronaut EVA Avatar

The EMU mesh (and the Sintel mesh below) both proved to be quite complex meshes. A simpler NASA 3D model of an astronaut in an EVA suit was used instead. I used the freely available 3D Astronaut Nr 1 (Collada .dae format) by Max Grueter and Byr2008. Again set as a complete avatar replacement “Costume”.

RGU Diver

A Sine.space outfit was also created using the meshes from OpenSim made by Colin Hetherington for his RGU Diver suit for use in training simulations in virtual worlds for training oil and gas drilling rig workers (see this blog post). It is not intended for distribution beyond the demonstrations on the “Oil Rig” region on Sine.space.

Sintel Rigged Avatar

With the experience of trying a replacement static mesh model outfit/costume as indicated above for the NASA EMU, I tried the Blender.org CC-BY-NC Sintel avatar (see http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~ai/unity/resources/sintel/)… which is a rigged mesh avatar. On the advice again of Adam Frisby at Sine Space, its important that the rigged model prefab has the “Root Motion” unticked. Its ticked in the original avatar model. Also, as its greyed out and non-editable in the original asset, drag the one in the Assets into the Scene/Hierarchy, modify it to untick the root motion tick box, then drag it back into the Project/Assets view. Then use the new one from the project view to fill the slot skeleton template slot.

I have done some performance monitor and CPU/GPU load comparisons for established virtual worlds like Second Life (Linden Lab viewer 5.0.0) and OpenSim (Firestorm Viewer 5.0.0) and emerging virtual world platforms like High Fidelity and Sine Space.

Windows 10 Xeon E5-1650 v2 @3.50GMz (6 core, 12 processor), 32GB memory, SSD drives, Nvidia GTX 980 GPU, 1920×1200 screen. VR Mode off (no Oculus Home, Steam and Steam VR).

• Baseline (Idle): CPU: 3% GPU Load: 0%
• Linden Labs Viewer in Second Life (ultra graphics, 512m view distance) (5K object region): CPU: 13% GPU Load: 16%
• Firestorm Viewer in OpenSim (ultra graphics, 512m view distance) (Mesh base region with 12K objects and 9K mesh colliders): CPU: 8% GPU Load: 11%
• Sine Space (Unity3D based) (Mesh base region with 12K objects and 9K mesh colliders): CPU: 21% GPU Load: 40%
• High Fidelity (Custom region with 5 large mesh objects and two NPCs): CPU: 12% GPU: 16%

Baseline (Idle): CPU: 3% GPU Load: 0%

Linden Lab Viewer in Second Life on “Vue” region (ultra graphics, 512m view distance) (5K object region): CPU: 13% GPU Load: 16%

Firestorm Viewer in OpenSim on OSGrid “Oil Rig” region (ultra graphics, 512m view distance) (Mesh base region with 12K objects and 9K mesh colliders): CPU: 8% GPU Load: 11%

Sine Space on “Oil Rig” region (Unity3D based) (Mesh base region with 12K objects and 9K mesh colliders): CPU: 21% GPU Load: 40%

High Fidelity (Custom region with 5 large mesh objects and two NPCs): CPU: 12% GPU: 16%

Linden Lab announced a number of community and social network feeds on 4th January 2017 as they prepare for the public opening of the platform sometime in 2017.

• Sandar.com Website
• Sansar YouTube Channel
• Twitter Feed – @SansarOfficial
• Sansar Forum

@InaraPey has provided an overview of the 2016 Winter Wonderland themed areas in Second Life…

https://modemworld.me/2016/12/15/the-all-new-new-portal-parks-open-in-second-life/

Fireworks

On the hour, every hour in Winter Wonderland…

“Automated” Ice Skating

The skating though does take some (keyboard) work! For a more “automated” experience with solo, couples and trick dancing try “CALAS GALADHON’S 2016 HOLIDAY SIM, EREBOR” and just sit back and watch the dance displays at…

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/EREBOR/148/105/22

The OpenSimulator Community Conference 2016 (#OSCC16) took place over the weekend of December 10th to 11th 2016 on the OpenSim-based OpenSim Community Conference grid (grid URI http://cc.opensimulator.org:8002 and WiFi front end http://cc.opensimulator.org:8005/wifi).

My report on the experience of attending OSCC13 is described in this blog post, in 2014 in this blog post and some activities in the 2015 event in this blog post.

The 2016 event kicked off with a panel involving the core developers of OpenSim… with approx. 86 participants in the session, peaking at 95 avatars…

OpenSim Code Commits 2016

Nebadon Izumi produced a visualisation of the code commits into OpenSim for the last year, as he has done for previous years of activity.

Overview of the OSCC Grid Regions

Virtual Robotics: Creating, Collaborating and Constructivist learning in a Virtual World

A session by Carina Girvan and John “Pathfinder” Lester described an EU funded project to teach using turtle graphics visualised as 3D shapes and colours in OpenSim using the SCRATCH visual programming environment.

External Application Development for OpenSim Applications such as Large Scale Urban Simulation

OSCC16 talk by OpenSim core dev Christa Lopes of University of California at Irvine (@DivaCanto) on using virtual worlds for large scale urban simulation…