But still, the machinima is much easier to share world-wide!
On Friday I had the great pleasure of sharing some of the SIMGIS work with an interested audience at UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility. I recycled an earlier slide show to get started, and had intended to use the machinima video as a presentation tool. Thanks to the resources at GIF, in a half-hour before the talk I was able to download the SL client, establish a connection, and provide a live tour of all three levels of GIS data-driven immersive modeling. I was able to answer questions using the SL client’s edit mode, demonstrate in-world physics, and provoke a few “ooh” and “ah!” comments from the inquisitive crew assembled for Geolunch. Thanks to Kevin and Marek and Brian for venue, equipment, and provocative questions, respectively!
So that others like them might get a better idea of what’s up with Simulator GIS, I returned to my principles of “improved production values” around video work, and have made another pass through the machinima rush that I posted on 11 December. This time through it has enough title work to help explain what’s up and why I shot the features that are shown. And it’s got some audio as well. In the process of burning prints to take to Geolunch, I think that I’ve found a way to boost my resolution on YouTube to full screen. Whether that works will remain to be seen. I’m attempting a 640 x 480 x 6 fps with stereo 32 kHz sound. The Apple .mov print comes out in the range of a half-gigabyte, so it should work.
If you can see the embed version, it should appear below. The video link to the machinima rush from the 11 December posting is deprecated. I’ll redirect to this more finished one.
Hey, I don’t know if it can, but I’m going to give it a try. Here’s how I am making an attempt to support a lecture Explorations, Publishing GIS Data as Immersive 3D Services to an academic brown-bag lunch.
On the edges of geospatial informatics, professional GIS practice, and video gaming systems, there is an Outland that too few have been frequenting: shared third-person (immersive) eD models of real-world spaces. These offer an engaging mirror of our world that can present GIS data with great fidelity and connect it in important ways with ordinary human experience.
Now for the video rush. I’ve seriously backslid on my better-production-values efforts, and haven’t yet spliced two takes, added titles, nor dubbed in sound. But I did reboot my annoying Windows machine before running FRAPS and the SL client, and things were reasonably OK. All this work was shot in and near the Second Life regions of Amida, Muir, and Gualala, with some Limantour in the background. Compared with my earlier “Levels 1, 2, 3″ machinima, this one spends quite a bit more time focused on the benefits of Level 3 builds, and I actually had things pretty well rezzed during the shooting.
Silent though these pages be, much has been thought. I’ve had some quality time with inquisitive Lindens and learned to expect some sort of standalone Linden server product along about 2009. For me, that’s a game-changer as it’s hard enough to suggest (at work) creating content without also keeping up with an open source thread to stand that content up upon.
This past week I’ve made a real-life geographic shift for a family event, and learned that I’ve got a relation involved in the study of architecture. That insight has reinvigorated my interest in Jon Brouchoud and some of his writing here. The notion of architecture as it is currently an academic subject, versus architecture as a current professional practice, and the disruptive possibility of widespread virtual world deployment—this is a notion not so different from geographic science as an academic subject, GIS as a professional practice, and the possibility of immersive 3D disruption of the status quo.
Others in academic circles, including University College London, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), published a Working Paper about the time this past summer when I was so focused on my 1:1 immersive build. It was gratifying to see the CASA acknowledge Second Life technology’s place in the world of neogeography and geospatial informatics.
Sitting side by side yet somehow abstracted from mapping, gaming and digital earths
is Second Life and other similar virtual environments. Second Life and their like are
easy to dismiss as pure distraction and entertainment. Yet look under the lid of
Second Life and it contains one of the most powerful geographical data visualisation
kits available
And the fine writing and attention to detail of Jon / Keystone was spotlighted in NY Times’ Style magazine this past weekend. It was a pleasure to share that link with architecture students!
It’s a big world, and immersive 3D systems must balance the tradeoff between quality and performant physics, and an economically practical level of large land areas served up to relatively sparse users, if we are to identify applications that consume vast tracts of GIS data. Spanning that scale will require that standalone Linden servers have the ability to shortcut some of HAVOK’s demands to pile in many more than four regions per physical server. After all, if I can get 100 regions stood up on a 1 GHz Celeron using OpenSim, then a four-threaded dual 64-bit Xeon server really ought to do the same for standalone Linden regions, right? I surely hope so.
