Second Life

It's Raining Money at the Capitol: Data Visualization in Second Life

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To commemorate the 2010 federal budget announced today, I have installed a new feature at the Capitol Hill in Second Life. 

Using the APIs available from USASpending.gov, the Show Me the Money! piggy bank will shower $100 bills down on the Capitol Hill legislative chamber. Each bill has the name of one of the top 50 recipients of government funding during 1Q 2009. The size of the bill is proportionate to the amount of money received, at a scale of $1billion = 1 Second Life meter.

To start the shower, chat "/2009 funding" and the rain of bills will last for 5 minutes, or until you type "/2009 stop".  The money soon disappears, just as in real life.

Go there now! (SLUrl)

Interactive Electoral Polling Map in Second Life

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Capitol Hill election map 

Capitol Hill in Second Life continues to draw visitors from around the world interested in the political season. In addition to the twitter display I added a couple weeks ago, I’ve added an electoral map that shows most recent polling on a state-by-state basis.

The technology behind it is interesting. I had originally created a display that would be used on election night, with states called and updated manually. I was looking for a site with live feed of current polling data to feed the display prior to the election, and Leon suggested looking at a scraping web service, Dapper.net, that might be useful. Dapper’s library of scraping scripts included one for RealClearPolitics.com that was easy to hook up to the board (via a PHP intermediary I wrote to turn Dapper’s JSON output into a LSL-consumable feed).  However, the page on realclearpolitics.com that Dapper was scraping only had 37 of the states, which made for a fairly impoverished display.

Although I like the realclearpolitics.com methodology for a weighted average poll-of-polls, I looked for a site with all states, and found USAElectionPolls.com Though this site seems to feed out only the one latest poll it finds for each state, and not a weighted average of polls, it does give a complete set. Dapper was very easy to use to create a scrape of the site to output the data as JSON.

I may channel my inner Brokaw and use the map in manual mode on election night, or I might challenge myself to quickly find a site that can be Dapper-scraped and feed the board automatically.

Why does this matter?
Why do you need a display like this in Second Life when you can go to dozens of web sites with electoral maps?  I believe that the strength of an immersive session in a virtual world is enhanced by the continuity of the immersion. Even though Second Life now supports both an in-application web browser window and web content displayed on the surface of objects in Second Life, having an interactive display that can be manipulated by an avatar means you don’t have to shift back and forth from the perspective of the avatar to the perspective of a web-surfer.

Politics and Twitter mash it up at Capitol Hill in Second Life

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Twitter theater

I've installed a new display at Capitol Hill in Second Life that streams Twitter tweets about candidates.  The tweets float above columns, and are refreshed every minute with a search for Obama, Biden, McCain or Palin. You can also talk to the display to get the latest tweets about an individual candidate. Touch a column, and you get the original post on Twitter that you can use to follow links, etc.

The Capitol Hill region has been one of a number of gathering places in Second Life during the debates. Though a lot of avatars tend to gather at party headquarters, Capitol Hill draws those wanting more of a cross-party discussion.

 As for me, joining the discussion in Second Life, with an eye on the Twitter election channel, and another eye on my TV, makes my head explode.

"The Office" Season 4 DVD arrives with additional Second Life footage and commentary

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NBC yesterday released Season 4 of "The Office" on DVD, including the episode "Local Ad" featuring Clear Ink's Second Life work. New to the DVD are two of the deleted scenes, along with commentary from episode writer BJ Novak and director Jason Reitman.

Reitman says that the Second Life scenes scared him the most, given that you couldn't actually animate the scenes - they had to be acted out by people running the characters. Though what we delivered to Reitman were finished QuickTime files, we had the sense that he thought he was watching the action in real time; I think this is confirmed in his commentary.

Philly JimHe also expressed concern about how to convey the written script - Jim is a guy with a guitar from Philly who is a sportswriter - into Second Life in just a few seconds. I think we got that one. Paintball

The deleted scenes include a great paintball fight and a funny reveal in Dwight's apartment.

The whole episode as shot ran quite long and was edited for time, so I'm glad these scenes are now available.

 

 

 

 

Cisco Visual Networking Index - Betting on the Over-Under for 2012

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Using up bandwidth in 2008Cisco this week released its Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast and Methodology, 2007-2012 [PDF] and companion piece Approaching the Zettabyte Era [PDF], well-considered projections of where we're headed given the impact on the internet of visual networking applications.  They're well worth the read.

In an act of confident prognostication, they estimate that the annual run rate of IP traffic in 2012 will be 522 exabytes, more than half a zettabyte. This will no doubt be an interesting over-under bet at your favorite sports bar.  In this case, I'll bet on the over.

Why?  I'm listening to "Stumbling on Happiness", which describes how predictions of the future so often underestimate the mark by extrapolating from the present based on what we know, without much of a factor for the emergence of the "Black Swan", or the things that we can't possible imagine happening in the next few years. We don't know what they'll be, but we should at least assume that something unanticipated will come along.

If I had to pick one of the internals from Cisco's prediction to support my bet on the over, it would be their category of "Internet Gaming", where they lump in “multiplayer virtual world gaming”. There is discussion about underlying factors and assumptions in gaming's use of bandwidth bandwidth, but I think the focus on “gaming” as the primary purpose of virtual environments underestimates the role of this kind of interface in future applications in many areas: business and commerce, education, government, entertainment. And while current bandwidth usage is moderated by how much of the virtual environment is actually created at the user’s computer, using lightweight communications with the virtual world servers, this will change. More integration with real-world data in the simulated world will demand higher real-time bandwidth consumption.

And for those of you wanting to know about exabytes and zettabytes, here’s a quick lesson from Cisco (and we haven’t even started talking about yottabytes yet!)

(Thanks to Christine Kerner for the link to the report, via Facebook)
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