Planet Semantico

This month my freelance work takes me to Nature Publishing Group to work on a new scientific project in Second Life. We're not quite ready to talk about what we're doing yet, but I'm so pleased with a bit of work in progress that I thought I'd put a teaser up here.

Many people find the creation of 3D models in SL to be rather tricky. This is because there's no built-in way to import polygon data as a mesh of 3D coordinates from an external modelling tool. Imagine if there was a factory object that could read a list of coordinates and spit out the results straight into the world, like a virtual 3D printer. As part of this project, I'm working on exactly that.

Update: As I suspected, I'm not the first to attempt this kind of work, although it looks like I'm only the second or the third. Although I had a good look around before starting to code, it wasn't until I published this post that a couple of people contacted me to point out this Second Life forum post which provides a scripts for doing much the same thing.

To try out my new system, I went looking for entertaining test data. I have fond memories of Quakeworld - it was the first multiplayer online game that I spent a lot of time playing, and it got me through my finals. Remember this guy?

There are plenty of handy tools out there that can unpack the Quake data files and extract the models into easy-to-parse polygons formats. So, here's my Second Life test rendering:

There's plenty of work still to do, and lots more to say, but I'll leave it there for now.

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Uncategorized external modelling tool, handy tools

People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn't try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links.

It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice. They remember not to follow links again through the page which took them there. One's chosen starting page, and a nurtured set of bookmarks, are the entrance points, then, to a selected subweb of information which one is generally inclined to trust and find valuable.

A great example of course is the blogging world. Blogs provide a gently evolving network of pointers of interest. As do FOAF files. I've always thought that FOAF could be extended to provide a trust infrastructure for (e..g.) spam filtering and OpenID-style single sign-on and its good to see things happening in that space.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, alas, my attempt to explain this was turned upside down into a "blogging is one of the biggest perils" message. Sigh. I think they took their lead from an unfortunate BBC article, which for some reason stressed concerns about the web rather than excitement, failure modes rather than opportunities. (This happens, because when you launch a Web Science Research Initiative, people ask what the opportunities are and what the dangers are for the future. And some editors are tempted to just edit out the opportunities and headline the fears to get the eyeballs, which is old and boring newspaper practice. We expect better from the Guardian and BBC, generally very reputable sources)

In fact, it is a really positive time for the web. Startups are launching, and being sold [Disclaimer: people I know] again, academics are excited about new systems and ideas, conferences and camps and wikis and chat channels and are hopping with energy, and every morning demands an excruciating choice of which exciting link to follow first.

And, fortunately, we have blogs. We can publish what we actually think, even when misreported.

Uncategorized BBC, energy, evolving network, The Guardian, trust infrastructure, Web Science Research Initiative