Author Archives: bat

Max – New Open Source Mesh Avatar – Resources

The GitHub “RuthAndRoth” GitHub organization is an online community dedicated to the creation and sharing of mesh avatars for virtual worlds and which are efficient to use. An aim has been to provide educational resources. For some time the focus … Continue reading

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PBR Materials on OpenSim

This blog post reports early testing of the use of a virtual worlds viewer capable of rendering Physically Based materials (PBR) in OpenSimulator (as well as Second Life). A blog post describing PBR and giving some resources is available here. … Continue reading

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Goatswood and Houndstead Abbey in Second Life

Another wonderful Second Life atmospheric build By Hera (zee9) in August 2023. Start at https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Themyscira/149/183/28 for transfer to Goatswood – http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Themyscira/204/198/30 Houndstead Abbey – http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Themyscira/186/140/1116 Goatswood is set sometime in the later part of the 1800’s. It is a Victorian … Continue reading

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Second Life – Senra Avatars

As part of improvements to onboarding new Second Life users, a project by Linden Lab known as the “New User eXperience (NUX)” a range of new mesh avatars and clothing has been created. A dev kit to allow content creators … Continue reading

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Second Life Bear Hunt

Many Second Life “Lindens” and “Moles” of the past and present have their own personal and unique teddy bear to share with Residents who ask them for it. Most of these Linden Bears are modifications of the Linden Bear Template … Continue reading

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Deep Sea Mining – Resources

Polymetallic Nodules on Ocean Bed – Image from https://only.one I am concerned that beginning larger scale deep sea mining with current knowledge of the deep ocean and with current extractive technologies will be damaging to the health of the oceans … Continue reading

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Second Life Linden Bear Island

Many Lindens and Moles of the past and present have their own personal and unique teddy bear to share with Residents who ask them for it. Most of these Linden Bears are modifications of the Linden Bear made by Nicole … Continue reading

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Second Life – Teletubbies

The Teletubbies (by BBC – see Wikipedia) have arrived in Second Life.. or at least via outfits created by Blueberry and on display on the Cutieland region. So say “Eh-ho!” to Tinky Winky (Purple), Dipsy (Green), Laa-Laa (Yellow) and Po … Continue reading

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Goliath Gardens – Its a Bug’s Life in OpenSim

Goliath Gardens on the virtual-hg.com grid in OpenSim presents a bug’s scale perspective on a garden area. A region by Marianna Monentes. Pickup a Ladybird avatar from a box on the deck of the house that scales you to the … Continue reading

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Gumball 3000 Rally 2023 in Edinburgh

The Gumball 3000 Rally in 2023 had a route from Edinburgh, through Europe to the final destination, Porto Montenegro. The last time the Gumball Rally was through Edinburgh was in 2014 (see this blog post). The cars gathered on Saturday … Continue reading

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AI open letter to UK Government and Industry

AI is not an existential threat to humanity; it will be a transformative force for good if we get critical decisions about its development and use right. The UK can help lead the way in setting professional and technical standards … Continue reading

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Viverse – Resources

https://world.viverse.com/ Items can be placed in world scenes using upload of, for example, .glb models, or a selection of 3D models from Sketchfab. Avatars can be imported to Viverse in “VRM” format.

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ChatGPT apologizes for making things up – a lot!

This is a small experiment to try ChatGPT (via https://chat.openai.com) on 4th June 2023) with some questions on myself and my virtual world avatar. To say the least, ChatGPT persists in making up career information, duties, prizes and honours and … Continue reading

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Seven Dales Heritage Run 2023

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. The Seven Dales Heritage Run was run again in 2023 on a … Continue reading

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Avatar – Pandoran Ocean Creatures

Avatar and Disney Possible Planet are supporting The Nature Conservancy to protect 10 of Earth’s oceans’ animals and their habitats, connected to the beauty of the fictional Pandora moon. Up to July 31, 2023, create your own Avatar-inspired ocean creature … Continue reading

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OpenSim 0.9.3.0 Dev Nessie

OpenSim 0.9.2.2 “Yeti” was released on 29-Mar-2023 (see Release Notes), so the development branch will now be OpenSim 0.9.3.0 Dev. The significant number increase is because the new version uses .NET6.0 as a base versus .NET4.6 (runprebuild) or optionally .NET4.8 … Continue reading

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Artemis II Crew Announcement

Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid), Commander Victor Glover (@AstroVicGlover), Pilot Christina Koch (@Astro_Christina), Mission specialist Jeremy Hanson (@Astro_Jeremy), Mission specialist On 3rd April 2023 NASA announced that former US Navy fighter pilots Reid Wiseman & Victor Glover, veteran astronaut Christina Koch, and … Continue reading

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ChatGPT and DALL·E

I decided that the tide cannot be held back and I better get an OpenAI AppID to test out some features of ChatGPT (a.k.a. “Chat”), DALL·E and an image manipulation Blender addon such as BlenderGPT. Here is a conversation with … Continue reading

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For the Love of Fashion

This event is part of a year-long celebration marking sixty years of research into computer science and AI at the University of Edinburgh. Starting in 1963 with a small group of machine intelligence pioneers, and computer science innovators, the University … Continue reading

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Metaverse Fashion Week 2023

Metaverse Fashion Week 2023 (#MVFW23) took place in a variety of virtual worlds and platforms including Spatial (https://spatial.io) in a space ghosted by Luis Fern and Metamundo which can be visited with Ready Player Me (https://readyplayer.me) avatars. This follows the … Continue reading

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Ruth2 v4 Rigging

Sean Heavy has documented a process to add an armature/rig to the Ruth2v4 open source mesh avatar and to export components of the avatar for Second Life and OpenSim using the Onigiri Blender add-on. These notes are to provide some … Continue reading

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Virtual World Best Practice in Education 2023

The 16th Virtual World Best Practice in Education 2023 online conference titled “Uncommon Realities” took place in Second Life on 23rd March to 25th March 2023. The event organised by https://www.vwbpe.org/ focuses on the use of immersive virtual environments for … Continue reading

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Ready Player Me Avatars in Second Life and OpenSim (Onigiri)

Update August 2023: A big advantage of new PBR Viewers is that the Ready Player Me .gltf file can be used to load all the PBR materials, their properties and constituent textures in one bulk upload. Use Build -> Upload … Continue reading

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Blender Nodes – Resources

This blog post provides links and resources related to the use of “Nodes” and their “Noodle” links to create workflows in Blender, especially for creating PBR Materials with Albedo images, Metallic, Roughness and Height Maps/Normals. Learn the BASICS of Material … Continue reading

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Cuteulula Artis Roller Coasters

I have posted before about Cuteulala Artis’s roller coaster builds in OpenSim, her free to use (in OpenSim only) Optera coaster, and her CuteulalaPark region on OSGrid. hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/CuteulalaPark/304/475/22 Via her MeWe posts, Cuteulala recently made available on OAR similar to … Continue reading

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Godot Engine – Resources

This blog post is to provide resources and links related to the MIT Licenced open source Godot Game Engine. https://godotengine.org/ https://docs.godotengine.org/ As an initial test I imported a glTF 2.0 mesh file created from my Blender version of Supercar 2023. … Continue reading

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CuteCircuit – Digital Fashion by Francesca Rosella

Francesca Rosella co-founded CuteCircuit with Ryan Genz in 2004. It is the world’s first wearable technology fashion brand. Francesca has been active in this space since 2001 and works in a mix of virtual, digital and physical fashion. This blog … Continue reading

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AI@Edinburgh Achievements and History

In response to a colleague’s request for pointers to early AI achievements in Edinburgh I provided a few links and resources that may be useful. This blog posts lists some of them… We carefully preserved an archive of project materials … Continue reading

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Second Life PBR Materials Tests

A development of Second Life is introducing Physical Based Rendering (PBR) materials based on the glTF specification. Some links and resources are in my earlier blog post. Test Materials with Metallics, Lights and Emission Ready Player Me Avatar with All … Continue reading

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Inworld Review with Ai Austin and Humbletim

Talk from and about virtual worlds & immersive spaces. With Mal Burns, Thirza Ember & James Atlloud. Produced by Metaworld Broadcasting. The 26th February 2023 edition had guests Ai Austin and Humbletim. The intended discussion topic was Virtual World Viewers, … Continue reading

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