Category: Technolust

I’ve been slumming around on There.com lately. It’s a 3D virtual world kind of thing.

I read BoingBoing.net every day, and one of the editors, Cory Doctorow, frequently mentions the comings and goings in the online 3D world Second Life. I bought a $10 membership to the place about a year ago but never used it. A few weeks ago, after having upgraded the guts of my PC, I decided to check it out. Maybe I had totally missed out on the reason for its appeal.

Well, I didn’t. At least to me, the place just plain stinks. It’s a virtual world that takes from the worst elements of the real world–sex, vanity, gambling, materialism and consumerism–and lets people go completely out of control with them. Practically every other user-created building in Second Life is a store selling slutty fashion for women. The irony of spending real money on more virtual property than anyone could ever need is completely lost on these people. And all the cybersex that goes on, along with the necessary equipment and scripts to support it, had me scratching my head and wondering, “What is WRONG with these people?” The worst part is the 3D physics and graphics were state-of-the-art about eight years ago.

So I decided to give There.com a try. Back in 2003, they blew through $30 million to develop their world and it shows. The landscape and professionally created structures are pure eye candy. The in-world vehicles are a blast to drive. It’s more difficult for users to make money as developers, so for the most part only the most skilled people can make a living at it, so the landscape isn’t so overrun with virtual crap.

What I like best about There.com is that it’s rated PG-13. I can let my kids play in there–supervised, of course–and not worry about coming across a pair of bare naked avatars performing oral sex on each other. The three of us have spent the past two weekends barreling over the landscape in dune buggies and flying over it with a jet back strapped to our character’s back. I met some people from South America and I’ve been able to use my Spanish (my second language) for the first time in ages. I’m trying to convince my sister in the US to sign on so that her two girls and my two boys can play together.

Yeah, so anyway, I’m sure we’ll get bored with it eventually, but for now it’s pretty fun. For about $4 in accessories, I even got my avatar to look like me, right down to my shoes:

Is that a hoot or what?

My username there is “Pavster,” BTW.

I live for this stuff. Someone mashed together Google Maps, Flickr, Firefox, and Greasemonkey to make it incredibly easy to show exactly where a photo was taken.

Here’s an example. Click on the photo below to go to the photo’s page on flickr.com. On that page, click on the hyperlink “GeoTagged” below the photo. It’ll take you to the geoblogger.com site and show you on a map the exact location where it was taken.

If you’re willing to click one more time, click on the “satellite” link in the top right corner of the map to see the location on a satellite photo of Tokyo. Zoom all the way in and you’ll see Shinjuku Station.

This is so simple to do that I’ll definitely be tagging the photos that accompany soundseeing tours. If you have flickr account and are somewhat technically savvy, instructions are here.

Being attention deficient is a good personality trait for podcasters, isn’t it? (Except when having to edit hours and hours of audio.)

Apparently there’s also a way to import the data into Google Earth, but I’ll leave that for another day. It’s a great app to play with if you have a powerful enough PC and video card.

Here’s a fun activity: Learn how to zoom in on your house starting from all the way out in space. If you’re ever abducted and you manage to comandeer an alien dingy to make your escape, this skill surely will come in handy.

Click and drag on the image to scroll around. If you’re saying, “What image?” then you need to install Java. Go ahead. It’s good for you.

That’s the back of our house. The house on the other side of the “street” with all the shrubbery in front of it is my father in law’s house.

I made this with very little effort and no practice. That’s why it’s kinda crappy. I simply stood in one spot and “painted” the scene with my Sony Clie’s 160×120 pixel video camera; no tripod, no nuthin’, I simply filmed everywhere. I downloaded the MPEG-4 movie to my PC and exported about three frames a second to JPEG using QuickTime. Then I pointed AutoStitch at the directory full of images. It did the rest.

There are ways to create higher quality panoramas, but they take lots of time, effort and an investment in hardware. But for what I want to do–take a quick immersive snapshot so listeners can get a clearer image of what they’re hearing–I’m happy with it. Take a look here for some stunningly beautiful hi-res panoramas of Japan.

You can see most of the path I took on the walk from the door to the rice field full of frogs. The door’s in front of you. Pan left. I walked up the alley then turned right. The rice field is right behind the white truck parked in the driveway of grandpa’s house.