More how to design an API

As part of my job I have to show up and help students who are having trouble using HHP sim’s educational ‘stuff’. I have ‘help poles’ students can touch to ‘summon’ me. When I’m not actually signed on to Second Life, ‘summoned’ has meant ‘emailed’, which sometimes doesn’t work – I often don’t notice that the email came in until too late.

A low priority project for me has been improving this so it SMS texts me.

I’ve gone through a rather long cycle of being offered one and another API’s to do this, and each time installing and understanding the API has been enough of a barrier that the job didn’t get done.

FINALLY, somebody pointed out that sending SMTP email (that’s ordinary email) to >phone number<@>cell company specific addy< works.
If you need to ring an SMS phone, here’s the link

Yes, this is the way an api should be – it’s deadly simple and it works. I’m sure there’s lots of cool functionality I’m not seeing. Wonderful!! Cool! I DONT want to see that stuff. I just want to ring my phone.

Comparing what’s out there

wanted to separate the comparison from the actual posts

SL	OSGrid	Catagory
11.0%	0.0%	Adult
25.0%	13.0%	Art
39.0%	37.5%	Natural or Landscaped Beauty
7.0%	8.3%	Violence
29.0%	41.7%	Ugliness
7.0%	4.2%	Educational Value
	29.2%	Commercial Activity
	25.0%	Advertising
	29.2%	Abandoned/apparently unused land.

What’s actually in OSGrid?

In May 09, as part of the discussion about segregating adult content, I conducted a survey of content on the SL mainland, which appears in this blog.

I’ve just completed a similar survey of OSGrid.

My methodology was largely the same, with the exception that I modified the criteria for ‘empty/abandoned’ when l landed underwater. In such circumstances I ‘peeked’ above water by moving my camera up only to score this single catagory.

I traversed 26 regions. This included several regions that were undoubtedly part of a megaregion.

Adult –

I saw no adult content in my travels.

Art -

In interests of scientific objectivity, I should say I somehow omitted this one from my list of things to score. I discovered this right after completing the data collection, so my memory was fresh.
13% of the sims contained art – a shop selling paintings and a stonehenge building that arguably rose to the level of architecture as art.

Natural or Landscaped Beauty

37.5% of sims contained natural or landscaped beauty, per the definition in the may 09 survey.

Violence

8.3% of sims contained violence or the tools of violence, in the form of a single military submarine, and a collection of weapons in a freebie store.

Ugliness

Subjective ugliness score was 41.7% – the large number of underwater landings probably lowered this, as I didn’t score underwater as ugly if it was reasonably terraformed

Educational Value

I found only a single ‘building tips’ poster that triggered educational content.

Commercial (New Catagory)

I scored for commercial activity if there were shops or someone selling something. I would have ignored land rental boxes, though I found none.

29.2% of locations scored commercial activity, divided about evenly between freebie shops and land sale/rental signs.

Advertising

I scored for advertisements separated from shops, but not shop signs unless the shop signs were outsized. I saw no outsized shop signs.

Many of the advertisements were an in-world teleport /search tool that looks like a TV.

25.0% contained advertising

abandoned/apparently unused land

I scored 29.2% of land as abandoned or apparently unused.

Conclusions:

I encountered no other avatars during my travels.

OSGrid has noticably more water than SL. I landed underwater 5 times, and had two more edge cases. I landed in knee deep water once, and landed under an offshore rock once. As always, when I landed trapped under something, I moved upwards until I was free of the trap and positioned myself over the original point.

There is noticeably less true ‘trash’ around.

Simulator performance is noticeably better without the vast array of stuff packed into the sky.

I was under the impression that the average OSGrid user would be an expert builder and highly technical person. Clearly that’s not true from the quality of the builds. Perhaps building skill and technical skill are not the same.

OSGrid tends to have clusters of regions owned by a single entity. Thus my ‘raster scan’ method might not be the best strategy for gathering random data. If I were to repeat this experiment I might choose to use a more ‘shotgun’ random effect.

T is for Tomography

Do you have tomographic data to display?

Set up a thin vertical ‘wall’ prim above a side view of the object. This gets the tomography slices textured on it. When the wall moves, the slice changes.

Provide some controls to allow moving the prim back and forth (allow anyone to move, perhaps, and a scanner to replace it if it gets lost, while the moveable prim dies if it’s moved too far from the base).

Controls also allow the user to set the ‘wall’ to move at a constant speed.

U is for Unions

Suppose you’re doing a section on labor in America.
Students could have a project to create an exhibit about some aspect of labor.
Some examples:

• An exhibit of safety appliances on the railroads, and the role of labor in causing their adoption.
• an exhibit of racism and union organizing
• the role of organized labor in creating the 5 day week

Why SL? In SL students can create an exhibit without the time and mess of physical building. Students can incorporate ‘real’ items – like the exhibit about railroads, which could include the actual safety items.
Doing so may allow students to incorporate elements from something they already are interested in (say, trains) and see the relevance of a topic they may be less interested in.

The conventional research project for students at lower levels is the paper. Most students have limited composition skills and this perhaps prevents the student from learning the content. Many students will find building in SL and creating posters to be more natural forms of expression.

You could provide a kiosk where passersby could tell stories about relatives or their own stories of working in union shops, organizing, etc.
A drop box for notecards is all that’s needed. Students could revisit the drop box and create a display of submitted stories.
Some students could be detailed to publicize the drop box.

Vertebrate Goggles

Make/buy a large mass of SL animals and plants. Let’em loose in some natural area.
Make a set of ‘Taxonomy Goggles’ that let you look at an animal and define it’s taxonomic classification.
domain/kingdom/phylum/class/order/family/genus/species

Make one set that works like carbon goggles and displays the classification of stuff.
Make one set that is a ‘quiz’, you run around and occasionally it stops and asks you to identify one of domain/kingdom/phylum/class/order/family/genus/species for this organism.

Have to do various biomes (including some ‘enlarged’ ones for microscopic beasties)

Fire Centaur has a cool flash card system that rezzes the cards, and they drift towards you. As they do, the student has to chat the right answer before they reach the student, or they blow up.
This would be a cool system for the quiz.

W – World War II

YouTube has a truly remarkable set of videos made by displaying a map as it changes over time.

Check out, for instance, this Map of the Western Front

They’re great as is, but they have some limitations.

• It’s hard to stop and examine details
• It’s not very natural to use the scrubber bar to scrub thru them
• they aren’t that detailed anyway
• it’s very difficult to annotate changes as they occur – e.g. ‘that change was the anschluss’

So, rez a goodly sized mega. Texture it with the media texture.  Download one of these movies and stretch it way out in a video editor (change the frame rate down so it doesn’t balloon in size).

Now do some scripting to play the thing, stopping to have an ‘annotation’ pop up.

Alternatively, run the video out as as frames, pick out the relevant ones, and use two megas and changing alphas to make a ‘slide show dissolve’ effect between successive slides.

You can also find sites like this one that gives maps of europe at various times and use the above two megas method.

This would be a great thing for a canned kit. If enough people convince me to make one, I will.

Alternatively, and probably more efficiently, if some historians and geographers wanted to fund the project we could do this en masse for many subjects.