[LINK] Second Life

[Stephen Loosley]

Hi Tom and all,

"IBM has poured many, many hours into (Second Life) to showcase
what some at the giant US technology company believe could be a
new way of doing business.  It's no gimmick.  Big Blue is serious .."

> At 03:14 PM 10/01/2007, Tom writes:
>
>> Flying Librarians of Oz: What's the fuss about Second Life and what's
>> it got to do with libraries?
>>
>> Second Life is an online virtual community created by its residents and
>> run by Linden Labs. Over two million people registered: Dell Computing,
>> Adidas, Harvard Law School and the United States Congress all have a
>> presence there. ...
>>
>> Kathryn Greenhill, a librarian at Murdoch University Library in Western
>> Australia, co-ordinates the Australian Libraries Building. She will provide
>> a guided tour of the Australian Libraries Building and discuss some of the
>> benefits to librarians of having a Second Life. See <http://secondlife.com/>

Grand Slam tennis that's out of this world
http://www.theage.com.au/news/biztech/grand-slam-tennis-thats-out-of-this-world/2007/01/12/1168105128562.html

Stephen Hutcheon
January 12, 2007

On Monday they'll be flicking a switch that will pump real time centre court action from the Australian Tennis Open - ball-by-ball, point-by-point - into a parallel, virtual universe.

IBM, which provides the IT services and technology backbone for Tennis Australia's Grand Slam tournament, has built a three dimensional facsimile of the Melbourne Tennis Centre complex inside a virtual world called Second Life.

Over the duration of the two week tournament, data will be fed from games in the real Rod Laver Arena into the unreal one, nano seconds after happens.

The feed will come from game-tracking technologies such as the line-calling system HawkEye, PointTracker which plots shots and ball trajectories and Speed Serve which clocks the players' serves.

Computers then crunch the numbers to recreate the positioning of the ball inside the virtual stadium. And avatars, 3-D characters representing the players, can simulate strokes made by Roger Federer or Alicia Molik - or whoever is playing at the time.

And spectators inside this computerised world will have not only the pick of the seats (including the match umpire's), but they can choose to watch the action from a player's perspective.

Forget stump cam. In Second Life you can get inside the heads of the players on the court and see what they see 
 after a fashion.

The Australian Open is IBM's second crack at such a project. As an experimental exercise, the company built a more bare bones set-up for the Wimbledon tournament last June.

"This time we've used Second Life physics engine," said Mr Brad Kasell, Asia-Pacific Manager for IBM Software Group's Emerging Technologies. "So we're plotting the ball's trajectory in a much more refined manner so you can see the trace of the ball far more accurately."

IBM has poured many, many hours into this project to showcase what some at the giant US technology company believe could be a new way of doing business. It's no gimmick. Big Blue is serious about this.

Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation, likes to call it v-business - virtual business, or business conducted in a virtual space.

"I believe that highly visual interfaces and virtual worlds will become increasingly important for interacting with applications, communicating with people and engaging in commerce," he wrote in a post on his blog at the start of the year...
--

Cheers, people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia
aka: "Another Acronym"
(with $250) in Second Life :-)


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