April 11, 2008 by Ciaran Laval
Posted in
New toys are coming to the Second Life World. The Space Navigator mouse from 3D connexions (an arm of Logitech) should be with us any day now, but more excitingly for me is the work Mitch Kapor is doing with 3D cameras.
The 3D connexions mouse is aimed at making movement more fluent and relative to a 3D world than a traditional mouse. There's a press release here.
Mitch Kapor's project is aimed at controlling your avatar, well hands free! Now this won't be cheap, new toys never are and I wonder if people will injure themselves whilst using it, especially with regards to certain activities but it has real potential to open all sorts of new avenues here. Hopefully this throws down new challenges to content creators and scripters to develop products that work with these devices.
Here is a demo of the 3D camera, which exemplifies the potential far greater than I can with words.
You can follow progress about this here.
I love developments like this because within all the whining and flapping there's also an awfully exciting product developing, which sometimes I lose sight of but with features like this coming it puts a lot of things regarding the infancy and development of this project in perspective.
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No picture. :-(
How can there be a press release for a product to be used in a synthetic world with no picture? :-(
But yes, it is pretty cool. Still, for those of us who type, we'll still have to fight with the keyboard/mouse combo. Such an antiquated thing... do you realize that the combo is almost 50 years old (since inception)?
And you know what would, quite simply, rock? WII Nunchuks and Second Life.
Second Life Consultant
Looks cool but....
How many people that are in SL really want to stand but to control their avatar? Maybe if I was dancing in a club.
And how will you type, maybe they could use sign language and the camera would understand it. I know a little sign language, and this would give me a good reason to finish learning.
Still the project is young and they will improve it in time.
Bart Heart
Excellent point
lol Bart that's an excellent point. I'd imagine voice would be the primary communication method for such a device and as we all know, voice isn't the primary method of communication here but your point about sign language is the sort of thing I was implying when I mentioned content creators and scripters developing new products, well I wasn't thinking of sign language at that time but if it were feasible to do that with this device, then that would be a good development.
Personally I think this sort of device will lead to more inworld games being developed, WII style.
Picture
picture!. Looks odd, people who use Maya or Blender may be familiar with it.
Things that work confuse the timelines of a product's viability, I mean VHS and floppy drives, still in use although finally VHS is going but the floppy drives has been dying for years and years and it's only recently that they've stopped making them. I miss the Five and a quarter inch version though.
As for the WII Nunchucks lol, that's what I was implying with injuries! WII style intergration sure would rock!
Actually...
the truth is that Mitch Kapor is barking up the wrong tree. An accelerometer and RLG in a headset/handset would be better.
Always overengineering... remember I said that, btw. ;-)
Second Life Consultant
Where can I get some
Where can I get some computer geek glasses like in the video.....
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