Learn 4 Life

Desktop Broadcasting of Second Life with TwitCam - “Inside Broadcasting”

Here’s another first from Learn 4 Life. Using Twitcam to Broadcast out Second Life from your desktop. Simple blocky but effective if you use a tripod and don’t move your avatar around too fast.

In this broadcast I even managed to stream in a video into Second Life on a media player. The sound is superb but the video being shown comes across as stills but then my broadband connection can only take so much through my Mac.

Oh an I forgot to add I was also talking to Chris Smith @shamblesguru on Skype as well on voice - go and play. A whole new Inside / Outside broadcast model. Voila!

Scratch in Open Sim

Thanks to ReactionGrid and @dstrawberrygirl, Learn4Life now has a place on the Open Sim grid and I am officially a “Gridizen”.

Chris set me up an account in minutes and I was able to have a quick play with Scratch for Open Sim.

Here’s a very quick video of the basic process. I simply downloaded the Scratch for Open Sim application - written in Squeak here (courtesy of a link from Rich White’s excellent Greenbush Labs Blog - Rich tweaked Scratch for Second Life for Open Sim as a universal app for Windows, Mac and Linux) and then I was able to write code that could control a prim on the Open Grid in seconds.

I simply dragged and dropped the building blocks onto the interface and then copy and pasted the code into TextMate and from there into my prim on Reactiongrid and presto - it worked first time. (NB you don’t need to even copy to a Word Processor on a Windows machine - but do on a Mac)

So much more engaging than Scratch in 2D don’t you think ?

If you are a teacher in a  UK school thinking of a quick start in Virtual Worlds and want to explore Open Sim I’d thoroughly recommend ReactionGrid for their pricing and prompt service. They even have a virtual turn key solution Banbury and the educational apps they can offer and other services are well worth looking at http://outpost.reactiongrid.com/. They can make worlds secure and in my experience are still small enough to offer a very personalised service and what’s more their main developer is UK based - so what’s stopping you - get in touch with @dstrawberrygirl now.