When I read that the second-life client had been open-sourced last week, the first thing* I thought was that it would finally become easy to have Arduino talk sophisticatedly to SL (instead of just doing a keyboard hack). An experiment was on my todo list (right after get a life) but 1) I was not enthralled at the prospect of returning to C++ coding or visual studio, 2) serial-port coding in C++ on windows appears to me to be a dog.
Well, Matt Biddulph has done a cool proof of concept already. The lazyweb’s mind-reading interface rocks.
(*My second thought when I read about the open-sourcing of the client was that (arduino or no) the SL grid was looking at a lot more downtime.)
Of course, there’s no need for everyone to learn to write their own modded SL client or even (at a stretch) their own arduino code… one could leave a standard arduino sketch (like the pduino firmware) on the microcontroller and have a standard “arduino-modded” SL-client which just relays events when things change, by sending a say on a non-chat channel. Then all that the LSL programmer would have to do would be to listen to the arduino-owning avatar on that same channel, who would act like a medium, whispering arduino signals into the ether…
…and back. I think it’s just as neat when SL starts driving RL via the arduino… the modded client listens for (authorised) messages on a certain set of channels, passes what’s new to the arduino which drives actuators, affecting RL. A very unimaginitive first use would be to sync your room lights to the time in your SL region.
The downside so far is that you have to dedicate an avatar to one (or more) arduino devices. (one SL client = one logged-in avatar. (Well, those signals can piggy-back while your avatar is actually doing stuff, but if you log off your avatar, your arduino manifestation is gone, too, even if it appears unrelated to the avatar in SL. If there are one avatar per machine or per IP restrictions, then you have to dedicate a PC to the arduino-carrying avatar.
For SL modellers reading this who want to use a hardware interface to speed their work, it’s going to be quicker to take a store-bought midi controller board, and just have someone make an SL-client mod that does the same thing, but just either proxies the midi messages into SL, raw, or converts them into SL-modelling parameter changes. Arduino rightly comes into it when you want to read something that a store-bought midi controller can’t sense. (not pots and sliders). For instance, you could use a galvanic skin response sensor to sense when you get nervous, and pass this on to your avatar in a poker game, and make your avatar blush or sweat. (Well, poker’s when you’d disconnect it. That’s information your glad the current keyboard-and-mouse client can’t convey).
Hmm, I thought I recognised the blog… Matt was also the developer on that Rails-driven BBC Programme catalog. (Oct 2005).
Via this innocuous-looking photo of an LCD display I happened to recognise (because it’s sitting right in front of me (because I wrote an arduino library for it)) , via the flickr arduino tag.
Interfacing arduino.
Anyway, Bluetooth Arduino + gyroscope + SL: In the future your avatar really won’t be able to dance for shit.