Ariadne’s thread
We are currently investigating in a Media Viewer for our Eduation Customers. But sometimes you just got do dive in, so this is a photo of a current and spontaneous lession of “Graph Practise”, lecturing one of our most talented builders, Scara Marenwolf in the good old backtracking/route planning stuff, in LSL. 
Mischief managed
I declare the stableized virtyou Grid for open. Please note, we have a new login form, now with Email verification.
It’s that time again
Dear Virtyousers: Guys and Gals, Trans- and Post-Humanists, Builders, Scripters, (Edu|Cyber|Steam)(punks|cators); hochgeschätzte kleine und GROSSE Lebensformen, AVATARE!
We will update the virtyou Maingrid to the latest Version of Opensim (with fancy Hypergrid 1.5i7b) beginning on Friday night GMT (that would be Friday afternoon, if in the US timezones, or Saturday morning in ASIAPAC). There will be an outage of the Maingrid for about 6 hours.
I’ll send an update on Saturday, when everything is running smoothly again.
Happy GridHopping,
Torrid
Google Earth adds virtual Trees, and it’s amazing
(more at Markus Breuer s Steingrau)
Cryengine-3
So this is what you get when you remove the first letter from our beloved Multi User Virtual Environment, and pimp the last a bit up.
The Cryengine-3 does different Stereo Modes with a new technology: Instead of rendering 2 complete images, the pixels from the rendered scene are shifted by the angle resulting from the deepness. This is said to eat up just 1.5% load, instead of 50%!
Yes, I wish we had that in Second Life…
tx Oh’s LightShare™ Panel
A few days ago I received an invite from our programmer tx Oh to his personal Opensim grid. After logging in, I got a first-hand demonstration of the new LightShare™ environment, and had the opportunity to play around with the Lightshare panel he has scripted.
What it Lightshare? If you have been into Second Life in the last few years, you have probably heard of WindLight. Back in 2007, Linden Lab acquired the new technology to render more realistic Sky, Clouds and Water from Windward Mark Interactive. The problem with WinLight is, that it is strictly playing on the client-side, like all rendering features. While all of the alternative viewers have been implementing WindLight, and it’s extensively used by Macchinima Makers, sharing the settings you have found with another resident is quite complicated: You have to save your current settings in an file, send it to the other person, make him or her install it in the deep space of their Client configuration settings, and then – after a restart, you can share the experience. Not quite so Fast-Easy-Fun, it seems, and certainly no RealTime collaborational experience. This is where LightShare comes on the plan: Invented by Meta 7, a virtual worlds hosting company, Lightshare allows you to do what the name says – share your WindLight settings with all visitors of the Sim, instantaneously, with no download required. This is done by some newly introduced Scripting commands and a compatible client/viewer, that receives the settings sent from the Sim it’s logged in, whenever anything is changing.
What tx is doing here, and the reason why he invited me to come over and play with the new stuff he made: He made a handy panel containing all the knobs and buttons for setting up a windlight theme, only he did it in-world! So we could just stand there (me in a pyjama, the inofficial Opensim standard outfit^^), fiddle on the knobs and change the blueness of the water, time of day, brighness and color of the sun and ambient light, all that – together , simultaneously. Just like anything you know from Second Life and Opensim, sharing the experience we create in realtime.
tx is making the panel available as a IAR archive on gridhop.net, so grab a copy, and check out the nearest OpenSim! 
“Can I use that in Second Life too?” one might ask. No, not yet. They just need to hire (or re-hire) some developers to get that running. ;p
Cheers,
Torrid
New Age Physics Engine: Lagoa Multiphysics
Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.
This is a new Multiphysics simulator by Lagoa Technologies Inc.
Synthetic sounds for animated worlds at SIGGRAPH
At this year’s SIGGRAPH, several groups are showing physical models of simulated objects to create the actual sound of these objects, fluids and breaking solids.
Here’s the New Scientist’s article.