Fermilab/SLAC Magazine On Second Life's Large Hadron Collider-- And Linking It To The Real One

Last week I wrote about the brilliant machinima tribute to the Large Hadron Collider from Ryushimitsu Xingjian, the Resident who created his simulation in SL from photos of the LHC's ATLAS project.  (Click for a side-by-side comparison above.)  I found out later that I wasn't the only fan: so was David Harris, a physicist who's also the editor of Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Fermilab.  He actually attended the LHC's "first beam day" at CERN last September, and is thus able to compare Xingjian's efforts with the real thing: 

"Not everything is scientifically accurate," Harris writes, "but I can tell you from having been in the ATLAS cavern while it was being built, that this does a very good job of the look and feel of the real detector."  High praise.  Even more intriguing, he mentions that colleagues at Fermilab/SLAC had already considered creating a mixed reality LHC:

"A couple of years ago, a few of us were throwing around the idea of building the Large Hadron Collider in Second Life... Once it was running, the idea would be to feed real data from the LHC to the SL version, and have a really detailed 3D virtual tour of the facility, which people won’t be able to get into once beams are running."

He was unable to find the time to develop that project further, but it sounds like something worth pursuing.  Anyone have spare virtual land for a scale model of a particle accelerator with a data stream connected to the real one?

Comments

[Veeyawn Spoonhammer]

Oh I wish I had the land for it! That would be fantastic!