REALLY SIMPLE SECOND LIFE

Somehow, it seems safer to watch news of North Korea going nuclear from another world, if by just a tad.  Koz Farina is the creator of BlogHUD, a system that enables you to write blog post from within Second Life, and using a clever hack with Flash code, he's now managed to create a way of displaying RSS feeds in-world, too.  Which is how Koz and I watched news of Kim Jong Il's nuke, along with other headlines of the day taken from the BBC feed. (Music for the video borrowed from the indispensable Torley, taken from his 230 track library-- the cut heard here being "Nightweathers".)

After the break, Koz explains the technology behind his 3D RSS viewer.

"The NewsScreens here," Koz tells me, "are actually Flash files, which read the RSS feeds from the BBC News site-- there's a CNN one nearby too." He grins.  "It could be any feed, naturally."

The display uses the ability to stream Quicktime video in Second Life.  "Quicktime supports Flash," Koz explains, "but only up to Flash version 5. We're up to version 9 on that now!  Luckily, I have been dabbling with Flash since the early days, so already knew how to do this 'the old way'... So, Flash is doing all the work. No LSL at all... I heart feeds."

Koz is working to integrate the NewsScreens with his BlogHUD, and even foresees a kind of RSS reader in Second Life itself. "It would be possible to a screen which called certain feeds," he says, "pre-programmed by a notecard or having an RSS feed 'shouted/chatted' to it...  Did I say 'I heart feeds?'"

Direct portal to Koz Farina's RSS viewer demo.

Comments

[SignpostMarv Martin]

Point 1) I've been bugging Steve Linden about getting external data into the XUI.

Point 2) Second Life uses uBrowser to render web documents, and Firefox supports extensions that allow Firefox to be a fully blown RSS reader (you could also run XSL + JS on the feed). Which basically means what Koz forsees is only a few SL Source Code commits away.....

[Koz Farina]

I don't know why the trackback didn;t seem to work, but here you go. Cheers!!!

http://kosso.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/official-second-life-blog-picks-up-rss-newsscreens-and-bloghud/

I believe that if be get the full pluginable browser on a HUD surface first, that would be a logical stepping stone for integrating things like Javascript calls to LSL scripts.

When we have this, the door's wide open.

Or will it be another black hole? ;)

Whatvever it is, it'll be *alive*! ;)

Koz

[Koz Farina]

also, I'm all for external XML data for the UI.

OPML is the perfect format to choose (with extensions and/or custom attributes)

K

[Frans Charming]

Man this is so 1.6 when quicktime integration came into SL. There was just hardly anyone interrested in this sort of thing back then.

[Koz Farina]

i'd love to see some examples of earlier attempts. I have been looking! ;)

[Hamlet Au]

Thing is, RSS feeds weren't nearly as prevalent when Quicktime streaming was introduced 1.5 years ago.

[Torley]

And in addition, there a bunch of very basic, most excellent things I haven't seen done with inworld QuickTime streaming yet: for example, using it to simulate moving scenery outside of a stationary train, creating an illusion of motion more longplaying than a mere animated texture. Or splitting up a QT movie into quadrants, and by way of texture offsets and repeats, coming up with 4 simultaneous visuals in a club.

Thx for using my ch00n, Jamlet!

I gotta check this out inworld nowz...

[Torley]

Ack, I just came back, and it said "LAST UPDATED" but didn't look like anything in particular was streaming. I didn't see any headlines... oh well, hmmm... this could be really versatile if Resis wanna showcase their blogs on their parcels! Or, even the Official Linden Blog. =)

[Torley]

O, I found out what was happening -- for anyone else who can't see it right, use this workaround:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/09/25/bugwatch-enabling-flash-in-quickime-713/

[Felix]

Why not check out a real RSS reader for Second Life? Its my SecondView... SLNN uses it, and its free. Just search classified...