Dedric Mauriac is a tireless inventor of metaverse widgets, and has been for years. When I read about one of Mauriac's latest creations on his blog, I had to touch it for myself. You see, he's taken advantage of the new scripting feature that enables you to build objects with multiple avatar interaction points, and applied that with an entire globe. "I originally started out just computing coords with the 'detected touch' uv map," he tells me, "but then I found a service on the Internet that lets me find towns and locations close to the coordinates touched." Once you've touched that location on Dedric's spinning globe with your mouse, that data is sent out to Geonames, and returns as exact geographic data displayed on the screen. (Above, that's me finally managing to poke the tiny Hawaiian islands drifting in the Pacific's blue expanse.)
"I don't know how precise you can get," Dedic explains, after I have a few unsuccessful attempts trying to poke my home location. "You can only zoom in so far, and then the pixels just blend out."
"So this is cool," I observe, "but what's the point as you see it?"
Dedric Mauriac textually shrugs. "Well ... mainly just interaction for now. Something to do. Not many things have points in my workshop. They are simply me having fun." But then, I bet others will discern applications of Mr. Mauriac's touchable globe, at least to enhance the fun. Visit his workshop in Hooper-- direct SLURL teleport at this link.
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