The Mixed Reality Desktop of Qarl Linden

Happy Mixed Reality Monday, everyone; here's an apropos screenshot to start your week off right: it's what Linden Lab developer Qarl Linden sees, when he logs into his desktop computer at work. It's running Second Life, and it's currently displaying his SL office. And his Second Life office, in turn, includes a screen which displays his computer's desktop. Which means it shows you all the icons and applications Qarl's currently running -- including Second Life. Which is displaying his desktop. And so this screenshot, as Qarl tells me succinctly, "[is] my SL display showing my RL display showing my SL display showing .... well, you get the idea." I actually only sort of do, do you?

Image courtesy Qarl; go here to tell him about your now-melting brain.

Comments

[Sioban McMahon]

Nice to see him working on a Mac. There was a while there, about a year ago, that SL was fairly unfriendly to Macs.

[Stacey Franks]

I would love to know what Mac he has :)

[Dedric Mauriac]

Looks a bit like the stuff I was working on a few years ago streaming SL into a video feed.

http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/virtualcasting-from-virtual-worlds-to-virtual-worlds/

[Ari Blackthorne]

Videographers where doing this circa 1981 when video cameras were new. Simply aimk the camera at the television creen that is displaying the video from the video camera.

Fancy to see it applied through the SL viewer, though.

[Osprey]

Can't wait for SpeedTree.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

It's cool in a "why are you making pretty but pointless recursive visuals instead of solving the Alpha bug?" sort of way.

(False-dichotomy logical fallacy included at no extra charge).

[qarl]

> It's cool in a "why are you making pretty but pointless recursive visuals instead of solving the Alpha bug?" sort of way.

because LL actually lets me go home after work. :P

[HeadBurro Antfarm]

Osprey is right - Speedtree is looking good, Qarl ;-)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

"because LL actually lets me go home after work. :P"

Hence the "false dichotomy" disclaimer ;)

It IS a slick trick. It reminds me of the sense of wonder I had as a child standing between two mirrors and seeing an army of myself receeding into the distance on either side.

Something else on my SL wishlist... real reflective surfaces, like mirrors.

[qarl]

> Hence the "false dichotomy" disclaimer ;)

yeah, i know. i still felt the need to stick out my tongue. :P

> real reflective surfaces, like mirrors

that's super-hard realtime. the ocean is a special case b/c it's an infinite flat plane.

we had a hack for a while for arbitrary surfaces, but it had SO many drawbacks that we decided to drop it... (like, it didn't work unless your surface was parallel with one of the X, Y, Z axes.)

you'll have to wait for realtime ray tracing to get good mirrors.

K.

[Net Antwerp]

Real-time raytracing is available on today's GPGPU-capable hardware, as well as a bunch of other visual effects/approximations made possible in real-time a couple of years ago.

[Keith@mozy]

It's nice to see what he's working with. Gives all your readers a nice insight into someone else's work space.

However, I don't think I would want a display like that on my computer. I never quite caught on to moving screen savers either.

It's a world within worlds, a circle inside circles or egg within eggs. Or is it eggs within circles, water within water or anything else that makes sense but can appear confusing at first?