Chris's Random Ramblings
Kelly and I have been thinking about moving back to Adelaide some time in the future, and have been looking at houses on the websites for a while. Something that fits in pretty well with what we want came up recently, and we put in an offer which was accepted. The house is in Hectorville, within walking distance of both my parents and brother's house.
We plan on renting out the place for a couple of years, then knock it down and build our dream house before moving back. We've been reading a lot of books on sustainable houses, and hope to get a good solar passive design. I think it should be possible to end up with a house that needs no artificial heating in winter and little cooling in summer. We're off to see an architect who specialises in sustainable house design next week for some advice and feedback on our very rough house design.
Kelly and I were able to head over to Melbourne on Friday to see the real Rod Laver Arena setup for the Australian Open event and meet some of the other IBM people working on the event. Arriving at the grounds to pick up our accreditation I was able to walk through the real life gate entrance in exactly the same place as seen here in the SL version.
Garden square was configured a bit differently for the Australian Open than when we made a brief visit in December.
The Match Update Centre in Second Life is quite different from the one in real life, but some designs work much better in Second Life. In future it will be interesting to think of more 3-D ways of representing data which is available.
There has been some talk about how you can "be the player" in the simulations. What happens is you can have yourself automatically moved into positions where a player would have to be to play a shot during the rally. So during a game your viewpoint is that of the player and you can see the ball heading towards you, then away from you after "you" hit it. Your viewpoint then moves smoothly to the next position ready to respond for the next shot. Ghosting of the ball makes it easier to follow the play.
Screen captures can't represent how immersive this experience can be, but I don't have any movies available of it. Some people have described it as changing the nature of how you can experience a sporting match.
And its great to see that just a few days of the client being released under an Open Source licence that a Linux PowerPC port is available. The power of Open Source development at work :-)
I'm headed up to Sydney for LCA 2007 on Tuesday night. If you're there - don't miss out on the Hackfest on Thursday afternoon. We'll have fun questions and some great prizes including a Quad processor G5 machine, for just a couple of hours of concentration.