I’ve recently been quite freaked out by the quality of voice recognition technology. OK so my Nintendo DS can recognise when I say four colours (blue, black, red and yellow) and the numbers zero to ten. I can accept this as they are phonetically diverse.
But yesterday I booked a hotel room for Transpocalypse via an automated system. It could recognise my name once said and spelt, it knew my address from the first line and postcode, but what freaked me out most was it recognising the city. They’ve hundreds of locations and it knew where I meant. It even read it back in that scary sub-American “you have been selected for a special offer” voice.
Scary, but better than the old days off,
“Cancel”
“You have selected delete.”
“No. I said cancel.”
“Deleting all work. Are you sure?”
“NO!”
“You have confirmed deletion”
“Nooooooooooooooooooooo!”
Friday, October 6, 2006
And Now For Something Completely Different...
Anchors Away!
Testing our recent idea of anchoring an entire building to a small mover placed underground in order to make the building visibility independant.
Of the buildings so far using this in our world: Ground Zero and Starbucks. Works nicely even when you drop visibility to 30, they remain visible well past 30 meters of your visibility. Also using this idea - the rain particle effect around GZ. Extending the visibility of the rain farther than normally posible with a Particle Effect on it's own.
This proof of concept was put together to show the use of an Anchor ability for objects and particle effects - while the anchor option for Particle Effects should also allow the creator to arbitrarily set its visibility manaually (for effects like weather).
The Anchor checkbox would obviously only be availible for CT and as an option in World Properties (Enable Anchors).
Change of Lighting
Have been tweaking the lighting in our world so it's a bit more realistic for night time (or twilight). You will now notice a Moon in the sky as well as things looking a bit different in our world (we have been working on making the lighting properly reflect night time and moonlight)
Fixed the Arcade
The arcade was mostly not working as of recent, due to the secondary domain address being down. I quickly corrected this and switched the games over to the first domain prefix.
New arcade building sits behind the current one, and is being worked on by Wes to take the place of the one we have now. Hopefully we get a photorealistic arcade machine to go with it :) We'll see.
Testing our recent idea of anchoring an entire building to a small mover placed underground in order to make the building visibility independant.
Of the buildings so far using this in our world: Ground Zero and Starbucks. Works nicely even when you drop visibility to 30, they remain visible well past 30 meters of your visibility. Also using this idea - the rain particle effect around GZ. Extending the visibility of the rain farther than normally posible with a Particle Effect on it's own.
This proof of concept was put together to show the use of an Anchor ability for objects and particle effects - while the anchor option for Particle Effects should also allow the creator to arbitrarily set its visibility manaually (for effects like weather).
The Anchor checkbox would obviously only be availible for CT and as an option in World Properties (Enable Anchors).
Change of Lighting
Have been tweaking the lighting in our world so it's a bit more realistic for night time (or twilight). You will now notice a Moon in the sky as well as things looking a bit different in our world (we have been working on making the lighting properly reflect night time and moonlight)
Fixed the Arcade
The arcade was mostly not working as of recent, due to the secondary domain address being down. I quickly corrected this and switched the games over to the first domain prefix.
New arcade building sits behind the current one, and is being worked on by Wes to take the place of the one we have now. Hopefully we get a photorealistic arcade machine to go with it :) We'll see.
Thursday, October 5, 2006
Bad Mojo Be Damned!
The secondary domain is offline for an extended period of time (vr5online.com) due to compliations concerning the privacy system. I other words, the company screwed it up and we as well as they are unable to reset it properly.
The solution for this is to simply allow it to expire lock, stock and barrel and renew from scratch. In the meantime, the main domain http://www.vr5-online.com is very much operational, and there should be no real drawbacks to the temporary loss of our secondary domain.
In Other News
Autolook is now enabled on the majority of our avatar selection. I know it took us long enough... but finally it's enabled, so your avatar should now move a little more realistically. It definitely made a difference versus the older, stiffer movement.
As a side note, I noticed that the Formal Butch avatar we "borrowed" from COFMeta as well as the Becca avatar look so much better with Autolook enabled on them! Btw- when I say we "borrowed" those COFMeta avs, I mean that they are not resident on our servers, but instead being called directly in the avatar.dat file from the COFMeta OP.
This was done not for the purpose of stealing content from AW, but to demonstrate the ability of reversing the avatar replacement that the SWCity patches do for ActiveWorlds where they add avatars with extra animations for use in Alphaworld, but only people with that patch will see it.
The COFMeta folder in our Avatars list is a working proof of being able to add animations to avatars from other servers and make them also universally seen in a world (as opposed to needing a specific patch).
Just one of the many successful experiments from the City of Nidus ;)
Galaxy Update
It'll take us longer than expected to move over to a galaxy - but we are trying to do this before our world expires in 2007 June. Alot of things going on in VR5 leading up to this, so please be patient. I'll try to keep everyone up to date as I get the information...
Emulation Nation!
Jamie Sanders of vNES fame is currently working with us closly to implement his now popular Java NES Emulator within our world as his own arcade! What does this mean for you? Literally *hundreds* of classic NES titles at your disposal to play in Active Worlds, making the Nidus arcade *the* most comprehensive arcade in any virtual universe!
What about the legality? Well from what we understand, it is illegal to offer ROMS to *download* from a website, thus proliferating piracy. The Java vNES loads the rom files dynamically and allows the user to play the library of games without requireing them to download the files locally, thus remaining legal to implement.
One popular incarnation of this concept is NESCafe, another Java NES Emulator that does essentially the same thing, but with advertising built into the app (which sucks when playing Super Mario 3).
Jamie has expressed interest in building a custom arcade in our world using his vNES, so as time goes on we'll be putting together the pages and files to begin implementing all of the titles :)
Look for it coming soon!
The solution for this is to simply allow it to expire lock, stock and barrel and renew from scratch. In the meantime, the main domain http://www.vr5-online.com is very much operational, and there should be no real drawbacks to the temporary loss of our secondary domain.
In Other News
Autolook is now enabled on the majority of our avatar selection. I know it took us long enough... but finally it's enabled, so your avatar should now move a little more realistically. It definitely made a difference versus the older, stiffer movement.
As a side note, I noticed that the Formal Butch avatar we "borrowed" from COFMeta as well as the Becca avatar look so much better with Autolook enabled on them! Btw- when I say we "borrowed" those COFMeta avs, I mean that they are not resident on our servers, but instead being called directly in the avatar.dat file from the COFMeta OP.
This was done not for the purpose of stealing content from AW, but to demonstrate the ability of reversing the avatar replacement that the SWCity patches do for ActiveWorlds where they add avatars with extra animations for use in Alphaworld, but only people with that patch will see it.
The COFMeta folder in our Avatars list is a working proof of being able to add animations to avatars from other servers and make them also universally seen in a world (as opposed to needing a specific patch).
Just one of the many successful experiments from the City of Nidus ;)
Galaxy Update
It'll take us longer than expected to move over to a galaxy - but we are trying to do this before our world expires in 2007 June. Alot of things going on in VR5 leading up to this, so please be patient. I'll try to keep everyone up to date as I get the information...
Emulation Nation!
Jamie Sanders of vNES fame is currently working with us closly to implement his now popular Java NES Emulator within our world as his own arcade! What does this mean for you? Literally *hundreds* of classic NES titles at your disposal to play in Active Worlds, making the Nidus arcade *the* most comprehensive arcade in any virtual universe!
What about the legality? Well from what we understand, it is illegal to offer ROMS to *download* from a website, thus proliferating piracy. The Java vNES loads the rom files dynamically and allows the user to play the library of games without requireing them to download the files locally, thus remaining legal to implement.
One popular incarnation of this concept is NESCafe, another Java NES Emulator that does essentially the same thing, but with advertising built into the app (which sucks when playing Super Mario 3).
Jamie has expressed interest in building a custom arcade in our world using his vNES, so as time goes on we'll be putting together the pages and files to begin implementing all of the titles :)
Look for it coming soon!
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