to create some buttons inside Second Life. They are virtual buttons that you click while you are in the Second Life environment and that sends a signal that connects out to a Web server which was running a special little piece of code that then connected to a physical device, in this case I used a fan, and you could turn it on or off. So that means that from inside the virtual world you can turn on or off devices in the physical world, so we have this bi-directional communication.
Can you describe how you used the RFID tag implanted in your arm to unlock a door inside Second Life?
It's actually a long chain of events. One of the things I am trying to demonstrate to people in my tutorial is that they really only need to learn a series of small building blocks, and then they can use those blocks and join them together. It's very much like seeing the world as a big Lego set; you start thinking of the world as a whole lot of things you can rearrange to do what you want to do, and if you can break it down into small simple chunks then you can rearrange them in different ways.
In that particular demonstration I used a small implanted RFID tag typically used in cats and dogs, and an RFID reader. The reader interrogates the tag and gets its ID code, that then talks through a USB connection into the computer. In this particular case the object was a representation of a door, and the door was listening for messages, specifically telling it that it needs to unlock. So the end result was that when the correct tag was swiped, the RFID reader sends the message up the USB connection, which then is converted to a network socket using a little script called ser2net, which is then read by the PHP script, which then connects to the Second Life gateway, and then connects to the object, which sends it the message, and then the object unlocks. It sounds like a house of cards and in some ways it is, it's a whole lot of small building blocks but the good thing is the building blocks themselves are very simple and you can rearrange them to do all sorts of things.
What kind of applications could this communication between the real and virtual world have?
The interesting thing is that once these building blocks have been put in place, people start using them for all sorts of amazing things that you have never even thought of. One fairly well known example is the work that IBM has done over the last year or two with the virtual representation of the Wimbledon Centre Court inside Second Life. What they did was build a representation of Wimbledon Centre Court inside Second Life, and linked it up to a system that acquires data from Hawkeye and various other on-the-ground systems, and then have that data fed into Second Life to represent the actual physical event inside Second Life, so you can walk onto center court at Wimbledon inside Second Life and watch a representation of the event that is taking place in the real world. Another really interesting example: last year I was in the US doing a tutorial on hardware hacking inside Second Life, and one of the tutorial participants came up to me afterwards and explained to me that he was a mining safety engineer. His idea was to use Second Life to build a complete representation of the mine environment that he works in, and then acquire telemetry data such as positioning data from trucks, loaders and the various machinery inside the mine, and then feed that in real time back into the Second Life environment and have it as a real time representation of what is going on in the mine. So as a mine
Post new comment