CSC Senior Analyst and SL Blogger Dedric Mauriac writes about his experience with Peek360 and offers his insights and suggestions for it. Read it here

Peek360° is a free application that allows you to take a quick 360 degree look at a location in-world without the need for logging into a Second Life client. The output is delivered as a flash display which you can view with a standard browser and share to others via links and social networking sites. Peek360° was conceived and developed by Avatrian and is now available for public use.

Below is an example view from one of our favorite regions in Second Life…the Japan Chubu sim.

You can create your own views by going to the Peek360° homepage here.

This caught our attention lately–a massive virtual representation of the Yellowstone National Park in ScienceSim, an OpenSim space. Imagine, 1024 regions in a 32×32 grid, all in ONE machine! According to the researchers, in this configuration, it took a full 8 hours for all 1024 regions to completely rez.

Read the entire article here. Thanks goes out to Shenlei Flasheart for sharing the info.

This is a short demo showing Rodion building a Mediterranean-style town street, inspired by the viral “World Builder” video by Bruce Branit. The actual build/primming lasted about 7-8 minutes, and so the video shown here was speeded up by about 1.2 times the normal speed. This video was created specifically for a presentation at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. The talk, demo and question and answer session was given by Dennis Bacsafra on January 22nd to the students and faculty members of the Math and Computer Science department.

Rodion dropped by RMB City on January 10th, 2010 to attend the RMB City 1st Anniversary Celebrations, representing Avatrian LLC. The affair was held in the newly restructured People’s Marketplace, a section of RMB City that evokes the public marketplaces of China.

Highlighting the event was installation of Erica Dubach, a.k.a. E3a Digital, as RMB City’s 4th Mayor. Born in 1969 in Switzerland, Erica Dubach travels the digital world in search of the new and interesting, both professionally and personally. As E3a Digital in Second Life, she has connected the virtual world to the real world using RFID technology. RMB City is destined to achieve the same leap in the context of art. As Erica in Real Life, she is a PhD candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich) since February 2007, and a senior researcher in the Auto-ID Lab University of St. Gallen / ETH Zürich since February 2009.

A special announcement about an exciting new mission, the RMB City Code, was also made by the new Mayor. China Tracy and her baby China Sun graced the occassion, as well as some SL notables, among them, Hamlet Au. Mayor E3a also gave a speech about the increasing relevance of virtual worlds. This sequence was filmed during the dancing that followed the presentations.

Avatrian and the Center for Educational Technologies (CET) staff held a meeting in the 9-sim Avatria continent, on the Opensim-based Avatrian Grid. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce the CET Team to OpenSim’s features and potentials. Bonji recorded some footage of the meeting as it transpired and turned it into a short music video seen below.

Hamlet Au recently published a listing of the most popular sims in Second Life. This was based on the views received by the sims in Koin-Up. And, it is nice to see that RMB City is on the list at #17. RMB City is an online art community in the virtual world of Second Life. The four sim development explores the creative relationship between real and virtual space, and is a reflection of China’s urban and cultural explosion. RMB City is developed by Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy) in collaboration with Vitamin Creative Space and Avatrian, LLC. You can read more about RMB City’s history, evolution and current events at the official website here.

This is a nice incentive for affiliate websites from Linden Labs. I am glad to see they the company is proactively marketing the SL platform and recruiting new users. This will be good for the community. Although, we’re not sure if those banners are something we’d like to embed in our homepage. It does not look very appealing. Subjective though as it may be, it can make a website look cheap if inserted in there willy-nilly. See these banner options for yourself here below…

Thanks to Dusan for posting about this in his blog.

This is a very interesting application of OpenSim. Because the open source platform is free, the developers have customized the interface to have the navigation controls and display necessary on the 3D guide for visitors. Thanks to Hamlet for posting. You can read more at his NWN blog here…