Victoria Crater in SecondLife
Most of us harbor the desire to explore the world beyond. For centuries, space, far-off galaxies, exciting nebulas and the solid planets have captured the imagination of people aged young to old. Only a few, very fortunate ones have actually been able to venture forth and personally explore the secrets of the planets. However, with the advent of technology and the information age, it has become possible to explore the world beyond, without ever leaving the comfort of your own living room.
Here, at CoLab, our SecondLife intern has made the first step in this direction. Using the newly popular multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) as a platform, he created a scale model of the Victoria Crater in the sky above CoLab Island. It includes a real representation of the Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, perched at the edge of it. Our intern, Cozmo Yoshikawa in SecondLife, was interviewed by Federal Computer Weekly regarding his role in the creation of the crater, you can find the article here.
*Crater Specifications*
The real life width of the crater is reported as 800 meters in some locations and 730 in others. The digital elevation map that was provided for the project had approximately 1 square meter resolution, which indicates that the real thing is about 800 meters wide at the mouth. The depth is reported as about 70 meters. The elevation data had a top-to-bottom difference in minimum and maximum of about 84 meters. The scale model in SecondLife is a 1:3.5 rendition of the crater.
*The Implementation, from a technical viewpoint*
To begin with, the digital elevation model was sliced, along with the visual texture, into 625 mosaic pieces. It was then run through an in-house script that mapped them to a sculpted plane. Then, a normalization and shifting script went through each tile, performed statistics on it, and then shifted the height values by subtracting the minimum. The minimum was then recorded. (You'll notice that the crater tiles are all at different heights in the sim, because each tile had its minimum subtracted off of its pixel values, but this minimum was then later added back on as the Z-position of the tile itself.) All 625*2 textures were then batch imported into SL through a modified opensource client, and the asset ID strings were assembled into a text file. The xyz data, and the texture asset ID's were imported into an SL notecard, and a custom builderbot, written in LSL, was then used to interpret the data and assemble the crater peices in sequence.
The CoLab Second Life community, composed of talented volunteers, was essential to the implementation of the project and provided much technical input.
Feel free to contact us with any concerns you may have.
