I’ve been tweaking the LookingGlass web site at http://lookingglassviewer.org/. Just another thing to add to the project – learning MediaWiki. But the seem is new so it doesn’t look like the default MediaWiki page. More formatting is needed but that will come with time.

I will be updating my progress programming here and on that site. Manual cut-and-paste at the moment. That is another thing for automation.

To get proper sun and moon lighting, I spent a day adding Caelum. This is an Ogre plugin for sun and moon and precipitation and everything atmospheric. I didn’t quite get it working and as I was looking for solutions I found that the person who created Hydrax (water and oceans) is now building a sky system. I think I might wait to see how that comes out. This means that, for the moment, Caelum build information is in the source tree but the ifdef in LookingGlassOgre is commented out to disable any use of that library.

I am working on an OpenSim/SecondLife compatable viewer. I almost have it to a state that I am going to let the BSD Licensed code loose. I want to get it to the point of being buildable and runnable and not totally sucky before I put the code out. That's not to say it will be anywhere usable or feature complete at that point.

The biggest problem at the moment is performance. I have clearly made some of the noob mistakes when creating a visual application. It disparately needs a manager and scheduler for all of the work queues. The current implementation gets totally overwhelmed when entering a large sim (especially an OpenSim sim since the whole sim contents is thrown at the viewer).

Here are some progress pictures. These are of the Portland Connection sim in SecondLife(r).

LookingGlass	SecondLife(r) Viewer

I listen to the WNYC Radio Lab podcast and last week's was about the musician Juana Molina. She creates music by using a looping machine to add to her presentation: she starts singing and plays her guitar, loops portions of it and has it play back while she sings over it. Layer upon layer is added all in real time until a complex chorus of voices and sounds creates a song.

Back in August, they podcasted about Zoe Keating who does the same thing with a cello: in a real time performance, she plays phrases and layers them into an accompaniment and creates an overall complex and full sound.

This all made me think about how the Internet is new, personal technologies are expanding what an individual can do. I remember talk about how, since tech is getting so complex, only corporation could do innovation -- the garage invention is dead. But now we have people blogging and magnified without the need of a newspaper, we have musicians who can make an orchestra without the symphony and we have directors creating movies without the film studio.

Real innovation still happens at the "bottom" -- one person with an idea. And that one person, with all our new technologies at are available to everyone, can still make a splash. There are two messages there: individual people free to create and technology in the hands of everyone.

In trying to get LookingGlass working with Ogre, I had to figure out how to dynamically load resources (meshes, materials and textures). Ogre’s default methodology is to have everything preloaded. Loading meshes and materials on demand is not obvious. Especially materials.

I've figured some of it out and wrote up Dynamic Loading of Ogre Resources. Hopefully this will save some other people many frustrating hours.