Real-world Control Panel for Second Life
Today my good buddy Andy and I finally turned up our little entanglement experiment between Second Life and real life. The box uses an USB-connected Arduino developer kit to read the inputs and control the LED outputs from Andy's program on the host computer. The script in turn communicates with an identical object in Second Life. Changes to the knobs or pushbuttons in the real world are translated to their counterparts in SL, and the objects in Second Life can react by controlling the LEDs on the real world control panel.
I constructed the physical panel and wrote the routines running on the Arduino platform, which has proven to be a fantastic way to quickly prototype these sorts of projects. My thanks to the Arduino team and contributors for making this great platform available to the hobby and art communities!
Andy took care of writing the in world code, the host interface, and crafting the in-world panel. He did a nice job of texturing the knobs using these photos. All in all, it's a neat look at virtual-entanglement!
Another photograph of the box with the LEDs alight. Note the virtual panel being constructed in Second Life on the display. Andy took care of texturing the knobs after this shot was made.. See the panel in Second Life at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pi/112/243/33
Update: Andy had his own views on the topic over at his blog...
Just found this blog post randomly - I'd love to see this at Brooklyn is Watching-- y'all should come over to brooklyn sometime and let me show you the physical installation.
Posted by: jay Van Buren | December 07, 2008 at 03:51 PM
The link you provided looks pretty interesting. Are you looking for a finished product to plug in and go with?
Posted by: William Ward | May 05, 2007 at 12:20 AM
Can you program the Led controller to change color and flash the colors? I am looking for something like this
http://www.lunaraccents.com/technology-programmable-LED-controller.html
with a reasonable price!!!
Posted by: LED Controller man | May 04, 2007 at 04:32 PM
Hi you guys. We'd love to do a story about this for Second Life News Network (www.slnn.com), a Web portal for daily news about SL. Could you e-mail me at marvel.ousley[at]slnn.com and let me know a good time to talk to you? Thanks
Posted by: MarvelOusley | January 24, 2007 at 11:34 AM
This one is using polling via http because if I let XMLRPC send a reply there's a 5 second script lag, and if I don't it's indistinguishable from an error. There are some workarounds for that, but this is a baseline.
Posted by: Andy Fundinger (Ciemaar Flintoff) | January 24, 2007 at 10:35 AM
Any details on the XMLRPC scheme and tips/tricks?
Posted by: Andrew Turner | January 24, 2007 at 10:30 AM
This is awesome. I have been wondering what you were working on. I hope my compulsive clicking of your panel didn't cause any issues.
And I wondered why it wasn't doing anything... Just not doing anything in Pi.
Posted by: otakup0pe Neumann | January 24, 2007 at 09:14 AM