New HTML Page Viewer Can Save L$ on Image Uploads
You’ve probably heard about the new page viewing abilities in the most recent Second Life software update. If you haven’t, go check out Torley Linden’s awesome video explaining how it works.
Second Life residents have been begging for real, interactive HTML on a prim (being able to view, click, and actually navigate a web page from inside Second Life instead of in a browser pop up) and this new page viewing option is certainly an awesome first step. In the past, to view a web page inside SL, you’d need to take a screen shot of the page, upload the image, and apply it to a prim (primitive shape, the basic building block in SL). But not any more!
This development is exciting enough but Milosun Czervik (aka Ross Perkins of Virginia Tech) has found a new bonus to the recent update…the ability to view multiple images without having to pay for and upload each image. Milosun recently posted his discovery on the SLED mailing list and explained it so well that I’m copying it here with his permission. Thanks, Milosun!
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As you know, the capability to scroll JPG’s already exists (partly) in any of the low cost/highly useful whiteboards created by Eloise or AngryBeth. Dedric Mauriac has a scripted “web browser” that does it as well, which is nice as it’s easy to set up and displays the URL as hovertext.
BUT… the added step (and cost) has been that one must take screen shot, then upload to SL at a cost of L$10 each. For one of my famous 112 slide presentations, it’d cost $L1,112 to upload (US $4.21), and a great deal of time wasted waiting for them.
Now, however, FreeView/QT seems to do this with JPG images as well. This means we can do this with NO uploads whatsoever (provided you have rights to change the media texture for a given parcel):
1) Save all slides in PowerPoint as JPG images (a nice folder is created on your computer with all the images in it). PPT does this all at once or slide by slide.
2) Upload those images to a web directory (ex: http://www.host.com/slides/)
3) If you want, use Excel’s concatenate function to create a list of all slide locations (ex. Slide1 to Slide112). The syntax example is:
Slide1|http://www.host.com
*Note… I don’t have ‘.JPG’ at the tail end, but it doesn’t matter.
4) Copy this list from Excel and paste onto the Bookmark card in the FreeView flatscreen tv object.
Example…
Slide 1 Title|http://www.host.com
Slide 2 Title|http://www.host.com
Slide 3 Title|http://www.host.com
* note the PIPE SYMBOL between the title and the URL (shift + backslash)
5) Using the video controller dialog box for the FreeView screen, one can scroll back & forth through bookmarks (slides). This allows you to view the “slide show” at NO cost!!
It’s a bit slower than the other options because the UI for FreeView is a bit clunky… but it’s free! The other very cool thing I’ve noticed is that the media texture on the screen does not seem to be slow to rez as I’ve seen other textures on prim.
The potential drawbacks:
a) On group owned land, the FreeView TV is set to group, so anyone (in the group) can scroll and change the screen. This is great if you have stand-alone tutorial slides, and not so great if you don’t want people mucking about with your presentation as you give it. It’s moot point if you own the land… and no others can view the controller. It’s also a non-issue if the group is very small.
b) it does require your audience to know enough to set their preferences to automatically place media content. With noobs, this can take a bit to set up. At ISTE and other events, I’ve seen tutorial cards around that help with this.
This, I’m sure, represents a decrease in revenue for LL (shhh) - but it’s great for those who have students who want to show off reports or pictures or whatever, but do not have scads of L$ lying about to upload.
I’ve tested the above on group land at the ICT Library on Info Island and it works perfectly.. it’s on the rooftop garden.
http://slurl.com/secondlife
You do *not* need the new candidate browser to make it work, but you will need to be in the ICT Wunderkind, Ltd. group (free to join) to use the controls. Leave the group when you’re finished experimenting.”
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