UGO

A day in the life of a UGO

August 11, 2007 (03:53 CET)

While I am figuring out how to get UGO going on the mac, I've also been playing around on the Windows side of things with the new functionality of getting a realtime visualisation of your UGO position in Google Earth (earlier post). Its still hacking away, but the experience of seeing your positions materialise "right here, right now" is quite a powerful one when it comes to the immersiveness of a platform like Google Earth (aka virtual worlds, or better, mirror worlds). Below I have included some screendumps of different configurations, using Sketchup as the tool for 3d modelling. Getting my inspiration more from Photosynth than from Second Life, my initial choice on how to represent myself was for a pyramid with the bottom plane directed towards the viewing direction. The first one shown below is one of the initial tests of the new code set next to an "old style" UGO (orientation was not yet taken into account at that time). The other ones are subsequent stages of just having fun flying around and getting a feel of the new functionality using a SpaceNavigator. And of course I couldn't resist playing around with some of the standard 3d models provided by Sketchup. I wish I could show them all here but I guess you get the picture so I've uploaded all the other stills to my Flickr UGO set. (Update 12Aug-> just noticed the settings of my Flickr account prevented the download of full-res images. I changed it into a CC license so now all sizes are available for download/sharing)