In the previous slideshow howto article, the process of bringing a powerpoint slideshow to a realXtend virtual world was explained. The process was, although technically sound in many ways, also a bit cumbersome.
There is an easier way, especially if your slides are not top secret.
In the picture above you can see the result. I am taking advantage of the webscreen I presented in an earlier article - Browse the web together in realXtend.
The process is simple. Upload the slides to http://www.slideshare.net on your account. You get a URL for every slideshow. To protect your slides from public viewing, it is possible to define slideshows private, and you can get a URL for them too.
Now use that URL with the webscreen or as a texture MediaURL to show the first slide of the presentation inside a realXtend world. Now there is one problem to overcome - there is a lot of stuff that does not belong to the slide, just like with Youtube videos (check also previous article Watch YouTube videos from realXtend). Now it is time to use slide offset and repeat -properties to show only the slide portion of the web page. Take a look at this picture to see the exact settings you need to do. As a sidenote, this works with Youtube as well.
To change the slide, you need to append slash + slide number at the end of the URL. Look at the first screenshot to see an example. This can be done using the webscreen, or simply manually changing the MediaURL.
First reaction of many people to virtual worlds is that they begin to think about possible applications. One of the most common idea is the meeting application.
It is so strongly in peoples minds, that if a virtual world platform does not support some basic technology enablers for the meeting use case, the platform is considered useless.
The key technology enablers for successful virtual meetings are:
I believe that moving our current 2D User Interface paradigms to virtual worlds is only an intermediate step towards true 3D applications. In true 3D applications brainstorming, training, planning and many other (collaborative) activities are not done in front of flat virtual screens. The real 3D approach takes current strengths and weaknesses of virtual world technologies into account (as I wrote in an earlier post - Virtual world advantage over real life).
But for now, it is still important to get basic things working as people have tons of legacy Powerpoint presentations and other 2D material. Follow the following steps to use your ppt files inside realXtend:
Open your .ppt file in OpenOffice Impress, check the slides that everything looks good
Make a new empty folder for the resulting files
Select file->export, type “rexslides.html” for the file name and “export as html” to the new empty folder
Select “New design” -> next -> “Webcast“
Now you can select ASP or Perl solution, depending on your web server platform - Perl should work for most - the rest of the steps assume perl. You need a web server for this to work; CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com
In the next screen, use jpegs and set the resolution to highest: 1024×768, in the next dialog you can save the design if you wish
copy txt files to the /webcast/perl/ folder at your web server, and set them writable (permissions to 666)
copy pl files to the /webcast/perl/ folder at your web server, and set them executable (permissions to 755)
copy all the other files to /webcast/ folder at your web server
Now you are ready to use the presentation in realXtend. Just use a texture’s media URL property, set it to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/ and apply the texture to your favorite object.
A virtual radio station was built using realXtend 0.31 platform. It was connected to a real amateur radio station to enable remote control.
The text at the web site states that: “In this live demonstration new techniques of Internet and the first ever global community of amateur radio will allow mixing the edge of virtual world and real life when operating remote located HF-radio station thru virtual world. In demonstration virtual world is executed with realXtend, next generations open source platform for virtual worlds.”
radio Arcala antennas, aerial view
This kind of use of virtual worlds for real world control is also demonstrated by Implenia, a swiss construction firm. I believe that the real world control cases offer interesting possibilites for virtual worlds in the future. One of the realXtend project’s core missions was, and still is to enable good interfaces between real and virtual, to enable applications just like this.
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