Posted by on February 5, 2009 under howto | 
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.
Posted by on January 28, 2009 under Ideas, howto |
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:
- Application sharing
- Document sharing
- Web co-browsing
- Spatialized voice support (3D audio)
- (Powerpoint) Presentations
- Streaming real time media
- Customizable avatars and rich interaction
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
- Set URL for listeners to “index.html” and presentation URL to “http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/” and URL to perl scripts to “http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/perl/“
- 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.
To control the presentation, open a web browser and point it to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/rexslides.html
Posted by on January 25, 2009 under Ideas, howto |
Collaborative web browsing plays an important role in meetings. Meeting rooms have usually data projectors so that people can plug in their laptops and show slides, documents and web pages to support their message in a meeting.
In realXtend 0.4 it is possible to show web pages with live flash content, like a Youtube video (see CTN article about that). The web page to show is defined in the texture properties as a media URL.
However, it is a bit clumsy to use texture properties to change the web page when there are lot of people attending a meeting and possibly wanting to share something.
CTN built a server side solution to the problem using PHP and javascript.
Follow these steps to test the solution:
- download php and html files (unzip webscreen.zip) and upload them to your web server (if you don’t have a web server, get a free hosting from http://www.000webhost.com/. For professional use CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com.)
- set texture’s media URL to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/webscreen.html (use your own server name here!) and apply the texture to a cube
- open a browser window to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/seturl.php (use your own server name here)
- write a URL (e.g. http://www.realxtend.org) to the text input field and press enter, after a few seconds, the web page shows in realXtend viewer, and the same web page is shown to all participants in the virtual world at the same time.
Extra benefit of this approach is that people who do not have realXtend can also follow the presentation from the same URL using a standard browser (you can test it by using the CTN URLs in the steps above).
If you wish to have several webscreens showing different content, it is easy to copy the same web files to another folder at the web server to separate URLs. To develop the solution further, learn the tricks from this book.
The next topic will be about how to share your Powerpoint slides in realXtend - stay tuned!
Posted by on January 1, 2009 under Uncategorized |
realXtend offers beautiful “Beneath the vawes” world as a default with their server download. It requires some work to clean it up so that you can start to build your own world. Now it is done and CyberTech News offers you a blank rexserver 0.4 download in two flavors:
- Without assets (55M): http://www.cybertechnews.org/downloads/rexserverblank0.4.zip
- With assets (69M): http://www.cybertechnews.org/downloads/rexserverblankwithassets0.4.zip
CTN web page shown at almost empty rexserver 0.4
For the with-asset-version, you can find a CyberTech News page on a TV set at the middle of the empty island… Testuser is also a bit modified and looks like Samuel J. Enjoy!
