Show your slides in realXtend: The easy way

Posted by on February 5, 2009 under howto | Be the First to Comment

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. 

slidesinrex2

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. 

slideobjtexturesettings

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.

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Watch YouTube videos from realXtend

Posted by on January 17, 2009 under howto | Read the First Comment

Now it is possible to watch your favorite Youtube videos from the comfort of a realXtend world. Rendering web pages to a prim or 3D object has been working already from the first realXtend release. Now the realXtend 0.4 release brings the possibility to make the rendered web pages flash content to show in real time.

youtubeinrexTest User watches Guns and Roses “Welcome to the jungle”.

To make this work, you need to make a prim box for the screen and upload a placeholder texture. The texture is used to mark the place of the web page so it can be anything as long as it is jpeg and a small one.

youtubevideo_mediaurlWhen you see the texture at the prim, go to inventory and edit properties of the texture (see example left). Set media URL to http://www.cybertechnews.com/test/gnr.html which is a web page with a black background and the embedded Youtube video - feel free to copy the code if you want to make your own pages. I used “autoplay=1″ parameter to start the video automatically, otherwise the video just stands still.

To make the video show, set the Refresh rate to “60″, which is how many times per second the screen is updated.

Note that the video is not synchronized between viewers, but if you want to share a video with your friend, just restart the video and you will get a simultaneous experience. Simplest way to restart is to go again to texture properties and hit enter at the MediaURL field.

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