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Sunday 2 December 2007

Bringing the sky down to SL Earth

Continuing to look for ways of using Second Life as part of my teaching, not so long ago I decided to put a new skybox above my place at Shimmer Island that would act as a meeting place and resource center for an astronomy venture that I am moving forward as part of a more general enrichment programme. The Skybox I called the Astro-Park, and went about gathering and producing some suitable features to install, like a small observatory and the planets of the Solar System. I experimented with making a simple holodeck for the Milky Way, and a deep sky projector that casts images of nebula and galaxies into the dark night sky.

My latest addition to all this is an interactive star chart. If like myself you have occasion to look at the night sky on charts, you may have become aware that a lot more attention is being paid these days, particularly so with those appearing in popular magazines, by the inclusion of colour and images. And so my thought was, can I use SL to make them both 3D and animated?

Well this is the project so far.


At particular points on the chart you will find small 3D models of stars, planets etc. Just touch on any one of these to open and close the object. In the case of planets and stars, (not to scale), they will expand and rotate, as this happens the adjacent screen fills with an accompanying information slide. Guessing what the surface of a distant yellow orange star looks like has I must admit required some imaginative license.


For meteor showers I decided to develop a particle emitter, which I think looks reasonably convincing. I am still thinking about using short introductory voice-overs. If you feel like teleporting over for a browse around please feel free and drop me an IM by way of any feedback and if you would like to join the Shimmer Island group.

Bye for now Skipper

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