The Observatory at Greenwich UK

I have uploaded my build for the 28 inch refractor housed at the Greenwich observatory to the outworldz.com site. The telescope itself  was made by Sir Howard Grubb of Dublin 1893. The instrument, which by the way is still in place and the building open to public view; well worth a visit if you are in the area at any time. The refractor is the largest of its type in the UK and remains one of the largest in the world. The build comes as two uploads, the observatory itself and the telescope assembly. The spiral staircase is a little on the tight side for movement and so I would recommend that upon entering the building you zoom the camera in close to your avatar. The telescope assembly should be placed on the second floor which is in the dome area.


If you have any questions, then contact Skipper Abel in Second Life.

The Old Gasworks

My build of the old gas works is now available at the outworldz site. The build downloads as a zip file made up of a number of folders each having separate components, in this way you can include all or some, plus have the option to use separately, they include:-

Coal Shovel
Coal Trolley




Furnace block
Gasometer
Gas works compound
Gas works office
Pipes
Tool shed

The office block has two floors connected by a staircase and I have included transparency effects on windows, however I have not included any office furniture. The build circa 1930-40 and was used as part of a sim project for my students.

I have included a CC license for this, please feel free to download and use, any comments welcome, enjoy. Should you have any questions then IM Skipper Abel in Second Life


Bye for now

Virtual ships

My builds of two coastal steamers recently uploaded to outworldz seem to be growing in popularity. The  SS Southern Star coastal steamer  shown here, is a medium size cargo carrier vessel circa early 20th century. If you are building a dockland scene at your sim then you may find this is a useful asset. The boat will rez as two separate object, so once they are in-world simply align and link.

The North Star form the same period is a smaller build and will rez as a single object. I used both of these vessels as part of my own dockside feature in one of my recent sims produced for Foundation Degree students.

Please feel free to visit the outworldz site and download a copy and if you have any questions, then contact Skipper Abel in Second Life and please see accompanying CC licence, enjoy.

AI bot for C#

Having read the book Robot Proof recently by Joseph E. Aoun that looks into the implications for Higher Education in the age of Artificial Intelligence, I decided to break with my tradition of posting prep notes for the coming academic year on our vle and create a conversational agent using the Pandorabot platform. My students can access the bot either from the web and below you can see a screen shot of the page.

Or meet-up with the agent, Tether Gistnut in SecondLife, by the way the name is an acronym if anyone would like to have a go a cracking it. The image below shows my landing point in SecondLife with the teleport board just to the right.

Just touch on the board and you will be transported to Tethers space station on the planet Mars, you may like to try and have a conversation about that.

Once you are there, get close enough and Tether will home in for a chat. One of the great advantages of the virtual world here is that you will a 3D persona of the bot and you can be with others in the conversation. You will also find that Tether is able to offer short video tutorials for C# that display on the media screen. This is proving to be a fun and popular implementation, so do feel free to teleport over and give the facility a try. If you have any questions then please IM me Skipper Abel in SecondLife. Bye for now and enjoy.