Second Life, with graphics, on the iPhone?
February 6, 2010 6 Comments
I’ve had the Touch Life app on my iPhone for a while, though I tend not to use it much, since not being able to move around (apart from teleporting) or see what is around you (apart from a map view) means you don’t get anything like the full SL experience.
However when I read about the Peek360 service from Avatrian, which lets you view SL via a web interface, I figured that there might be a way of making the mobile SL experience a bit more satisfying.
Step 1: Log into Touch Life and teleport to where you want to go. Note the region and the coordinates. Log out.
Step 2: Launch Safari and go to the Peek360 page. Enter the coordinates noted above, and your email address. Note the estimate that is given for when your image will be ready (from 4 to 30 minutes the times I did it).
Step 3: Log back in to Touch Life (if you want to be in the picture), then wait for the period mentioned above. Log out.
Step 4: Check for the email from Peek360, and follow the link to the picture taken by the bot they sent to the coordinates you gave.
The rather disappointing result of this cumbersome process can be seen below:
(In the spirit of this experiment I posted this with the WordPress iPhone app, and I don’t know how to rotate the screenshot.)
Not quite a killer app then. It might work better on a device that allowed multiple processes, and ran flash.
If I was smart enough I could probably set my desktop to log in to SL, then feed screenshots to a web page that I could access with my iPhone, with some sort of remote-access facility to allow me to control the viewer. The frame rate would have to be pretty slow, but it should be playable.
[Update: someone already did this of course, two years ago in fact.]
Second Life Shrink 
Hi Zombie,
I appreciate the write up that you did. When we were developing the Peek360 app, availability of the output in the iPhone is one of those features that we want to include. The current version of Peek360 already displays the panoramic view in flash. However, flash is not supported in the iPhone because explicit licensing issues between Apple and Adobe. Apparently, Adobe is coming up with a version of flash that is supposed to work in the iPhone. But, we have yet to see if that will really push through. Your suggestions are very helpful. And, we would consider putting together a version of Peek360 specific to the iPhone platform. That would just take a bit of development time.
Cheers,
Chenin
Don’t foget us Windows Mobile users (I think Flash works in the Opera Mobile 10 browser I have)
Could you include an option to receive the output in jpg form?
@Johnny,
Do you mean just plain snapshot images instead of a 360 degree panorama?
Yes, maybe 4 pictures, North, South, East & West. The panorama view is cool, but snapshots are easier to share with people.
Would it be technically possible to set up a live feed of pictures from SL, updating every few seconds, like a webcam? I guess that would tie up your bot in one place, but you could do it for events like concerts, so people could watch without having to download the SL viewer.
As an f.y.i. I’m currently running “Mobile Grid Client” on my Droid phone, which lets me log in to SL but not move about 😉 My zombie avatar can chat, IM, TP, and people can happily push my avatar around to great amusement. Of course, I can TP elsewhere if I wish. I’ll be commenting on MBC News later this week and hopefully have an article for the Metaverse Tribune. So far, it’s a curious experience – being there but NOT being there! I’m thinking of creating a group called “Droid Zombies” so that I – and others – can have “Droid Zombie” hovering above my head so folks understand why I seem so passive 😉