Second Life: Freya Ophelia

I had been trying to create animations with QAvimator but, even after much research and contemplation, I still felt like the project needed more direction. Astro Pow suggested tapping into other features of Sl that an avatar could respond to, such as the landscape, or the proximity of other avatars. I asked one of my SL friends if it was possible for avatars to sense such things, and he gave me a great object, which, lo and behold, also had the script up for viewing. The object is a radar that can be worn on your avatar. Once worn, you can click on other avatars and the radar will tell you their proximity and also the proximity of the other avatars around. This means CG and I could create different animations as responses to the proximity and number of other avatars around. For example, we could make an animation of an avatar fainting, and tell that animation to automatically play when "x" number of avatars are "y" distance away. It's a slight shift from the study of movement to the study of personal space, but the objective of creating unique animations and implementing them through scripting still applies. We have our work cut out for us, but now that we have a strong sense of direction I feel like we can tackle it.

To add some substance to our final project I've started researching how movement (specifically walking) has evolved over time. I figure understanding and possibly recreating the stages of movement through animations could help me understand what a future way of walking may entail. I have to be careful not to stay too true to reality though. Second Life is unique in that it's NOT limited to reality. Plus, if I was simply trying to predict and animate how a human may walk in the future, I certainly wouldn't use a program as simple as Avimator, I would use something like magentic based motion capture. What I'm hoping is that this research will give me a base of knowledge and spur some ideas of how to create a unique state of movement relative to the virtual SL environment.

On a side note, check out these adult siblings who can only walk on all fours that I stumbled across while researching. It's like reverse evolution. Hum.

So I found a script that reassigns the avatar movement keys (up and down arrows) to control an object instead of an avatar. Though I don't know exactly how to use it, I think this is going to be key in our project. With this script we can, hopefully, assign the movement keys to control the playing/stopping of an animation.



if ( change & held & CONTROL_FWD )
{ // the "move forward" control has been activated.
if( position.z < (startPosition.z + 10.0) )
{
llSetPos( llGetPos() + < 0, 0, 1.0 >); // move up
}
}
else if ( change & held & CONTROL_BACK )
{ // the "move backward" key has been activated.
if( position.z > groundLevel + 1.0 )
{
llSetPos( llGetPos() + < 0, 0, -1.0 >); // move down
}