Raven's Roost

Gadgets ‘N Gear: The Universe is Wider

// July 10th, 2009 // Gadgets, SecondLife

… than our view of it (Henry Thoreau).

Welcome to the many universes of life online. There is Second Life, Plurk, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and so much more.

How does this apply to gadgets? Well, let’s examine the wider reality of “everything else online.” Since Steller Sunshine joined SL in 2002 the Net has been a constantly evolving environment. Nonetheless, SL scripters have found ways to incorporate the rush of online services into SL.

Case in point: Calendar Cogs from Mechanized Life.

Originally developed by Alidar Moxie and picked up and evolved by CodeBastard Redgrave, Calendar Cogs represents, functionally and technically, a best in class bridge between SL and the other universes online (in this case Google Calendar).

Why?

Why calendars in SL? Well, if you’re a club owner, role play promoter or store owner, you’ll likely have a regular event schedule that you want your regulars current on. If you’re a hard core SL addict, you probably want to be reminded of when the latest SL events are happening.

Google calendars are free. There are a lot of features offered by Google without any in-world capability at all. Calendar Cogs enables you to start bringing that information in-world.

The System

The core of Calendar Cogs is a server that is hosted off-world by Mechanized Life. It talks to the Google calendar system (1 or more calendars) and then ships the events on those calendars to in-world displays.

Mechanized Life adds functionality on the server side too, enabling aggregation of multiple calendars into a single feed into SL.

The Boards

There are two boards available for sale, regular and super. Super comes in a monster 20m wide (max) format, the regular board is smaller. In my rush to be thorough, I bought both boards, only to get an IM from Codie that if you got the SuperBoard you didn’t need them both, accompanied by a refund.

SuperBoard is a whopping 20m wide, but it can be rezzed in smaller configurations. It’s the smaller configurations that makes it redundant with the regular Calendar Cog board.

These display in crystal clear text the upcoming events on your venue’s calendar. Update your google calendar in a browser, and watch the boards update. They are modifiable, so go wild.

If you have a venue that regularly hosts events, this is a great system to use for putting those events up, front and centre. Recent work has dropped the prim count down on these displays (32 and 33 prims) which makes them the most prim efficient text display boards of their size in SL.

The HUD

Also pictured above (lower right) is the CalendarCogs Hud, which can bring multiple calendars into a single pop up and minimizable display on your viewer. This is where the power of the system kicks in, because with the server pulling many calendars into one event feed for you, you are looking at your personal events as well as the events of your fave venues.

The HUD will play a reminder sound, so if you’re deep into partying or design and need to go get your daughter from daycare (or hit your fave DJ’s show), it’ll nudge you.

The other major power of the HUD is that it can actually update your Google calendar with new events that are added via channel chat. IMHO, this could get a lot easier than the current mechanisms but I can see this getting huge as capabilities are added.

The Kiosks

The Kiosks are an interesting simplification of the board. They display, on a rotating schedule, the upcoming events for the calendar they are configured to read.

When you click them, they can provide an information notecard (suggestion – tell your customers how to find your club’s calendar of events to include on their hud) as well as a link to xstreetsl to buy the hud (250L).

What struck me about the kiosks offered by Mechanized Life vs. so many other kiosk vendors is the variety and creativity of each individual kiosk design. That includes a simple, invisible box that can be wrapped around any object. Simple. Brilliant. You should have thought of it, and you know it.

I Want More

I know how I like something. I start coming up with a long list of things that could be added and bore the designer to tears with IM’s about what would be cool.

It would be cool if:

• This system cost 1L. It sure doesn’t – but for individual use, the hud is only 250L.
• Events could be displayed as “time from now” – think “in 10 mins.”
• When adding events on the HUD, I could say “tonight, 10pm, Party.” I can’t. It’s a multi-line input process.
• There were so many clubs and venues offering Google calendars in-world that I never needed to read a group notice again to catch a cool act or sale. The day might come though.

There were bugs, yes. Type “reset” not “Reset” as the prompt says.

But as an example of how to bridge the online universes, Calendar Cogs can’t be beat.

Originally posted at ShoppingCartDisco.Com