Building with Naali

I have been working on build mode for Naali for some time now. We have had build functionality for a long time with the 'Object Edit' UI. At some point it became a bit too crowded and other tools like component editor started popping out. We tought that we need some central place where you have your build tools. Anyways it's nice to have your normal UI on where you communicate with others and interact with the world, and another where you build your world with nice tools. I decided to make a new scene so I could have all the screen space for myself. When you enter build mode all your normal Naali UI will hide and the build tools come out.

I think the build mode has now ported most features from python Object Edit tool and it combines your inventory and other build tools into one work space. There are still bugs but you can already do some interesting things with it. We are trying to move to using entity components to add features into world objects. I've made a video that shows you some components as light and web content on a object and also other stuff like how to use URLs from web or from your webdav inventory as your 3D models, textures and sounds.

Here is the youtube link, I recommend wathing it in HD and full screen so you can actually see what I'm doing with the UI. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifJtJreQIZg

When my mouse is out I'm copying URLs from my text editor. Most urls are from my public dropbox, that I found to be a very interesting build tool where you keep your assets. When you update your mesh there, everyone will get the latest (if they clear their Naali asset cache first for that mesh, we are looking into how to automaticly do this via timestamp or something similar). You can too build with my meshes/textures as they are public with dropbox:

Sphere:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3589544/building/meshes/geosphere4500.mesh http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3589544/building/textures/MRAMOR6X6.jpg

Penguin:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3589544/building/meshes/penguin.mesh http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3589544/building/textures/penguin.jpg

The things you see in the video will be available in the Naali 0.3.1 release that we are going to make next week. Please let me know what you think and what central things you might be missing.

P.S. Seems like youtube didn't like my music choices and has desided to block the video for Germany. Here is the direct link to download the video for our German fans and others too:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3589544/building/realXtend-Naali_world-building.x264.avi

Best Regards,

Jonne Nauha

realXtend developer

3D in the 3D Internet

If you're browsing the 3D Internet in 3D, is it a 6D or a 9D experience? What about if you're browsing the 3D Internet in 3D in a CAVE where you're surrounded from at least 3 directions with walls full of graphics, 9D or 27D?

Ok, back to business. Philosophy is best left to philosophers, I was just momentarily carried away when I saw the latest Naali development version running with anaglyphic stereoscopic rendering. If you have red/green glasses, you can check out the result from the attached screenshots.



On another note we've also been working on CAVE rendering. Tests with two screens have been pretty promising, now we're waiting for an adapter to be shipped from Germany so that we can test with three.

From the previous posts you've already seen how Naali can be run on a mobile device and I have to admit that it has been fascinating to see the development in the other end of the computer power spectrum as well. Now it's possible to pick up Naali and go if you have a high-end mobile phone and if you get your hands on a CAVE system (they're not very easy to come by), you will have a very powerful immersive experience.

The 3D rendering option will be released in the next binary (0.3.1) at the end of this month, the code is of course already available.

Nokia & Intel establish first joint research lab in Oulu

As many of you probably know, most of realXtend development has been done in three companies based in Oulu, Finland. LudoCraft and Evocativi (then ADMINO technologies) have been involved since the beginning in 2007, Playsign joined the project officially in 2009.

We were all happy to hear the news and honored about the opportunity to present realXtend at the event when Nokia and Intel decided to found the joint research lab at the Center for Internet Excellence. Many of the realXtend developers have graduated from or are still studying at the University of Oulu where the CIE resides, which naturally leads to us having good contacts there. Not to mention a degree of pride for having two industry giants choose Oulu as a location for the joint research center.

Here's a couple of links to more information:
Official CIE website
Nokia blog
Intel blog
Maxping articles by a former realXtend program manager Jani Pirkola

Naali 3d canvases & mediaurl handling

This text was originally sent to the realxtend-dev mailing list.

Thanks to Jonne's efforts recently, showing qt widgets as textures in the 3d scene in Naali is back working again. And the old textureprop/genericmessage mediaurl handling that I wrote using it in December is now enabled in develop and uses that new implementation for display.

I had a little fun with a custom use of this yesterday -- this video shows a html+js animated webpage as the texture of avatar's shirt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikh9ZrJ_aaQ . The webpage used there is http://bubblemark.com/dhtml.htm which is good for fps testing, has an fps meter for the own drawing. In my setup had refreshrate 20fps for the 3d view, and naali on linux kept running >50fps, while the qwebview was running bubblemark with defaults at 40-50fps (external window). All looked and felt smooth, and was fun to resize the 2d view to scale the bubbles up in the texture :)

The EC_3DCanvas is basically identical to the EC_UICanvas implementations that was in the old qtmodule last year, but instead of the uicanvases we had then for both 2d & 3d display, this takes the qwidget directly as a param. But input, which worked fully with the old system back in October or so, is not yet implemented at all. Dealing with the focus etc. is the tricky part that Jukka has been investigating.

The actual mediaurl handling nor the 3dcanvas itself don't yet have any UI for opening the same widget for 2d display, where input works. My test uses little custom code that put to command.py. I leave it there, so in the upcoming 0.2.2 release if someone wants to play similarily can go to this line in pymodules/usr/command.py: if 0: #webview as 3dcanvas . Change 0 to 1, and press alt-. inworld to see it. You can change the urlstring in the code snippet there, and modify the submesh/material indexes too (default is [0], so assigns to the first mat index of the user's avatar). This test code is local only, not synched in any way, so only you see it. The 2d view of the widget this code opens is an external window.

A use case for mediaurls is where the webview is showing something like etherpad or google docs, which updates live in the inworld view, but which can also be opened for editing. We plan to use this in an inworld rex testing workshop with the French Ener team next week. The workaround with current code is to put a server side script to the same object that is having the mediaurl to send a LoadURL command when the object is clicked. That will give two separate webviews, where scrolling the 2d one doesn't affect how the 3d one is scrolled or anything. Just now realized that that is the desired behaviour probably anyway, so your inworld view keeps showing the same that the others are seeing too. But still some UI for opening any 3dcanvas for 2d view is probably good, in client side without needing custom server side logic .. with a
mouseclick or something.

How to scale, offset etc. arbitrarily sized web pages by default etc. is AFAIK a bit of an open question still. Do defaults work ok or should that be configurable? I haven't looked yet how the new shared media thing in slviewer works.

Besides the old rex mediaurl genericmessage handling, I also started writing now a EC_WebView as a test, using the new Attribute system in Naali which gives automatic net sync of component data. This would be much simpler and robust than the texture mediaurl handling, and also allow adding new features easily .. like synching the scroll offset when
desired or something.

~Toni

P.S. oh and the use case for showing something animated in the avatar's shirt is another request from Francois -- have videoconferencing work so that participants video shows in the av t-shirt, while the av face etc. remains for av animations etc. I had thought of having avatars with box heads where the video shows where the face is, but agreed that his idea is better :) .. should be easy now with the comms module video call videos, 'cause they are already shown using a qwidget. And Francois was thinking it could be also just showing a webcam image of the avatar's user, doesn't necessarily have to be naali which sends the video. And of course doesn't have to be the full shirt texture, I guess putting a video/webview plane as an attachment to the chest can work simply and well?

P.S.2 about video in these webviews: qwebview doesn't support flash out of the box, so youtube etc. doesn't work now. That's why I used the bubblemark html+js thing for fps testing. Hopefully qwebviews get html5 video tag support soon (and youtube etc add support for something else
than h264 so that open source software can show the videos?). Using a qvideowidget should work, but I don't know what formats+codecs are supported there - Matti K. etc. I guess know based on the video calls work.

Naali on the Nokia N900

If your not a big reader skip to the bottom and at least check out the video!

...

I bought a Nokia N900 phone recently. It's a great device and has a lot of potential with the linux based Maemo5 OS and the processing power. First I made some simple small application in Qt to test how it's done and learned a lot. The thing was that these application didn't do or show anything that could be useful for anyone.

Hmm... why not build Naali for that thing? Is it too heavy to run, what about the 3D rendering? What about building Ogre and all the other dependencies? Only way to find out is to give it a try. I had a 4 day easter holiday (extended weekend) coming up so I started the home project then. I made slow but steady progress during these days. Building ARM versions of Ogre and all the deps were the biggest challenge for sure.

Naali itself didn't need that much work, just disabling some modules and I got myself the first build. As an end result I had Naali that started from the terminal and opened a QMainWindow that had ogre rendering to it. The UI was not showing, the window was just black. Oh... I also had one pissed girlfriend for not spending the holiday with her. She watched/listened me swear and curse on the computer for days, thanks Susanna for putting up with me ;)

On the next workday I showed this "thing" to my co-workers. Didn't get that good of a welcome as... well it didn't do anyting. So next few days I worked on actually showing something and doing a login. I made a simple timer into rexlogic to blast a hardcoded login away when Naali was done loading. And what do you know, it went in and showed me a bringht yellow Audi world. As I later discovered it was the EnvironmentModule doing this, it also crashed the viewer every time terrain was fully loaded. So I disabled the module, after that everything started to load and most importantly look good with the GLES rendering. Of course the sky was black and terrain had no texture due to disabling the module, but our target world is indoors so that didn't matter at the moment.

Next I showed this thing at work and then I got some peoples interest peaking. Then it became my job to make this thing "working" and in demo shape in 1-2 weeks. I took the challenge, did my best and here is the result.

The video demos everything I've managed to do so far specifically for the Maemo platform. This includes removing the normal Naali UI and remaking a simple UI for the interactions that we were interested in, without obstructing the world view too much. Some small adjustments in the window creation. I also tweaked the input system to work with a touch screen and made some special camera controls. Probably I missed something, small changes were required here and there.

Check out the video at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP7zty5Kg7g

Best Regards,

Jonne Nauha

realXtend developer

Using Facebook chat with Naali

Since Facebook opened its chat to Jabber/XMPP clients, it has been available to be used with Naali. Now you already can have your Facebook friends list in Naali and chat with people with it. Voice chat, however, doesn't work, because the Facebook chat doesn't support it. You can view your jabber id and server settings from the Facebook guide.

New UI in development

The new Naali platform is still some way behind the original realXtend viewer when it comes to feature completeness. It seems that our original predictions were correct, however, and the new technology enables us to create new features and fix issues at a high rate. One of the aspects we will be looking into a lot more in the near future is the user interface.

Until now UI design has been driven by the need to have some kind of a way to access the functionalities mostly for testing purposes. After the release of the 0.1 version (Don't forget to pick yours here) we will be concentrating a bit more on the UI side. Here's a brief explanation on the new approach by Jonne Nauha (typos are all mine):

Ether concept

We have had some actual UI design meetings now and decided on some high level consepts. One of them is "ether space" versus "inworld space". Th e aim is to have "ether" as the view where you land in when you launch Naali. It will be the place to make logins, create new avatars, create new worlds and possibly access tools/settings for the viewer. We would like to get rid of the "write your information to these text fields" approach. Of course this is somewhat necessary when creating avatars /worlds, but in basic use the workflow should be "I'll pick this avatar, I'll pick this world, ok lets go" -type of thing.

We tried to think of a simple and at the same time nice looking and inviting thing, so we started prototyping a "flip book" type of thing that resembles iTunes cover flow, but for virtual worlds. Me and Mikko Alaluusua have worked on this for a few days now and have got something together already. We did this out of Naali codebase with QtCreator and used pure Qt, namely the Qt animation framework is used heavily. The cards get loaded into a scene that is shown in a full screen graphics view, so it will be easy to port into Naali.

The fps in my capture software was too low to show the animations fluently and somehow it altered the colors too, but you should be able to get the idea. The navigation is WASD or arrow keys, and we'll add mouse selection functionality to the "cards" too. The background image and other graphics are only for prototyping, not what will eventually be included in Naali. For now the avatars have the basic image of the naali (arctic fox) and worlds all share the globe image. The idea with the images is that your avatar's screenshot will be inserted there and it is updated when you change your appearance or logout (not really decided yet) and for the world images a screenshot is taken from the position you last left the world in question.

Inworld widget interaction

The inworld widgets will probably stay with the slim frame or maybe some styling will be done there with proper graphics. The main thing inworld would be to get rid of the age old toolbar at the top of the screen. We are now close to 10 widgets and they will only increase in numbers when we go forward. We were thinking of giving each corner inworld a certain type like widgets on the top left, notifications / status things on the top right, messaging on the lower left etc. Of course the positions or the final look are not firmly decided yet. But at least I would like to remake the "widget toolbar" into something icon based and add some snappy animations like some kind of a layered menu that has sub groups for widgets like interacting, world building etc.

Also some kind of workspaces would be nice to make. So you could make different UI views and swap between them fast to get to your tools. A little bit like operating systems have multiple desktop views that have their own set of applications and you can move apps between them.

UI for interacting with objects and people

We also need something similar to pie menu we all know and love/hate :) There hasn't been any decisions about this yet, but some kind of a hovering "info card" for things you want to interact is the goal. This infocard could follow the avatar / object that you have interest in or it could be pinned to a position. The idea for these cards would be that there would be a viewport (camera) to the item, for example the avatars face that you clicked or movable view of a object you are interacting with. Also this card would have quick selections for sending messages to a user etc. This will also be the most challenging thing if we do it purely on Qt that needs an ogre viewport rendered to it. Right now all info that is showed of people is a static 2D overlay that has the avatars name. And if this is the best we can do with ogre then we probably go with Qt on these infocards.

Schedule

The aim is to get most of this done by the march release. It may be that "ether space" will have 70% of the defined features, inworld "info cards" 50% etc. as its hard to know what obstacles there will be ahead. Especially when our Ogre+Qt is a special thing without paint events that there always can be something unsuspected outcomes of this, good example is that we had fully working video calls in Naali IM before we moved them inside the scene and now gstreamer doesent render the video to the window handle.