more health care simulations make news

Interesting article and video from the Wall Street Journal on health care simulations in Second Life®.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909804575124470868041204.html

The article discusses the advantages of setting up crisis situations, like pandemics or chemical spills. What do you need to accomplish this at your own school? Land, a simulation designer with scripting skills (building is not that hard), and a commitment from faculty and students.

AIML test bot – Colin the virtual patient | School of Health – Second Life

Some interesting work being done here with medical simulations, and particularly with this patient bot:

AIML test bot – Colin the virtual patient | School of Health – Second Life.

animated gif on a prim

Here is an example (with no audio) of putting an animated gif file on a prim. You have seen those sorts of images, perhaps with a little character that jumps up and down or runs, like the Sonic Hedgehog, or one of my favorites, the Hello Kitty writing in a notebook.

Through a service provided by Peregrine Salon, you can upload your animated gif–providing the file is not copyrighted or has a Creative Commons license that permits free use–and the file is created in what looks the series of animations separated into frames. Don’t worry about how it looks. Download the file to your computer; upload to SL for L10 and apply as a texture to any prim. In this video, you will see it on all sides of a cube or one side of a flattened cube.

When Peregrine Salon creates the texture from your gif file, it also gives you the animation script. Create a new script in the Contents tab of the SL editing window and replace the default script with the new one and save it. That’s it. Your image will animate. You can change the frames per second in the script, which is initially set at 8. On the cube, I change it to 3. On the flat prim I make in the video, I change it to 2.

What uses can you think of for your animation? Maybe a nice sign that attracts attention to a display of art or an item you are selling. Let’s not get carried away and make anything that is disorienting or that turns avatars away, but you decide.

The details of how to pick or create an animated gif that will work well are here.

Here is the original animated image.

scripting made easy

Torley Linden introduces us to Ann Enigma’s autoscripting tool for those of us who want the quick and easy, and have no guilt about not carrying around scripts in our heads. The blog post has a few other scripting tools, so don’t just settle for this one video.

Then watch this video.