Blogger Notes

I had a very precise memory of my visit on Svarga, and of the guided tour I used to get familiar with all the ressources which were offered on this beautiful island. To explain better, you would get on a vehicule which would take you in a promenade with detailed commented in chat.

I proposed Pietro to make one for the S.S.C.B. project and contacted Blaise Timtam, the great inventor of the  Guided Tour System.  Strange coincidence, Blaise is also from Switzerland so we could speak french together and that made it also easier. Pietro wanted the visit to be similar to an RL visit, and to add sound or video in the vehicule, so tha tpeople could look around instead of reading the chat. I wanted the tour to be offered in different languages. The challenge was difficult to achieve !! 

We could not stream the language thru the land, there was no other chance than to ask Blaise to improve the sound functionalities of the guided tour system which were quite limited at that time ... and he did it. 

I first had to convert the whole visit in 9.99 seconds waw files to be imported into SL, and for each languages, that represented about 20 files. Those 20 files were a kind of synthese of the main point we wanted people to remember about S.S.C.B. Text would also come into the chat zone, in case people would prefer to read...

The main problem encountered was that sounds load at your entrance on the parcel, and if there are so many files, it would take too long before they upload in your cache, and you would only receive only part of it. After many tests and tries (and swears !) we finally arrived to a mix solution which consists for the user to click on an upload box with his language sounds, waits 2 minutes until he sees the box is green, and then he can ride the tour and have it sounded in his language. Wow, that took us so long , but we finally created the first real audio guided tour of SL ! And this in 3 languages...

Blaise told me a few days ago that this work served a lot of other people in SL, especially many cultural projects and sims, and that it really helped him to improve the G.T.S.. 

For information, because I did not have a big budget, I used synthetic voices on that project and I really think it would be much nicer with real voices. And if Second Life would allow us to import longuer audio file, that would even be much nicer !!!

For the next version, we have been working with my friend, the scripter, ab Vanmoer, on a kind of audio hud people could put and get audio explanations just walking or crossing places or objects, a kind of simulation of an augmented reality tool. That, I hope should come soon....