Hmmmm. . . hitting a road block with shadows, but at least one person has overcome this: http://tinyurl.com/59237o Need to keep looking to see how he did it. No rendering of shadows on the fly, no project!

As suspected, the coolest physics things in Second Life aren’t tagged, but are there. Here are some good things I found while trying to figure out shadow rendering in SL, which led to a lot of willy-nilly surfing on YouTube:

Particles in a SL box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=592rXlgCnoQ

Rollie-pollie planets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90v2-doDuwA

The goal for this project is to develop something in SL that supports Harry Shipman’s seasons PBL problem (see http://www.udel.edu/physics/scen102/shadows_of_light/). To keep things less complicated, I’ve decided to ignore both precision and accuracy (LOL!). Or at least high precision and high accuracy in terms of how faithfully solar motions are modeled. . . but enough of the gist to carry out the lab at the level it was intended will be there. I do plan to program in the axial tilt of the earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt) and hopefully solar positions from a few latitudes. Looks like the best way to do this is simply to use several parts that rotate about axes independently. The current idea is to have a floor that tilts to a max of 23 degrees up or down and a solar sphere that can shift starting position over the horizon based on season/latitude selected and then rotate around an axis. Much simpler than the original plan (to use web-data and some kind of polar coordinate something!). Am reading about rotation on the LSL Wiki (http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rotation#Rotation). Shouldn’t be hard to do something that is menu-driven.

The scripting behind this stock price rezzer is probably similar to what I need for my idea (although USING the stock rezzer right now is a little scary if you actually own stock!). It asks the user for a stock symbol, goes out and retreives the last 30 days of high/low/volume data from Google, and then uses those values to set the prim colors, relative positions, etc. Will study on this script and try and find a data source for what I’d like to do.
posted by Meredith Snookums on Eduisland using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Two more data viz tools look of interest, if just for the scripts that run them. One is for creting in-world mind maps (R) and one for I’m not entirely sure what (L) right now, but will soon once I open the box!
posted by Meredith Snookums on SciLands using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Found a copy of Hiro’s molecule rezzer, which must take crystal structure data or SMILES data to rez a molecule . . . it gives coordinates so my first guess is something like the former. Anyhow, this serves as another example of data viz in-world. . . hopefully some of these will have copies I can take and look at the scripts that run them.
posted by Meredith Snookums on SciLands using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

A walk with the dogs brought an idea to mind (as usual 😉 ), so I have a clear idea of what I’d like to create. . . but a lack of programming skill (at the moment) with which to carry it out. . . a typical spot to be in for a SL user! Luckily, a Google search pulled up this spot on the SciLands – the Data Visualiztion area. People more advanced than me are able to get SL objects to retreive web data and then display that data in-world through a number of methods. This image is of a data wall – currently showing (what I think are) electron microprobe images and molecular structures. . . clicking the images pulls up: http://1cellpk.wikispaces.com. . . looks neat and good for future viewing.
posted by Meredith Snookums on SciLands using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

One of the UD Physics faculty (Prof. Shipman) created a PBL lab that will make a good starting point: http://www.udel.edu/physics/scen102/shadows_of_light/ Light and shadows are things that can be done in-world . . . and it is a cute problem. 🙂

U Delaware’s Island manager sent me a list of links this morning, one of which really resonated with what I’ve found so far: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/32673 . . . see conclusion “few physicists have gone there yet” . . . or at least made stuff that they then tagged to be found! LOL!) . SaLamander and sloog both had several sites listed to visit, but few were actual manipulatives and even fewer were intro physics related . . . SL is just new and doing things related to the teaching of intro physics for whatever reason isn’t as developed as other sciences. A great model of what *can* be done for a given discipline is Genome Island (SLurl = Genome (127, 128, 48)). There is definitely a need for physics objects, so working on this project over the summer will be of some good use. I’m certain I’ll recreate some things others have made or stumble upon someone who has done a lot and I’ve not yet discovered them, but even so – there is a paucity of at least findable learning objects related to intro physics in SL. Better move on to planning some things to make now! 🙂

Collected a sloog HUD. . . it is clear the SaLamander HUD is a variation of the sloog HUD. . . and I wonder which is preferred for use at the moment. I’ll test tagging from both and see what happens.
posted by Meredith Snookums on Mosi Mosi using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]