Posts from — January 2008

My research group had some fun controlling SL with a Wii-mote a few weeks ago. It’s easier than you think! Several people have asked how we did it, so I hope these quick instructions might come in handy.

1. Download, install, and run DarwiinRemote.
2. Turn Bluetooth on on the Macbook. You can do this by opening the Bluetooth Preferences Pane (Apple menu, System Preferences and choose “Bluetooth” under Hardware) and clicking the big “Turn Bluetooth On” button. If Bluetooth is already on, you can skip this step!
3. Hold the Wii-mote in front of the Macbook and press buttons 1 and 2 simultaneously. The LEDs on the Wii-mote will flash.
4. As you move the Wii-mote, you’ll see your movement plotted on the screen, as you see below.
5. Drop down the option box and choose “Mouse Mode On (Motion)”.
6. Load up Second Life.
7. Fly! By default, you can control the direction with the direction keys at the end of the Wii-mote.
8. Laugh with glee, because this is cool.

Twitter rocks. It’s useful for all kinds of things, but especially for chronicling a live event as it happens, including the pre-event discussion and post-conference wrapup.

We’re very excited to be hosting NewB Camp here in Providence, RI on February 23rd. In preparation for the event, Sara created a NewBCamp Twitter account and I coded up this quick script to pull in all tweets related to the conference.

It examines all of your followers tweets for a particular phrase or tag, and then reposts those tweets containing the tag to its own timeline with the author’s name prepended. I’m running this as a cron job on my hosting account. You can see it in action here.

This is a quick hack. It has a couple of issue that I’m aware of:

• Someone has to log in and manually add followers.
• The Twitter API only returns the previous 20 friends posts, and it’s possible we might miss some if we have so many friends that the post rate exceeds 20/50 secs (our permitted API request rate).

I do hope that you find this useful for creating your own Twitter event monitor!

include("twitter.php"); // Twitter API class
// Available: http://twitter-development-talk.googlegroups.com/web/api_class.phps.txt
 
// configurable options
$twitter_user = "newbcamp"; // Twitter username
$twitter_pass = "passwordgoeshere"; // Twitter password
$tag = "newbcamp"; // tag for friends to use
 
$twitter = new Twitter($twitter_user, $twitter_pass);
 
$last_post = json_decode($twitter->getUserTimeline("json",$twitter_user,1), true);
$last_post = $last_post[0]['created_at']; // get the datetime stamp of the last post to the account
 
// get new posts from friends since last update
$friends_posts = json_decode($twitter->getFriendsTimeline("json",$twitter_user,$last_post), true);
 
foreach($friends_posts as $key => $post) {
 if (stripos($post['text'],$tag)) { // if the tag is present
  if ($post['user']['screen_name'] != $twitter_user) { // no infinite loops, please
   $new_post = $post['user']['screen_name'] . ": " . $post['text'];
   // post the new post to the newbcamp account with the user's name prepended
   $twitter->updateStatus($new_post);
  }
 }
}

Update 10.16.2009: This script is basically superseded by Twitter’s lists feature. Use that instead!

The vendor containing this hat was recently deleted from Virtual Morocco by an employee of Linden Lab without any notification to me. Why? Because an anonymous person complained that it is “broadly offensive”.

Virtual Morocco was created to be both a tourism promotion platform and a space for cultural exchange. It was built entirely by undergraduate students as an educational service-learning project.

We give space in the Marrakesh Marketplace to several Moroccan artisans with virtual goods for sale. Our only requirements are that they keep everything appropriate to the sim’s theme and to the educational context of the space. The vendor selling the hat was owned by a college student (not from our institution) who specializes in items appropriate for the Morocco of the 1940s.

This hat does appear to be in the Nazi style. Even if it is, it is historically and thematically appropriate for Virtual Morocco.

Managing a space for cultural communication is not always an easy task. We have dealt with anti-Muslim intolerance, anti-American intolerance, and other forms of inappropriate behavior. When an incident occurs, I try to use it as a learning opportunity and prompt for discussion for my students and the members the our Virtual Moroccan community.

This incident has implications far beyond one college student and an ambiguously offensive hat. How can we create an academic space – a space for the free exchange of ideas – if our content can be deleted arbitrarily, by a third party?

I’m posting this now because my support request has gone unanswered for several weeks. I will post updates as the situation develops.