blog@Yantrajaal

or "Why you cannot create a camera in-world in Second Life" It all began with a simple desire, to know who was visiting my Mahamaya Temple in SecondLife and the first step was very simple. I created a phantom, nearly-invisible, trip-wire around my teleport point and sent out an email to my blog whenever someone passed through it and this helped me track who all were visiting the Temple. But then I got ambitious and decided to see if I could create an in-world camera that would take a snap of the individual instead of just sending the email. I thought that it would be easy but it is not. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it seemed to be until I realised that it is IMPOSSIBLE .. and here is why. Objects in SL are represented as pieces of data and it is the SecondLife client software that assembles this data and gives it a visual representation. So if I had to create an in-world camera, then I would have to use LSL to create an full fledged SecondLife client itse...

I am often asked a question on whether it is possible for SecondLife to be a source of revenue and my answers is simple : depends on what you do there. Like the Web, SL is a platform and a platform does not make money. There are websites that are a source of revenue and there are websites that are purely informational or educative and SL is no different. I believe that one of the biggest sources of revenue in SL could be online games. Games are a worldwide industry that draws billions of dollars of revenue and the popularity of this industry lies in the fact that Microsoft, with XBOX, Sony with PS3 and Nintendo have developed specialist hardware devices for people to access these games. If you look closely, the fundamental architecture of the games that run on these platforms is very similar to the 3D Virtual Universe technology that is the backbone of SecondLife. It is all a matter of positioning and moving 'solid' artifacts through a virtual space and making them interact wi...

After all the murder and mayhem around SEZ and the obnoxious quota regime, there is a ray of hope that things can improve for the better in India. First of course the news Infosys and its 50% growth in quarterly profits. More than Infosys, it is a great sign that things are going well for outsourcing industry in general and the IT industry in particular. But IT adds only 5% to the GDP and touches perhaps 3% people in the country. For the other 97% there is a bigger ray of hope as well thanks to two initiatives taken by the Supreme Court. First : They have tried to free the police from the tyranny of the local party bosses. Policemen are corrupt but not all ... there are some honest law enforcers still left but the moment they do anything good, they are transferred out of the jurisdiction by party bosses whose toes have been tread on. With the formation of the police board in each state, this should be minimised to a large extent. The Home Minister and his cronies will not be able to ...

My last post of of 2006 had proposed ( 'predicted' ) that if SecondLife has to thrive and become the defacto standard for the Virtual Universe, then there is no option but to take the open source route. Proprietory products, especially when they are so very useful, cannot stand up to the tide of popularity that sweeps in with Open Source products. I am not sure if someone in Linden Labs heard me or read my blog ... or perhaps it is that fools seldom differ .. but I am delighted to note that earlier this week, the Second Life client has been put under open source GPL. Anyone can download and modify the product and if their modifications are good and useful, everyone else, including Linden Labs will use it. This is stupendous news. This is now like the browser and the way it has become an open product. Now we will have hundreds of developers working on enhancements and no other Virtual Universe product will have the werewithal to stand up to this tide. Which is wonderful. As this...

The SEZ policy is a prime example of the crony-capitalism that hides behind the pseudo-socialistic facade that hangs over India. However it is not something that can be wished away. How can we make the make best use of it. But before that, a quick analysis of the genesis of the current mess. Special Economic Zones were dreamt up by the Indian bureaucracy as a way to emulate China's success story and had two design points. (a) India's notoriously rigid, inflexible and anti-market labour laws will be relaxed so that the nation could compete with China's manufacturing muscle. (b) Tax exemptions will be allowed to make India's companies more competitive. However, bureacrats propose and politicians dispose and so the first casualty of the policy was the labour laws. Faced with the implacable ire of the miniscule, but politically significant organised labour lobby ... the idea of relaxing the labour laws was summarily thrown out of the first available window. That ...

2006 is the year when the idea of Virtual Universes went mainstream. Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like Everquest has been around for about three years and three dimensional virtual reality, whether with physical devices or with technology like VRML, has been around even longer, but it had always been a niche market -- at best adopted in the gaming community. However with the advent of Linden Labs and the release of their SecondLife platform, the concept of a virtual universe has now become the defacto platform of the future. What the World Wide Web was in 1996 is what Second Life is in 2006 ... and this time, the rate of penetration and adoption is even faster. Describing SecondLife is an exercise of (a) redundancy and (b) futility. It is redundant because almost every magazine and journal has now described it in great detail and Reuters has a full time bureau chief reporting regularly from SecondLife. It is also futile because Second Life is an experience ....

As the year 2006 draws to a close, it is interesting to take stock of things that happened and speculate on how these will impact the year ahead .. and in this exercise the one single thing that stands out is SecondLife - The Emergence of Virtual Worlds. Milestones and signposts are seldom recognised when we whiz past them on the highway .. it is only when you have traversed some significant distance, do you realise how important that fork in the road was ... both for those who have taken the right fork and for those who were left behind on the wrong one. To appreciate, the enormous significance of this tectonic movement, one must go back to the year 1995-96 when Netscape went public and the Internet, for all practical purposes was born. The world had not been wired up as comprehensively as yet and we in India got wind of this techTsunami in 1996 when the first few intrepid cybernauts in India set sail on a voyage of discovery. It was voyage of discovery as well as a voyage of faith. V...

MMORPGs in general and SecondLife in general has now become a hot favourite with relatively large parts of the population. As a concept and technology it has few peers and there is no doubt it is at the vanguard of a new wave that leads to the 3D Internet. What next ? The clue lies in the word 3D ! SL is essentially a 3D world that avatars live in, but the limitations of the computer console / video display unit means that 3D has to be represented as 2D grid of pixels. But today, we have technology that can display artefacts in a real 3D format. You can look up the following websites .. http://www.sharp3d.com/products/ or this website ... http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/archive/2004/3d-display-cebit.html there are other technologies that support such technology .. for example see this http://www.seereal.com/en/index.php These are monitor based 3D technology which can enhance the SecondLife experience signficantly. Moving forward, laser based technology like the one from AIST...

PANIIT2006 - the mega IIT Alumni meet that is scheduled for next week in Mumbai has raised a lot of decibels in the media. There are a lots of articles and discussions on the IIT - the hype, the mystique and myth associated with India's best known educational instititutions. As an IIT-ian ( genuine B.Tech product - Mechanical, Azad Hall, Kharagpur) it is my misfortune that I would not be able to attend this megaMeet ... so let me share some of my thoughts on these unique institutions. At the risk of being politically incorrect, let me state upfront, that even though anybody who has enrolled in IIT is a dejure IITian, many of us believe that the defacto IITian is one who has qualified through the JEE Examination and has gone through the undergraduate ragging program -- does not matter if you were Mech or Chem or Agri or Electronics or Physics. The motley crew of M.Techs and Research Scholars do not qualify as genuine IITians .. despite their pretensions to the contrary. This may sou...

Google has a habit of coming out with extremely user-friendly and innovative products and I wonder if they could do something for distance learning. In the explosive growth of the knowledge economy, nothing -- bar nothing -- is more important than new and innovative ways of imparting knowledge. Google would do a significant service to humanity ( and perhaps to their shareholders as well ) if they could design a hosted, web-based tool to further this activity. The broad functionalities of my proposed system is as follows .. a] A hosted presentation server, that would allow a teacher to broadcast a set of educational slides over the internet. Streaming video is good, but we would need far higher broadband penetration before that can happen b] A white board ( or screen sharing ) application for the teacher to communicate to the students c] A way for students to join a particular session and a way to manage the interaction with students. A way for a student to "raise your ha...

Movie making lends it rather neatly in SecondLife. Here is a platform where you can create sets any which way you like and then you can populate the sets with actors and actresses who can be tailored to look just as the situation demands. So the same set of human 'actors' or manipulators can work with avatars who can take on any shape and size , including fantastic ones. The behaviour of the avatar-actors have to be defined in terms of animation scripts and this calls for signicant programming, but the best thing is that these animation scripts can be both reusable and incrementally improved. What this means is that while the first movie can have an avatar-actor who delivers a jerky slap that lands on someone's shoulder, the next version of the script can create a smooth slap that hits the intended victim right on the cheek ! And what can be done for a simple slap can of course be extended to any other action ... depending on the directors imagination. The 3D sets are of co...

A short movie set across three 'worlds', namely Planeshift, Real life in Calcutta, and Second Life that explores the boundaries of real and the illusory. Based on the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, as articulated by Sankar, the 8th century Hindu philosopher, this movie seeks to explore the boundaries between the worlds that are thought to be real and those that are believed to be illusory. [ this movie may initially take some time to load, and the first pass may be jerky, but if you are patient, then from the second replay onwards, it is quite smooth ]

Now that SecondLife has taken on a life of its own ( pun intended ..) and does not need an army of enthusiasts to explain why it is so important to the world in the 21st century .. it is time to speculate on how it will evolve in the future. The parallel that I would like to draw at the moment is that SL is today where AOL was in 1993-94. There was a proprietory AOL client software that would connect over dialup lines ( low bandwidth SLIP/PPP protocols ) to the AOL servers and these servers would provide the 'space' for merchants and service providers to set up their commerce or 'fun' applications. What happened next ? The AOL servers were replaced by http based webservers and anyone could set up a website, not just AOL. Secondly the browser ( the universal client ) could connect to any web server and then it became a matter individual transactions between the server owner ( the www website ) and the client software through which it was accessed. AOL dropped out ...

China lovers in India, who can see no wrong with what the Chinese leadership does - whether brutal suppression in Tibet or staking claim to Indian territory in NE -- should please take note of the kind of repression that the Chinese government has unleashed on its own population. Grabbing land from villagers for a song and reselling it to urban realtors and industrialists is big business in India, but the Indian scams pale into insignificance compared to what is happening in China. Follow this link to get the latest update. What makes it even more easy in China is the complete lack of political and press freedom. While Indian politicians -- given that they do have to wear the figleaf of the Indian constitution -- have to allow a motley crowd led by Mamata Banerjee or Medha Patkar to have their say and the media has the right to talk about, no such luxuries is allowed in China. If you dare to protest, first you are shot and then that news is wiped off the face of the earth ... ex...

The communist government in Bengal is facing intense resistance from farmers in their attempt to convert prime agricultural land for industrial use. Allegations of scams and an unholy nexus between party activists and unscrupulous realtors are being flung around every day. Such conflicts however are very common in China but news of such conflicts are generally suppressed by the media there. One such incident has happened recently in Guandong province and has been reported by the BBC

An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms, which generally make semantic and syntactic sense but sometimes could add up to what is truly impossible -- like the "horns of the hare" or the "child of a barren woman". Looking at the title of this post, the reader, may be led to believe that the the author is exploring oxymorons of the latter variety. But nothing could be further from the truth. Having spent a week in Birbhum, where Santiniketan happens to be, I have come to the conclusion that a Tagore-free Shantiniketan is not only possible but perhaps could be very desirable as well. But before I begin let me admit upfront that I do know very well that unsolicitated advice is extremely irritating and it becomes even more intolerable when the advice is (a) unequivocally correct and -- this is worse -- (b) is directed towards individuals ( or groups) who steadfastly claim to be know-alls and hence by extrapolation do not need advi...

based on an article by Devdatta Kali The Adoration of the Durga is the biggest and most popular festival in Bengal and coincides with Sharad Navaratri that is celebrated in the rest of Hindu India. The celebrations kick off from Mahalaya, the last day of the first dark fortnight of Ashvin, when Hindus recall and honour their ancestors. Mahalaya is associated in the popular Bengali psyche with a radio program produced by Birendra Krishna Bhadra for All India Radio, where the the Devi is symbolically invoked. This program is a combination of devotional songs and readings from the Chandi - a text that is revered by those who believe in the Divine Feminine or Shakti. For many of us, the radio program serves as a nostalgic reminder of a long vanished youth but very few of us have explored the mystical message of the Chandi. This article is an attempt in this direction. According to legend, Durga sat on the tip of a needle for nine days, doing a severe penance to destroy the evil Asura ...

1. I revere the Mother ! The Mother Rich in waters, rich in fruit, Cooled by the southern airs, Verdant with the harvest fair. 2. The Mother - with nights that thrill in the light of the moon, Radiant with foliage and flowers in bloom, Smiling sweetly, speaking gently, Giving joy and gifts in plenty. 3. Powerless ? How so, Mother, With the strength of voices fell, Seventy millions in their swell ! And with sharpened swords By twice as many hands upheld ! 4. To the Mother I bow low, To her who wields so great a force, To her who saves, And drives away the hostile hordes. 5. You our wisdom, your our law, You our heart, you our core, In our bodies the living force is thine. 6. Mother, you're our strength of arm, And in our hearts the loving balm, Yours the form we shape in every shrine. 7. For your are Durga, bearer of the ten-fold power, And wealth's Goddess, dallying on the lotus-flower, You are Speech, to you I bow, To us wisdom you endow. 8. I bow to the Goddess Fair, Rich in...

Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) are something that I have been writing about extensively in my other blog the-Imagineer . However the posts in that blog address the technological and economic aspects of this emerging phenomenon. Here I wish to explore the philosophical implications. But before I attempt to link MMORPGs to Vedanta, let me state clearly upfront that I am not one of those who believe, and try to convince everyone else, that all technology that we see today was known and available to ancient Hindu society. While I am not a pseudo-secularist who revels in trashing each and every aspect of Hindu civilisation, I am also equally sceptical of wild claims about the usage of airplanes in the Ramayana and of nuclear missiles in the Mahabharata. And in particular I have no love lost for Vedic mathematics ... that collection of simple formulae and mathematical shortcuts that have been erroneously compared to the wonders of Euclid and Pythagoras. What I do hav...

All students and enthusiasts of the History of the Motor Car are aware of the Red Flag law that was in effect in England in the closing years of the 19th century. This was the time when engineers were making the first hesitant attempts to put a steam engine on a horse carriage to see if they could make a self-propelled vehicle that was both light enough to move and yet safe enough for the passengers ... and there were many ideas that were explored. Engineers in England, as well as in France, Germany and other industrialised nations were carrying out various experiments to study different options ... with different degrees of technical and commercial success. But England was the only country where the legislature -- that is Parliament -- had unilaterally and ignorantly mandated that self-propelled vehicles were a danger to the population and hence should they venture out on public roads, they had to be preceded by a man, walking in front, with a red flag. This arbitrary piece of ...