Sunday, July 22, 2007

VNC2SL technology preview

Finally I got myself to get it to the state which might be good enough to show it.
What is it ? In short: A very way to export your desktop in-world for others to see.
Practically, for example this means presentations could be done just by exporting the desktop - no textures to upload.
vnc2sl
On the picture: Dalien looking at Dalien looking at the Google video about secondlife.
(I must admit it was a bit of a trick, but I think having two nested worlds was more fun).
What's best - you can give this a shot *right now* and tell here in comments what do you think - and maybe would be interested in such a service for your SL business.

So, to try it out:


  1. go to http://www.tightvnc.com/ and download the VNC server (for windows, that would be here).

  2. Install the VNC server. It will ask you to pick the password - please do it, and use different than everything else and not very easy. (although we would not need it and will disable incoming connections subsequently)

  3. start the VNC Server (NB: the important part is that you start the server on the PC from which you export the desktop - we will use it in reverse-connect mode). For the windows this will bring up a white icon with waves and a letter "V" in the right corner of the screen.

  4. Right-click on that icon, and select "Properties". Uncheck the "Accept socket connections" - so that your computer would not be accessible for the incoming connections. (Note: this IS important). Hit "OK"

  5. Start the Secondlife on the other PC (and go to the primskirtbuilder plot, the screen is for now located to the right of it). Check that there is noone fiddling around - and if yes, wait till they finish.

  6. Right-click on "V" icon again, and select: "Add new client", then enter the following (without the quotes) in the editor string: "petitbe.be::8900" (note the double colon).

  7. After a while, you (and those in-world near to you) will see the contents of your desktop on the in-world screen

  8. The refresh happens every 60 seconds, or you can click on the blue ball to force the update (note that due to VNC protocol, the "rich" pictures may transfer slowly and at times the resulting screen will not be completely redrawn yet.



Have fun!

UPD: hmm seems the fiddling with the media texture might make the client more susceptible to crashes... Although, maybe it is just my voice firstlook that is misbehaving...

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting! Acctually, I went there yesterday and worndered "What this huge white board is...?".lol.

Dalien said...

Well, the huge white board before was just a huge white board - it was supposed to be a "background" for something (do not remember what :)

but now it does serve some "practical purpose" :-)

Unknown said...

Now that is cool....

Dalien is so sexy when he does geeky cool things like this....

Anonymous said...

V, how's your defense nowadays? :p

Anonymous said...

Very nice! This is exactly what we would need (for education purposes). Unfortunately it does not seem to work anymore; at least the screen has gone. Is this still available somehow?

Dalien said...

Frank: I found out that the constant change of textures was helping a lot to crash the clients... So I had to nuke it.

One thing which should work, is to stream the image as a very low framerate video, something like 1 frame every 5 or 10 seconds.

Should be possible with ffmpeg, but I never had the time to play with it, unfortunately.

logogolo cortes said...

Is possible to try again the vnc board? i'm from a mexican teaching institution and it would be enougth the video rate of 5 per second to teach people external programs as sculptypaint or ploppsl...

Dalien said...

I never got around to actually using video...

and the sequential new images caused the viewer to crash.

The teaching - does it have to be conveyed in SL or opensim could be an alternative ?

The reason is the latter has the dynamic texture module, which *might* make it possible to re-write the VNC thing.

Unknown said...

Dalien, This is phenomenal: I just can't seem to find it. Do you still have it somewhere for testing?

Thanks!

Shavkatmemo said...

Wow great ... can you give exact location of this place (SLurl) ...I couldn't find --primskirtbuilder plot--