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Yesterday I visited IBM 7 in Second Life to see what Ian Hughes, IBM (Epredator Potato in Second Life) has been doing with his Wimbledon project this year. In the picture above, Tara5 Oh, my avatar in Second Life, is in the IBM Wimbledon team control room reconstructed in SL from panoramic photos. Click on the image below to see the whole panorama in Flash.

My timing was good because I not only met up with Epredator and got to play his new “Rock, Paper, Scissors tennis game (see picture below). But, I also got to talk to Judge Hocho, the IBMer who Epredator noted did much of the work on the build this year. Also there was Laronzo Fitzgerald who worked on the build last year. Even the legendary Jessica Qin (one of IBMs most talented architects in SL) flew in briefly to tweak a telehub. But she was “slammed” with work, unfortunately, so she couldn’t stop to play tennis and drink Pimms.

Enjoying Prims Pimms

As Epredator has illustrated with a video on eightbar some very funny cross purpose conversation that occurred during my tour of Wimbledon in Second Life! Pimms, a specialty English drink that is a tradition at Wimbledon, kept cropping up in the conversation. But prims, as we know, are the basic building blocks of Second Life. For a while I was struggling to work out why Judge and Epredator wanted me to visit the virtual Wimbledon roof garden to share some Pimms “prims.”

Well I had prims on the brain not Pimms. I had been admiring the good use Epredator has put Linden Lab’s “html on a prim” to. But as you can see below I did finally get to enjoy a Pimms on the roof garden that again makes nice use of panoramic photos to capture the beauty of this spot.

Judge does not blow his own horn and it took me a while and a few roof top Pimms to find out Judge is also Lead Architect for the division of IBM that handles the infrastructure on the Wimbledon project.

The infrastructure for the IBM Wimbledon web site is cool in and of itself. Judge explained some of the more gearheady details:

Judge Hocho: We use multiple sites in a failure avoidance capacity, rather than the standard failure recovery. It’s something we developed here, wherein we only need 150% capacity, instead of the typical 200% for recovery which is why we have had IBM.com running at 100% since June of 2001.

Tara5: What kinds of load does it handle?

Judge Hocho: we can handle a metric ton of load

Tara5 Oh: What does that mean?

Judge Hocho: heh, millions of requests per min!

Epredator Potato: Last year, we had 266,311,332 page views for the event.

HTML on Pimms a Prim

Epredator Potato showed me how the present capabilites of HTML on a Prim in SL, that include live updating, do provide nice presentation tools.

Epredator: if you press play like you would for a movie. You will see the website on the large monitor in the corner. You can click the monitor to get slected pages. The Linden browser on a prim is not fully active. But it runs things

You see the webpage?

Well I have been using this to demonstrate how to interact with existing content. While the links dont work we can change the url, just like videos and hence let you have control. You will see the clock is ticking and working. And, we have a wimbledon twitter channel now too, so when I do demos, I can direct this web to anything.

The HTML on a prim is read only but, if you have a fixed structure on a page you can make the surface buttons clickable until we have full browser [more about LL's plans for this below].

Full browsing is complicated, so there isn’t a full browser capability yet. But its not just graphics. Like if we run twitter vision because you can change the URL. Well this [the Twitter vision page above] is an active webpage running live. They dont do flash but they do do ajax style. It is a webpage. it is a browser just with clicking turned off. So it is running javascript on your machine. It is very nice as a presentation tool.

“WebKit Meta: A new standard for in-game web content”

I pinged Qarl Linden who has been working on Linden Lab’s web rendering project while I was admiring the IBM Wimbledon web presentation board. And Qarl Linden concurred that even though the current html on a prim is not fully dynamic yet, you can for instance, if you use an ajax based white-boarding software, see the whiteboard update live on the prim.

But Qarl also mentioned there are some very interesting plans afoot for using webkit as our web renderer because “we’re having trouble getting mozilla to properly handle plugins (flash, java, etc).”  You can read more about that progress here:

After admiring the Web presentation tools I tried my hand at Judge’s server game. Judge (seated below) seemed rather underwhelmed at my serving skills! But I highly recommend an outing to Wimbledon in Second Life. And, for updates on what is going check in on the eightbar blog.