VR Tour

(note: the screenshots in this section are now fairly old. See the main screenshot section for the most recent pics.)

In the upper right and lower left are two instances of the VR application (the 3D engine used is Crystal Space). Each have already connected to the server and downloaded the world. Each avatar is presently represented by a blue sphere, so the avatars are looking at each other in this picture. Next to the 3D windows are the terminal windows used to run the program (and are now filled up with logging!) Behind the other windows is the terminal window used to run the "server", also printing out great quantities of logging information.

An example of the the shell application mesh browsing the world. It runs entirely independently of the world server or avatar processes, communicating only through the VOS protocol. You can inspect/navigate the object tree using commands such as "ls" and "cd"; this should be immediatly familiar to anyone who has ever used a Unix shell. Notice that the first "ls" lists off the objects which are direct children of the world object, and that the avatars, which exist on seperate sites from the world object, are listed alongside (and for many purposes treated identically) irregardless of network location.

Again, the view of one of the avatars. Notice the other avatar peeking out from behind the wall. That big ugly thing on the left is actually a .3DS model of a flower pot which currently isn't being textured quite right (yup, this is a bug.)

Back to mesh. Notice the last few commands: we've gone to the path "vop://zarya:4231/world/pot/scaling" (the site in this case is implied), inspected the scaling factor property of the pot, and then changed it to be one-half the size in each dimension. What do you think this will do?

Yup. The pot got smaller (compare with the earlier picture). Note that this change to the world is reflected, in real time, to all interested parties (and the 3D rendering client is certainly interested!)

Just in case you're not convinced, we'll move the pot a bit as well.

The pot has changed position. Amazing.

Of course we can look at the avatar's positions as well.

Finally, another full-screen shot, after the avatars have moved around a bit more. The one that was hiding behind the wall has decided to come out to play.