James (@JTOnline) a work colleague mentioned that he had a wind turbine model in second life and he wanted to link it to the actual windspeed .
I sat back and thought that is not augmented reality enough for me. With permission i took a copy of his turbines and made a few modifications.
A few months ago back in December I decided to waste a few hours publishing the buying and selling price of electricity from the national grid. This is not the price the UK households pay but the price the companies buy and sell it for wholesale. This data is published to pachube for anyone to see here depending when my home server is working.
Taking this information and turning it to a rotary motion in second life was amazingly simple.
After a few days I decided to add a method that made the windmill go on fire if the price of electricity breaks a certain threshold. This was half an excuse to use particles and half an excuse to allow for a graphic representation of the electricity price spiking.
Images and code to follow
The handy wind turbine model came from Mark Burhop (@burhop) who had a little wind farm going on the ugotrade sim – I just fixed up the rotation script a bit.
Looking forward to seeing avatars get pushed away the faster the energy price turbines spin! Talking of which, I found out at the code clinic yesterday that there’s apparently a competition on the way for best vizualisation of ReactionGrid data. Will forward you the email when I get it.