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