Term Project – Final Report

Mirror Worlds

Deric Sutton

Abstract

The ability to mirror the real world in the virtual world has many endless possibilities. In short, it gives us the ability to test things that are not easy to test in real life whether it’s due to implementation issues or monetary. Our project was to make headway in the search to have better mirror-world situations.

1. Problem

Our goal was to mirror of the real world mock store at the RFID center. This mock store has clothing and many other items tagged with RFID sensors. The store can be scanned and the items’ locations are stored in x,y,z locations in a database. We wanted to expand on the idea of using x,y,z locations and real time movement to create a mirror world of the mock store.

Our subproblem was to learn how to use last semesters project, visit the RFID center, and figure out how to expand on the main mirror-world idea.

2. Objective

The objective of our team was to show changes in a virtual world when objects are moved in the real world. Our design was to use Second Life as this virtual world.

Our subproject would have to be how much time we spent on learning last semesters work, getting it to work, and learning about RFID.

3. Related Work

Since this project was basically an extension of last semesters project, our related work is basically what Brent Garber and Chris Lesso did. The links to their papers and projects are to follow.

http://www.csce.uark.edu/~cwt/COURSES/2008-08--CSCE-4313--PL/STATUS-REPORTS/HW3c%20-%20FINAL%20REPORT/Final-report%20-%20application%20-%20mirror%20world%20-%20Chris%20Lesso/

http://www.csce.uark.edu/~cwt/COURSES/2008-08--CSCE-4313--PL/STATUS-REPORTS/HW3c%20-%20FINAL%20REPORT/Final-report%20-%20application%20-%20mirror%20world%20-%20Brent%20Garber/

4. Architecture

4.1 Design

The design of our project was:

1.  Get everything from last semester working properly. This was more arduous than it sounds but Brent Garber was very helpful at getting us straightened out.

2.  Build simple prims in Second Life that represent the clothing racks at the RFID center.

3.  Move objects in real life and have them correspond with moving objects in Second Life. Jamelle found a great way demonstrate this with SunSPOTs.

The scripts on the objects in Second Life are very important. The objects have changed x,y,z coordinates in the database will then update their coordinates accordingly and the master object will tell them to move. The master object currently checks every five seconds if there has been a change. There are two scripts on the master object and two scripts on each object that is desired to move. The master object serves at the 0,0,0 point and the objects move around relative to that.

My subproject was to go to the RFID Center and take pictures of the store and make a replica of it in Second Life. Once we got there, we found out the clothing area that we wanted to use was just basically a floor with barriers around it. I ended up just taking pictures of the racks and modeling them in Second Life. I wanted to make a very detailed area, but there wasn’t much to work with and it wasn’t that important to what we wanted to accomplish. We did learn a lot about RFID tags and how the RFID center works so that was very interesting because we both hadn’t had much experience with RFID before.

4.2 Testing

To test our project, we hooked up the SunSPOTs to Jamelle’s laptop which when moved in certain directions, would update the remote database with new x,y coordinates. We didn’t bother with Z coordinates because we wanted the racks to stay on the ground, but it would be certainly possible (and easy) to have Z coordinates included. The Second Life scripts would then get the new X,Y coordinates and update the racks every five seconds in the virtual world.

There is also a website to manually update the coordinates of the objects in the database. That website is located here: http://www.thedarkcitadel.com/cgi-bin/SL/cruddy.cgi

5. Results

The results are quite impressive. By using the SunSPOTs, we were able to have sensor movement in the real world move things in the virtual world. Our project strayed a bit from the original intent with RFID, but it brought us to a very neat area with motion sensors.

6. Conclusions

6.1 Summary

Things were learned about RFID while we were at the RFID center was while it was good at finding objects (most of the time), it was quite inaccurate on x,y,z positions and on how fast it could get new coordinates. By making use of the SunSPOTs, we were able to have movement and nearly real time updating in the virtual world.

6.2 Impact

The potential is almost endless with mirror world projects. It can range from small simulations such as this one to others that could eventually mirror the entire world. How neat would it be to have everything essentially mirrored in the virtual world that happens in the real world?

6.3 Future Work

Taking the RFID center’s scattered x,y,z coordinates of the clothing and figuring out a way to place them on the correct clothing racks would be a neat thing to do. Another thing that might be neat would be to use a Wii controller and it’s sensors to move things in Second Life.

References

[1] Garber, Brent, “Mirroring Positional Data into Second Life,” University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. http://www.csce.uark.edu/~cwt/COURSES/2008-08--CSCE-4313--PL/STATUS-REPORTS/HW3c%20-%20FINAL%20REPORT/Final-report%20-%20application%20-%20mirror%20world%20-%20Brent%20Garber/ December 2008

[2] Lesso, Chris, “Mirroring Positional Data into Second Life,” University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. http://www.csce.uark.edu/~cwt/COURSES/2008-08--CSCE-4313--PL/STATUS-REPORTS/HW3c%20-%20FINAL%20REPORT/Final-report%20-%20application%20-%20mirror%20world%20-%20Chris%20Lesso/ December 2008

Appendix A

There are two folders labeled accordingly in the zip file with the scripts that are needed to be attached to the objects and master object in Second Life.

Comments – (I’ll do Software Architecture in this Paper)

What did you learn in this course?

From doing our project, I learned a lot about RFID, Second Life, and certain motion sensors. All of which I knew next to nothing about previously. Of course we learned a lot about of software architecture and how it impacts us in our daily lives.

What did you like about the class?

I learned lots of new things such as the previously stated RFID and Second Life. We got to go over lots of things and how software architecture applies to them. Things such as email protocols, databases, networking, web services, etc.

What should be improved?

Second Life is a good learning tool for virtual worlds, but it’s very limited and the source code for the server (well OpenSim) and the client is very complex and gigantic. It makes it difficult to add functionality which SL so desperately needs. I think more options outside of Second Life and virtual worlds would be a good thing.