Timeframe, timestamp your real life
Ginger Mandelbrot, a Hursley master inventor of some note has created something that I found fascinating both in Second Life and with real life potential.
He has built a ticking, rotating slat machine in Second Life to prototype an amazing cool idea.
The “timeframe”, currently previewing on Hursley private island ticks over the seconds using a collection of black and white slats, not unlike an old fashioned notice board. It represents, each second, a unique point in time by the status of the slats. This is also a date not just a time, and that is important as you will see.
In this video you can see CJ, Ginger and I waiting for a significant slat rotation.
Here is a still of a point in time on the timeframe from snapzilla
I asked Ginger to explain his thoughts on this, and this is where it gets really clever the second quote for the non unix geeks.
“The TimeFrame displays good-old geeky Unix time, which started on 1-Jan-1970, and will count the seconds until a fateful day in Jan 2038 when it rolls over the 31st digit and either goes very negative, or back to zero again, depending on how your applications decide to handle it. There will be (or was, depending on when you read this) a fairly momentous moment on 20th March this year at 15:38 GMT, when the 26th digit rolls over. The 27th digit won’t roll over until Apr 2008. ”
“it’s a piece of “conceptual art” that has a genuine purpose (unusual!). I’ve been thinking about it for a while, as something to build in FL, but it would be quite hard to build and expensive, so I thought I’d prototype it in SL so I could see if it’s really as cool as I imagine it’s going to be! It’s basically a clock, inspired by those indicator boards they sometimes have at train stations, with the slats that flip over with that lovely clacking sound. It’s reallly hypnotic to watch, but also has a real purpose: do you know when Google Earth did the last fly-by of your house? No, of course not. But if you have a TimeFrame in your garden, then next time you get snapped by a satellite or a fly-over, you’ll have a lovely bar-coded timestamp right there on the photo!”
So did you get that, you put one of these in your real life garden, and you get a unique timestamp of anything that takes a photo. Of course it works in SL too. I am going to run one as a HUD. A unique barcode timestamp on any picture.
When you think about this, which I have now, you have to say wow!
***Update
A timeframe has been placed on IBM 1 on Hughes Marina outside the Virtual Universe Community clubhouse
March 19th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Neat idea. ;0
March 20th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Mrs Epredator like the idea too. She started talking about putting it in water features in the garden.
It has a geek feel to it that matches those japanes water sculptures where the bamboo fills with waterand tips up.
March 20th, 2007 at 10:18 am
[...] « Timeframe, timestamp your real life [...]
March 26th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
This is a fantastic idea. I whipped up my own version — there’s a snapshot at http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=152317&sort=Pictures.PictureID+desc&Name=Taper+Pirandello . (There’s some bugs in mine, as I crufted it together this morning; I think I’ve got my 1s being black and my 0s white, and it’s a little out of sync with the text time_t display.)
March 29th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Neat idea….
(/geek mode on)
but you forgot to mention (though obvious if you understand such things) that the counter is counting seconds as binary digits in a 32 bit word
(/geek mode off)
May 4th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
[...] Today I was on a roll with the final virtual worlds pitch of the week in the company of two of Hursley’s Distinguished Engineers(DE), Mandy and Andy. Both of them are known for being great innovators and mentors a like and have a proper standing in our technical community based on doing things. I did my new Virtual Worlds pitch to a very knowlegable audience of visitors. Evangelizing as I do it is good to have a positive discussion rather than having to always convince the odd doubter in the crowd. On after me was Mandy talking about the problems of free thinkers and innovators within traditional management structures of any organization. Much talk of comfort zones, motivations and measurements. I twittered a few times that many of the phrases and examples of an attempt to control a free thinker were almost identical to the ones I have heard more than once during my career. The gist of the presentation is that if you do not pay attention to people and their new ideas and merely seek to control and tell them what to do then the true innovators peronality types will either leave, give up or become subversive. Part of the make up of some of the people that can be regarded as causing trouble/innovators is an apparent lack of attention, as new things come around and they get focus. Which in a traditional task based management structure is obviously hard for some people to manage or deal with. The irony of that was that Andy and I were at the back of the room trying out something Andy was putting together. So it may have seemed we were not paying attention. In reality we were helping Mandy by demonstrating the very traits that she was discussing. This is very different from people just ignoring the presenter and doing their emails. So what was Andy SC up to ? He too has got a Nokia n95 recently, though his came with his elevation to DE :-) As an inventor and leader in all things pervasive he was exploring the barcode/QR code reader software whilst creating a few messages with some QR code creator software. He was showing it to me when I decided to flickr it live via the phone in a wheels within wheels type of way. I dont think Mandy was too upset as it was a quick burst of energy and as we broke for lunch everyone asked what it was. By that time it was a QR code clock, not unlike his TimeFrame in Second Life Now, next comes a Second Life implementation, prims or textures? [...]
May 7th, 2007 at 4:59 am
I whipped up a timeframe for another platform, ogoglio.
May 12th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[...] If you want to see some examples, go to eightbar and get an insider’s view on how IBM Hursley’s Distinguished Engineers(DE) work on dreaming up the internet of things at every opportunity they get! Also, see TimeFrame in Second Life. [...]
May 19th, 2007 at 5:13 am
[...] For this project they use the IBM MQtt messaging system that Ginger Mandelbrot invented to hook all the monitoring devices together. And, Yossarian Seattle (also Rob Smart of Eightbar and creator of the much lauded SL Translator HUD), created the link from MQtt to Second Life so that messages can flow in and out of Second Life. [...]
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:41 pm
This is a great idea.
January 10th, 2008 at 9:25 am
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