I have been SO bad with this blog lately - my excuse is my second life. In Secondlife =)

So... Last year a few of the fabulous guys from the UK built a replica inside SecondLife of a tennis court, scripted it to take a data feed and display ball placement, and fed it with data from the Winbledon Tennis Grand Slam. It allowed you to watch a game from inside of the secondlife virtual world environment. It turned out fabulous, and was well received by all.

This year, we expanded on that work a little to create the Australian Open =)

Chris and I got a temporary reassignment at work, sold our souls to the awesome Brad Kasell from the IBM Emerging Technology Group (the driving force behind this project), and worked with James (Maxx) Andersen (an outstanding graphic artist from IBM, USA) to build something really freakin' cool!! We have also had some wonderful help from ppl in making some of the funky bits and pieces you may see around the grounds - signs, statues, etc... Dino and Arabica - you guys rock!!

So how have we extended it, and what features have we added? Oh god - where do I start...

for starters, we have built the stadium. And a large section of the surrounding grounds. The build currently includes Rod Laver Arena, Margaret Court, Garden Square, Australian Open Shop and a fair amount of the landscaping and such around... We've gone into great detail to recreate things like stairs, chairs, water fountains, rubbish bins, signage etc as accurately as possible.

Smooth movement of ball by converting point data to position and velocity vectors and then utilising the Second Life physics engine.

Representation of players on the court with their position based on where we know they hit the ball from (unfortunately we don't track player position, just the ball).

Ability to place your avatar such that you move as if you are one of the players, and have the player's viewpoint during the game. You can literally be Roger Federer or any of your favourite tennis stars. Well - virtually ;)

Better control of data sources. You can choose between live data (current matches being played) and previously recorded game data.

The stadium roof opens on command (you "talk" to it in world - type to it =). And what command is better than "open sesame"? ;) It also closes on "close sesame". It's not quite realistic though - the real one takes about 20 minutes whereas our build takes about 20 seconds...

Stadium seating includes fold down seats (like the real arena) with alternating poses for avatars seated in them... We felt that most sit poses make avatars look so stiff, so we've included scripts that change your pose every few minutes - from edge of your seat excitement to laid back enjoyment. Every pose is selected randomly so that we dont have a stadium full of people looking exactly the same.

The scoreboards, serve speed boards, etc, all contain live data updated as it happens =)

The IBM Match Update Centre contains live data on game statistics for completed matches and currently playing matches, and schedule information for upcoming matches.

A heads up display allows people to view live game data from anywhere in Secondlife - you don't need to be at the stadium to see it =)

We have already seen a lot of interest from both inside and outside of IBM, including quite a lot of press interest. Press on this so far includes Sydney Morning Herald, The Avastar (Deeeep Witte - Secondlife journalist) and CNN (going to air on the 20th January, I believe), and many more to come in the following days. Also a lot of attention in blogs and such.

A cool blog entry by Andy Piper - including some funky pics =)

Chris has a blog entry here with some more funky pics

And my fave pic of the arena at night:

And the youtube vid with the correct spelling of my name ;)

This has been an interesting few weeks =)

And thanks to everyone who has helped along the way - what an awesome ride! =)