The Word Made Real: bringing Cory Doctorow's new novel (and Cory Doctorow) to SL!

First an announcement, and then a challenge.

The announcement:

The Hamlet Linden Book Club is back in action! Somewhere between early or mid-July, famed Boing Boing blogger and award-winning science fiction writer Cory Doctorow will be re-appearing in-world in avatar form to discuss his new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town . Cory did the first Book Club almost two years ago, and it was a massive success, with some 120 Residents jammed into the auditorium. And now he's back with an ambitious new novel.

But that's not all! Cory has very generously offered to send me a text version of the book in mid-June-- so that, just as it hits stands in physical form, the novel can be read by Residents in-world.

So, the challenge:

Cory will be sending me an ASCII file for Second Life distribution only for Residents to read when the physical book goes on sale. However, I don't want this just to be a text file on a notecard-- so I'm challenging Residents to come up with a way to turn Cory's 320 page book into an actual in-world 3D book-- a book with text transposed to a readable typefont, on 3D pages that you can actually turn, in a 3D book that you can set down in front of your avatar and enjoyably read while in-world. (In other words, there should be no need for squinting, or a very slow rez times, in between page turns.)

So for the next couple months, I'm taking submissions of book prototypes, from Residents. (To prove they work, I suggest putting the text of a public domain novel like Frankenstein into the pages of the prototype-- or even better, a copy of one of Cory's older books, which are registered under Creative Commons for non-profit distribution. Say Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which we discussed last time.

I'll put the prototype entries on display in a Linden area for everyone to see-- a book expo, in other words-- and we'll put the entries up for a vote via Forum Survey. The one with the most votes will get to be the official Second Life publisher of Cory's book, with publicity and credit for fully bringing literature into an online world.

Questions? Suggestions? Post here, or IM Hamlet Linden, or e-mail [email]hamlet@secondlife.com[/email]...

Exciting, Hamlet.

Well there's our BoingBoing connection (and more) right there.

Hmmmmmm I know a certain someone who is a master of "PAGES THAT REALLY TURN".

I'm looking forward to seeing this in motion!

Excellent!

One continuing concern, please develop inWorld voting as well.

The Forum population is not representative of the residents of SL.

_/_/_/

Good point, Merwan, I do want to bring in Resident votes from folks who don't usually visit the Forums. Another possibility is to put signs out at the Expo, encouraging people who visit to come to the Forum to register their votes.

Torley, send your master of turning pages my way! Everyone, send all your masters of turning pages my way!

Oh yeah, extra credit bonus: a 3D book with turnable pages-- that Cory can easily sign! (Once again, "easily", as opposed to, "Resident puts book in Cory's inventory/Cory opens main folder/clicks on Notecard marked "Title Page"/types name in/Saves/returns book from his inventory to Residents."

Hamlet,

As a relatively new resident of Second Life, I am delighted about the prospect of the book discussion group coming back to life. I just came across those earlier discussions in the forum. What I lack in scripting talent, I make up for with dedication. Please let me know if you need any resident support for this to launch. I'd love to help!

Hi all

Torley just forwarded me this thread. Anywho, I have this book script. Real book flippy page turning experience. Hamlet - you've seen it

The script has been used in Trent Hedges' magazine, and also Ironchef's children's book.

The way it's encoded, each page is a texture, with the back page used to preload "the next page". You shouldn't noticed texture load times if you don't flip too fast.

The problem, though, would be rendering and uploading 320 page textures. Definately a chore for... someone else

Sounds like a good use for a QuickTime media stream. Of course, that would make it reference material, since you couldn't check the book out of the library.

If we could all agree on a widely-available font, format, etc., we could split the book up into chapters and farm it out for typesetting? Then turn the plates over to Francis to bind.

I have access to Adobe CS at work (Mac) and to Corel (PC) at home. And I'm a pretty fast typist. The trick is to pick a legible font which is available to multiple avies...hmm, this could turn into a PC-only or a Mac-only project...? I'd get more done faster on my Win box at home, but I can sign up for at least one chapter, whatever everyone decides.

Oh...this brings up a question or two. If we were to composite several pages onto a single plate, and then Francis (or someone) dinked with the script to offset into rectangular regions on the plate for flipping pages, that could save bucks on upload costs. But I don't know anything about upload limits on file sizes. At 72 dpi, could we get a large enough rectangle uploaded to provide decent resolution on, say, four crisp pages of text?

-- jj

I'm not so sure that a 3D mockup of a book in SL would ever be "enjoyable" to read, if it has to look like an actual RL bound book. I think it might make a charming (if trite) demo, but after a few dozen page turns it would get pretty old. Are other form-factors acceptable for a reader? So many other designs are possible, from a papyrus scroll to a Star Trek PADD. Does this SLeBook really have to be a book book?

I have a prim-based text-display technology, similar to XyText but based around a different set of design requirements. Since it doesn't use the bumpy 3-face approach XyText does, it can render text at fairly high resoultion and still look great. It could even be mashed around to do a proportional-width font, but right now it works with fixed-width only.

If someone, say LL, made the text of the novel available as an XML-RPC feed, we could slurp up the text a page at a time and use my GlyphPrims to render the text. Since there is only one texture shared among all prims, there is no download time involved in rendering a page. I'd have to play around with the mechanics a bit, but I think we could come up with a very smooth feelling page turn. Of course, it would take a ridiculous number of prims to display a standard 250-word page of text; somewhere over 1500 I think. But smaller pages wouldn't be so terrible, and we might be able to do something with temp-on-rez prims for the glyphs, though I expect that might look kind of crappy.

A XyText-like rendering system would be interesting. It would be an interesting exersize to get that working. Adam Zaius has a neat text-rendering system which takes variable-width fonts into account.

I think a flippy book would be a more interesting exersize than a scroll or a tablet design. If it doesn't *feel* like a book, you might as well distribute it as a notecard, which is a simpler, but superior way of distributing readable text.

As for a demo of my script, just grab a copy of Trent Hedge's SL Graphica. He distributes it for free at various locations in-world.

As for the suggestion of dealing with various offsets to save on upload fees - I don't think it's worth it. The way the preloading of textures works, it would be better to have many smaller textures rather than fewer larger textures. Which is not to mention the arithmetic for dealing with additional code complexity makes me already want to tear my hair out

A quicktime stream would be an interesting idea. A few drawbacks, though - it would be tied to the parcel, you could only have 1 book rezzed at a time, and you'd see the page "change textures" before/after it's flipped.

LL! We need a better way of rendering text!

AAAND I GIVE 'EM OUT!

So feel free to IM me if you want an issue of Trent's SL Graphica.

> Are other form-factors acceptable for a reader?

Yes. Basically, as long as it's a 3D object that's fully in the world, so to speak, and involves either animated page turning or scrolling or some other scripted mechanism which physically presents the individual pages and chapters for the reader, it qualifies for the Expo. That's why I'll put the prototypes up for vote, so people can decide which one provides the most satisfying reading experience.

Continuing in that vein, the book doesn't need to be proportionally the size of an actual book that fits in your hand-- it could be, say, 30 feet tall, so several people can read it at once. It's also possible to bind individual chapters into individual books, which actually might be an interesting way of distributing it over the course of a couple weeks, for example.

Personally, I think reading off surfaces within a pseudo3D enviroment (it's 2D at heart) is probably going to be less than ideal for readers (bad angles, limited number of words per page before obscurity, etc). Would something like an inworld audiobook classify?

-Adam

Guess who animated the BoingBoing's Jackhammer Jill logo

(no I'm not EBOY I just animated it)

-Blueman

Excellent, Blueman, and welcome.

> Would something like an inworld audiobook classify?

Hmm, you mean someone reading the whole book, and putting it into a series of audio files, or streaming it from their server? If you're really interested in doing that, lemme know, because I'd first want to check with Cory on that one, since that's considerably different from what I described to him.

Of course, is someone really hardcore enough to read a 320 page book into a microphone? That must take 6-8 hours of recording, at least!

Well, Cory just made his own desires for the SL book version of Someone known, which of course we'll take as a guide for this expo:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/28/contest_to_produce_i.html

I really hope that what they end up building is more than a simple 3D version of a meatspace book, though: electronic text is so much more protean than printed words, so it would be a shame to constrain it to behaving the way that dumb matter does.

So contrary to my previous guidelines, the ideal form does not necessarily have to look like a 3D book with turning pages, and so on (though those can be included, too.)

Ya know Hamlet - I want to say how inspiring it is to see this kind of promotion for SL - where people from the arts/literary world are brought inWord in a way that showcases the creative side of our world to the real world.

Thank you, thank you!

Taggy (Antagonistic Protagonist) created a great magazine viewer for our defunct Erogenous Zone magazine that could probably be adapted for this project. It allows you to use an attractive viewer, customized to content, and scroll page after page at your liesure.

At Perilous Pleasures, we just use Notecard givers shaped like books, with embedded notecards (chapters) within an initial table of contents notecard. Works well for full-sized novels, but isn't flashing or animation filled.

I've always loved books, and seeing more written words and creativity in fiction and poetry in Second Life is a major interest of mine. Can't wait to attend your bookclub activities!

<dances a jig, excited beyond words to see what residents come up with>

WOOP!

I definitely encourage Taggy to submit a version of his tech for this expo-- remember to put a public domain novel or one of Cory's old CC books on it.

Glad to do this, Merwan; it excites me just as much to put a challenge like this out there, knowing for certain that the Residents will not only meet it, but more likely, surpass it beyond anything I imagined.

In that regard, a little bird named Callum Linden just put this URL in my ear, noting that this Quicktime technology will be available to Residents in 1.6:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tools_tips/tutorials/textdescriptors.html

I've been fiddling around with a book reader for 2 days now, and I've learned a lot. I'm not satisfied with a solution that requires hundreds of special-purpose textures to be uploaded (and downloaded to each client), so I'm working on a dynamic text display system. I know XyText is popular, but it is optimized for low prim count, not for speed - it won't be able to keep up with the speed requirements for turning a page.

My own experiments have produced a prototype reader that can display 20 lines of 60 chars each using only (ahem) 625 prims, and over 620 scripts. I haven't begun to optimize really, but I did a lot of work up front to keep the prim count as low as possible without sacrificing readability or speed. Two chars per prim is the best I can do at the moment.

** Problems!

1) There is some pixel garbage between lines of text caused by incorrect display of textures.
2) It is pretty slow. It can take 5-10 seconds to display a page. I still have optimization to do, but I doubt I'll get a 10x speedup.
3) It's Primtastic! Yeah, most people don't have 650 spare prims to rez a book.
4) Lag. The overhead of rezzing the book can bring a sim to its knees.
5) Not robust. Using 600 link messages to display a page could result in some messages being missed and the page being displayed incorrectly.
6) Not linkable. That many prims can't be linked into one object, so it isn't very portable. You have to rez, read, de-rez, move, rez, repeat...

** Solutions?

There are a few things LL could add to SL that would make this sort of project so much easier and produce better resutls. Mostly they would reduce resource usage and improve performance.

1) llSetLinkTexture() - this is probably the easiest thing for LL to do. Right now you have to put a script in a child prim just to change its texture (or the texture's offset on a face). Give me this and I could get rid of 600 of my scripts, and 600 link messages. Zoom!

Strife Onizuka asked for this back in September (/13/f9/21652/1.html), and there have been repeated requests since then.

2) New Prim Type: GRID or SEGMENT

I've just posted this request: /13/34/40320/1.html

This would cut way down on prim usage, would let me link the book as one object, get rid of messages, listeners, etc. I could see a lot of other uses as well. Combined with a feature that would detect which face of a prim was touched would let us do seriously cool UI development in SL.

3) Text in SL

Eventually SL is going to have to do something to allow dynamic rendering of text in-world. People want this; just look at the popularity of XyText. It would be cool to have a text rendering prim that used an XML format to markup text. Then we could concentrate on making cool book objects that did wild things like display pages in a sphere around your av, or all the text of a book along a path in a garden, instead of devoting all our time to just getting text to render at all.

I suspect there is time to do #1 llSetLinkTexture in time for the challenge. I don't know about #2 and #3 as I'm not familiar with SL internals and can't estimate the potential difficulty.

2 questions,

1, Would the quicktime rendering text feature work (can entries use external servers? can we change parcel URL to turn the pages? I don't know if this would work)

2, Is there a skater chick character in this book? (If not, why not!)

yes, you can render text file using quicktime and change different attributes. styles etc.

the url that hamlet mentioned (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tools_tips/tutorials/textdescriptors.html) has a full list of commands that you can use - it's a little like using html.

the text file can reside on an external server - just refer to it in the media url for the parcel - e.g. http://www.mysite.com/sl/book.txt - and yes, there are parcel media commands to change the url via scripts - see the docs for more details.

callum.

p.s. it appears that you have to install more than the 'minimum required' when installing quicktime - if you are unable to load and render quicktime text files, run the quicktime updater and install the extra components.

Thanks, Callum!