SL 'virtual' Webcams

This feature suggestion is more for the website than the game, and came to me when I was showing someone (a non-player) the image gallery.

How about some 'virtual' webcams in a prominent page on the website, showing views of interesting locations in SL? They dont neccesarily have to update too often (but hopefully more than once per day), but they would show potential players some 'fairly recent' views of SL before they signed up.

Just a thought...

ohhh... that sounds cool... I'm not sure how easy it'd be to impliment though, short of Lindens going to those places and taking pictures every hour or so. I don't think we have to abaility to auto-snapshot from away from our AV yet.

i bet there's a much much better way to do it but offhand i'd leave my avatar in the game pointing where i want and use some automation software like Automate to trigger my screenshot program (Fraps or some such) every however long and dump the files into a folder my webcam upload program would access.

just an idea..

Windows media server can stream your screen to the world, its easy to setup and free to download from microsoft.
Just run SL windowed and you will be streaming SL to whoever wants to see it.

I still think this is a good idea, and it could be a good draw for people thinking about trying SL.

My thinking was this:

If the Linden's can make automatically updating maps (see the new map in the resident life section) it can't be terribly hard for them to code up some kind of invisible snapshot-taking camera. Taking a snapshot that is viewable from the website every half hour perhaps.

Wait - That map is automaticly updating?


<evil grin>

PS: how often?

No, we hand draw it ourselves by flying slowly over the world with photoshop running in another window.

But seriously,

Full 3D snapshots of views within SL are harder than the maps, because we don't use graphics hardware on the servers - yet.

Right now, as suggested, we would have to point a client at the scene in-world to get such pics. Agree it is a great idea.

Theres a problem though. You get logged out after 30 minutes of inactivity. I guess you lindens can get around every limit but it would make it impossible for us to put up such a "webcam". I think adding the ability of putting SL into an avless "kiosk" mode just to show off a part of the landscape would be cool for this purpose. No text should appear so people's privacy isnt invaded and we could possibly also do away with the UI buttons.
We could even do it without the windows media server.
Just set it up to take a snapshot every x seconds or minutes and let people connect to our client to retrieve the latest snapshot. Snapshots wouldnt even need to be uploaded to the SL servers.