CCTV/Security Camera

Is it possible to get a "video feed" from one part of a sim to another? I mean a CCTV/Security camera style setup to visually monitor one part of a sim from another?

A colleague wants to set up an emergency room simulator for students. She needs to recreate a security room with a bank of cctv monitors showing different parts of the sim. I suspect it's not possible, but thought I'd ask before she starts looking at an alternative to SL.

Regards,
Adam

It is possible with the use of a "camera avatar" but not with scripting alone - you can't script a camera to send a video feed to a tv in-world. You'd need to have another copy of SL running with a program on that computer recording the video from SL (using Fraps for instance), then set the media url of the land where the security room is to that of the video feed from the recording computer. So you'd probably need to have some sort of web server on the recording computer.

That's the basics of it, I'm sure someone else can explain it much better.

EDIT: With the viewer now being open-source, it's probably possible to create a viewer with the sole purpose of recording and broadcasting video. But that's probably far beyond the scope of what you'd want to do.

It's also currently not possible to view more than one media stream at a time. But, you could have one "monitor" that cycles channels/camera feeds every 10 secs or so.

Depending on your situation, you might be able to simulate a bank of video monitors. If the scene is mostly static, or mostly repeatable (a car drives by every few secs, people standnig around...) then you could use a texture-animation technique for those monitors. That's basically a single texture consisting of all the video frames of a looping video sequence. The llSetTextureAnim() function allows you to play the texture 'cels' in sequence to simulate video. You could then switch between multiple texture animations to mix-up the video content per monitor. This would allow each monitor to show different camera angles, but they'd all be pre-recorded.

That's a good idea for a simulation, but my colleague wants actual live feeds from different parts of the sim, to simulate an emergency. I advised her that it's probably a matter of finding some funds and collaborating with a programmer to program a client, now that it's Open Source, as Stylez suggests.

Not as outlandish as it sounds, since that's more or less what you'd have to do to get similar functionality from some other environment like Torque, CrystalSpace or perhaps Multiverse.

Thanks for the suggestions.