3pointD.com

A cool new thing floating around the virtual world of Second Life these days is the TourHUD, a generic name for a heads-up display that provides you with a list of destinations and in-world landmarks to allow you to teleport to each in turn. There are two different types of TourHUD available at the moment, as far as I can tell. Both provide a nice way to get around the world and hopefully spot some things you may not have been able to find in SL’s clunky search utility. But it also seems the tour guide business in Second Life is heating up as well.

The SkyLink HUD is available from SL resident Gilbert Frederick’s SkyLink service, headquartered »in the Geometer sim«. While a bit buggy, the HUD is also part of a promotional service Gilbert offers. Tourists get a nice guide to interesting locations, while business-owners get their locations into TourHUDs. The vendor interface in Geometer is a bit confusing, unfortunately, so I’m not sure how many tours are currently available, but it seems at least two (at L$100 each). It was slightly annoyingly to find you can’t attach them there to check them out, though, since public object-creation is turned off at the plot. Once attached, the HUD shows a large picture of the current destination, and clicking on the right button opens the world map with the destination pre-loaded so that all you have to do is click the teleport key to visit.

A slightly smoother affair is an open-source TourHUD that’s been created by the Electric Sheep Company (as ever: sponsors of this blog) for ad agency GSD&M, which recently opened shop in Second Life, in a region called »Idea City«. (You can grab a copy of the HUD at that location.) This shows thumbnail pics of each location in the tour, which, when clicked on, open a small landmark window where you can click to teleport. The HUD itself (seen above) also gives a short description of the next destination, and can be re-colored, and collapsed in two different cool ways. As Digi Vox of the Sheep points out, the HUD doesn’t work on parcels that have scripts disabled.

The coolest thing about this HUD, though, is that it’s entirely open-source, with even the code released under a GPL license. It even comes with the ability to drop your own tour locations into the HUD with a minimum of fuss (which in SL still entails some fuss, but not as much as scripting it yourself). GSD&M originally provided one “culture” and one “business” TourHUD, but Digi has scripted a women’s fashion version (available free on SLBoutique), and there’s a new user TourHUD by Sheep Forseti Svarog that’s also on SLBoutique.

If you prefer the personal touch, you’re in luck as well. There appear to be at least four tour services operating in Second Life at the moment (I say “appear to be” because it’s sometimes difficult to tell what services are current without being able to check with people who are offline), and there are probably more. In addition to the Synthtravels service I blogged about a while back (which offers tours of a variety of virtual worlds), there’s also »SL Travel & Tours«, and the “SL tourguides” and “TOUR/FUN GUIDE” groups. Respresentatives of the latter two, as well as Gilbert Frederick of SkyLink, will speak to a gathering of the Kuurian Expedition on Sunday, November 26, at 9:00am SL Time (noon Eastern), in the conference center of the Parioli sim. Just IM a tour guide if you have trouble getting there.

Also: Be sure to let us know if you make a nice TourHUD of your own.