3pointD.com

SL resident Williem Leandros sends news that he and a friend have built an interesting real-world control panel that can both control objects in the virtual world of Second Life and in turn be controlled by them. The real and virtual controllers are “entangled together through a Python web server” so that turning a knob on the physical controller affects the same knob on the virtual one. Pushing buttons on the virtual controller can light LEDs on the physical one. The project is just a proof of concept, but of course “the same techniques can connect other real world objects to other SL objects,” which is the kind of thing that someone somewhere will eventually find a productive use for. “We’ll probably be connecting the panel to trains and fireworks,” writes one of the pair (from whom I’ve lifted the screenshot above). Very cool. See the virtual controller for yourself »in the Pi region« of SL.