2 years ago at Euro FOO 2006 I met a mass of great people and enjoyed a torrent of wonderful conversations, but 2 of them in particular stuck with me. The first was with Gavin Starks who commented that climate change would be much easier to deal with if we could see carbon dioxide. The second was with Claus Dahl who observed that Second Life is a great platform to prototype large scale augmented reality applications as every object in Second Life has an Id and you can give away free augmented reality glasses in the form of heads up displays (HUDs).

A year later I started to experiment with the latter idea with SLateIt, an augmented reality application that can be used to find, tag and rate virtual objects in Second Life. Although I think tagging, rating and recommendation systems have a bright future in navigating the vast quantities of people, places and stuff in Second Life, SLateIt mostly came about as a way to demo augmented virtual reality in Second Life without a large data set to associate with objects in SL.

Finally, last week, the awesome team of Max Williams, Ryan Alexander, Andrew Conway, Simon Willison, Natalie Downe and Chris Waigl helped me bring the two ideas together by mashing up SLateIt, SecondLife and Gavin Starks’ new AMEE emissions data base to create Carbon Goggles. Instead of mapping Second Life object Ids to tags and ratings, Carbon Goggles maps Second Life object Ids to AMEE URLs. The HUD queries carbongoggles.org for emissions data for nearby objects and, if found, overlays a sphere on the object with a volume corresponding to the monthly carbon emissions of the object. In 24 hours we managed to hack together a working system to demo at Mashed and 2 days later added an annotation interface that allows new objects to be annotated with emissions data.

Carbon Goggles has had some great coverage over the last week, but I really hope the story doesn’t end there. The goal is to annotate objects across Second Life to produce a collaborative user generated ambient augmented virtual reality scientific visualisation the size of Denmark. Together we can add an extra layer of information to Second Life allowing people to learn to make more informed decisions in real life while living their Second Life. If you’re part of a group in Second Life that would like to help annotate objects, host Carbon Goggles vendors in world, create videos or images of Carbon Goggles visualisations or would like to help in any other way, please join the Carbon Goggles group in Second Life and get in touch.

Well, not exactly. Having blogged previously on Terra Nova, the original Creation Engine and currently on the Official Second Life Blog, I’m not exactly stumbling blinking in to the blinding light of the blogosphere. Recently a number of things have come up that I’ve wanted to write more than 140 words about, but that wouldn’t fit on the Official Second Life Blog any more, so I’ve finally stopped mooching off other people and set up my own blog.

One reason I hadn’t got around to it sooner is that I’ve been torn between platforms. Although it’s been tempting to throw up a WordPress blog every time I’ve had something to talk about, I really wanted to build a blog in Django that I could tinker and experiment with. Although it’s just a matter of plugging bits together, it still takes a few hours to get a basic Django blog up and running and longer to add all the bells and whistles. I finally managed to break the impasse last week when I came across this list of Django blog engines and after some routing around decided to go with byteflow which has all the bells and whistles but is made of standard Django bits and is eminently tinkerable.

So, that’s what you see here: a default byteflow blog running on Django trunk running in mod_python as a virtual host (alongside the slateit.org and carbongoggles.org Django apps) inside apache2 running on ubuntu dapper on a virtual machine hosted by bytemark. It took long enough to get round to, but once I’d found byteflow it only took an hour to set up. I’ll be kicking the wheels and tinkering over the coming weeks, but if you find anything broken, please let me know.