This short animation is a trip into the theoretical third dimension of the Second Life map. It's just supposed to be a bit of silly fun. It's a 13 second Quicktime movie and the file is 3.2 megabytes.
Click the image to download.
I've finished mapping the terrain of the continent of Second Life. Below is a map of the grid generated in the style of the in-world map. I added the ability to create this type of map because SL residents are already familiar with it. I'm working now on interactive grid maps for the web and for Windows .NET.
Click for larger version.
Linden Lab has been adding "void" sims to fill in empty areas in the Second Life grid. This means people will be able to travel through these spaces instead of going around. Apparently the servers being used are the old servers of sims which have been upgraded to new hardware. Here's a picture of the terrain of a set of new void sims along the southern coast of the Japanese sims. It's cool that they put in detail such as the long underwater valley.
The terrain data I'm collecting in Second Life is stored in comma delimited text files like this one for Seacliff. The first column in each row is the y coordinate of that row's data. If you happen to have access to MATLAB, you can create a 3D image from this data in three lines:
S = dlmread('Seacliff_Terrain.txt',',');
S = S(:,2:end);
surf (S); figure(gcf)
The first line reads the data into a matrix. The second line removes the first column. The third line plots the surface.
Of course you can create a lot of other different plots. Here's a contour plot with default settings.
