Created in Second life using real time data from 19 automated weather stations in Antarctica
Antarctica .. a continent of of ice, rock and wind that for most of its frozen expanse rises above the sea as the Antarctic High Plateau around 3000 meters. This piece brings the continent into a virtual world and poses the question : What is an avatar?
The word avatar is not a new word
--noun
1. Hindu Mythology. the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape; the incarnation of a god.
2. an embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life.
3. Computers. a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet.
This piece is a personification of a continent, and a fragment of its current (real time ) existence is projected into virtual in the same way that we project a fragment of ourselves into SL and call it our avatar .
It speaks as a symphony of music that is generated by the wind direction from location across its body. Its form is described by the height and position of its parts. Its skin ( the thin layer of air just above the ice) coloured by its temperature.
As this is real time the composition will change from hour to hour, day to day as the conditions at each of the 19 locations on the continent change giving a song of Antarctica.
While the discs are visible as well as touching the disc there is also a colour scale that will tell you the temperature at each site at a glance.
This piece has two phases
Phase One
The first incarnation personifies the continent ice cover as a human figure.
It stands then breaks into its component parts. Each part is a real location on Antarctica, the site of an weather station that is streaming real time data on the conditions.
Phase Two
The second incarnation transforms into separate discs and takes the last 20 readings from each of the 19 weather stations (about the last 5 hours with the last being current).
Each disc represents an automated weather station and contains a set of individual notes. The direction of the wind at that location determines which note from each set is played at each location. NB there are no sound loops rather notes are generated one at a time depending on the wind direction.
The direction of the wind is also given by the direction of the texture animation and the particle stream.
The speed of the wind is given by the speed of the texture animation and the density of the particle stream.
The temperature is signified by colour - red is the hottest and bright blue the coldest. If it goes over 0 degrees it will begin to drip.
The relative height of the discs conform to the height of the weather station.
Technical aspects and Acknowledgements
I take the data from the web, pipe it though my hosted web site and transform it into music and colour.
It uses several transformations that are facilitated via scripts that modify the primitive parameters of each unlinked prim in the piece.
For the height of the station I have used the barometric pressure in the same way it is used by an aeroplanes altimeter. Any difference due to temperature or local air pressure changes is negligible compared to the variation caused by altitude.
The data is provided by the University of Wisconsin Madison through its AWS site and I gratefully acknowledge their permission to use it.
I pull the information from that site and then pre-processed on my hosted site ( I learnt php for this project)
Each element in the piece then request the last 20 readings ( about the last 5 hours ). I use the temperature, wind speed, wind direction and barometric pressure.
All scripts (off world and inworld), sculpts and textures are my own.
The music come from sets of notes in each element. I utilise 4 instruments to create the symphony.
Ghost Blow notes created by Jovica - www.freesound.org
flute - by Lorin Tone
Chord set by Lorin Tone.
Violin notes London Philharmonic
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