Using Flickr photos in Second Life

My friend Lana Miranda recently pointed out to me that the QuickTime player in the Second Life client could also play SMIL presentations. For those that don't know, SMIL is an XML-based media description format, created by Real Networks back when Philip Rosedale was the Chief Technology Officer there before he founded Linden Labs and became Philip Linden. SMIL was standardized by the W3C and Apple implemented SMIL 1.0 as a supported media type in QuickTime 4.1 (we're at version 7.1 of QuickTime now, although sadly it still only supports SMIL 1.0 and not the later versions of SMIL which provide nice features like transitions and animation).

Second Life has the ability to play QuickTime movies overlayed on primitive objects. As a consequence, you can play streaming videos on in-world television sets and movie screens. But, since QuickTime can also play SMIL-based presentations, this opens some interesting possibilities for playing other media types as well.

One of the more interesting usages that occurred to us was to be able to pull images from Flickr and use them in SL. To that end, we used Flickr's robust web services API to create a nice little "Web 2.0" web application called PhotoMovr to let you do this easily. You can check it out at http://www.photomovr.com. It's just a beta and not hosted on a particularly fast server, so if it gets a lot of usage it might slow down, but it does work quite nicely at the moment. If you have a Flickr account and you have photos organized into sets, it's very easy to use. Feel free to give it a spin.

Here are some snapshots of Flickr photos being viewed in-world using the QuickTime movies generated by PhotoMovr: