Under the "bridge"

The DOCP bridge has undergone a lot of development thanks to our own Sousuke Tae, who has more or less singlehandedly coded the bridge as it currently exists. The developments from the bridge have led us to improve our Actors, which we had already coded and built. The new design takes the form of a small assistant that sits on one's shoulder. This makes it easier to touch under most circumstances, and it can be large enough that others are less likely to touch it by accident. Also, while Sousuke was building the bridge, I had time to rewrite the actor code (he later made his own assistant, which seems useful and fun however does not currently support the Actor functionality) and create a christmas gift for Ccs4ever Theilt, our assistant lead developer. This gift was a programmable trashcan robot that was DOCP-enabled, and therefore can be controlled via the new Actors.

New functionality will be soon added to the actors, such as inventory searching and resing/attaching, notecard searching, and eventually a rudimentary natural language interface. Currently the Actors can be used for IM from other objects and as a sort of universal remote control that learns all the forwarded functionalities of all the DOCP-enabled objects around it.

The bridge is going reasonably well, and although it doesn't forward yet, it does accept and process communication. If this attempt succeeds, we can use the same framework to allow web browsers to access the Synergist and the rest of the DOCPnet through standard http and some fancy plugins.

The robot, called the Gemini, was a simple thing that I whipped up in about an hour, however I'm sure that once the look of it is fixed up a bit and we add a bit to the DOCP interface and the included functionalities it will become quite a useful tool, as well as a fun plaything. Currently it is a blank slate -- a docp interface with no functionalities to choose from (though I included a few sample functionalities in comments). However, it is trivial to add functionalities, and in fact one can quite easily make an extremely powerful system out of it. One can have a script interpreter that interprets moves and conditions in a trivial language, add a vocal interface with which users can converse with and interact with the bot on channel 0 in a near-human language, add sensors, and make it work as any number of things, from a greeter to a security guard to a personal assistant to a tutor. One could even hypothetically give it some form of non-GOFAI intelligence and store the data on a notecard.

All of these things are fun to play with and fun to develop, and I think a few of them might just make us some lindens. It is my firm belief that copyable, modifyable, open source code and objects truly do have a market, in the metaverse and elsewhere, and that people are willing to pay a stipend for the convenience of having a package at their hands and to support the work that they themselves can build upon.

Before I get too preachy, I must go. I wish all a merii kurisumasu, hapii horideisu, whatever.

~EnkiV2