Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS in Second Life
October 22, 2008 | 1:29 pm
A couple of years ago, a few of us were throwing around the idea of building the Large Hadron Collider in Second Life (SL), the virtual world that has been pretty popular in recent years. I was hoping that we could build a virtual collaboration of people to construct the whole LHC in SL (and try to beat the real thing to construction).
Once it was running, the idea would be to feed real data from the LHC to the SL version, and have a really detailed 3D virtual tour of the facility, which people won’t be able to get into once beams are running. Unfortunately, like so many plans, I didn’t have time and resources to really pursue it.
However, I see that a dedicated LHC fan has created the ATLAS experiment from the LHC in SL. Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep it built in place as he did it on somebody else’s land for a while and it’s a pretty intensive simulation, with 1300-1500 individual 3D elements. Perhaps one of our readers out there has some SL land they would we willing to provide to the entity known as Professor Panda (SL name Ryushimitsu Xingjian).
Of course, not everything is scientifically accurate–this is done in the spirit of fan art–but I can tell you from having been in the ATLAS cavern while it was being built, that this does a very good job of the look and feel of the real detector.
Xingjian has made a video of his construction while it was still standing. Let’s hope that it can find a permanent home and that LHC construction in SL might continue. Get in touch with me if this is a project you are interested in.
Also Wagner James Au at New World Notes, a Second Life news publication, has a lot more info on this project here.
David Harris
Posted in Uncategorized |
October 25th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
If you’d like to see how to solve the Fermi Paradox by concluding that the LHC will spawn a killer black hole, take a look here:
http://staringatstrangers.typepad.com/staring_at_strangers/2008/10/the-end-of-the.html
Perhaps more science fiction than science, but interesting nonetheless.
October 26th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
[...] Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS in Second Life Hooray for 3D demos, and double-hooray for neat videos: [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
This is based on an interview I did with Ryushimitsu Xingjian– which is not his real name, but his SL name. (To make things more complicated Professor Panda is his nickname among some of his SL friends.)
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/10/professor-panda.html
October 27th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
@Hamlet: Thanks for that clarification. Prof Panda used his SL name in writing back to me and I foolishly took it as his real name! I have corrected that above and included the link to your story.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
[...] 27, 2008 by Ben Lillie As David Harris reports, someone has created a model of ATLAS, one of the 4 detectors at the LHC, in Second Life. Besides [...]
October 27th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
This is amazing work. We would like to offer space on http://www.reactiongrid.com for this project to find a home. Contact me on Skype “pcmash” or via email create@reactiongrid.com to see if it is a fit for OpenSim.
Either way beautiful work!
October 28th, 2008 at 1:53 am
Thanks David! I do hope some kind of link between LHC and SL’s LHC happens.
October 28th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
[...] up this machinima, and run it in his blog. Another nod goes to Ham Au for tipping us off to David Harris’ complimentary writeup of Professor Panda’s [...]
November 1st, 2008 at 5:43 pm
[...] Exploratorium have set up bases in SL, and one ambitious fan of the Large Hadron Collider built a mock-up of the ATLAS detector. At the research level, astronomers have set up the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, [...]