Yet Another Walking Update
After walking in-world a four or five times a week for a while now, I'm starting to see a little progress. Due to the walking, in addition to a half-hearted attempt at dieting, I've lost about 25 pounds in the last 12 weeks or so. Not great progress, I know, and I have a long way to go. But it's relatively painless, and easily sustainable for as long as it takes. And it gave me a good excuse to tinker and play around in SL every morning, too. Not a bad deal. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I still find it symmetrically pleasing and just that Second Life, the cause of a fair bit of my swivel-chair spread, is helping me lose it.

(Don't worry, this won't turn into Mori's weight loss blog. I expect I'd find that as boring to write as you would find it to read. Just thought I'd mention it in passing.)

But, alas, I fear I'm neglecting the upper body workout. (Well, not really. I couldn't care less about that. Just go with it.) Perhaps I need to look into something like this. The overhead weight assembly would be quite easy to adapt for the keyboard interface. I don't see any reason at all why simple contact switches couldn't be used in place of the fancier IR sensors. I'd be somewhat hesitant to integrate this into a real weightlifting apparatus, though. I know just enough about weightlifting to know that you can seriously mess yourself up by doing it wrong. And I expect that trying to flap your arms like some kind of demented bird would qualify as "wrong."

I did consider a somewhat related scheme after reading Aimee's comment when the project was mentioned in SL Insider. I got as far as whipping up a crude prototype for an arm-flapping control: a simple accelerometer (a metal weight sliding loose inside a plastic pipe, and a pair of contacts that closed when the weight is flung upward) designed to be held in my hand, to sense when my arm was quickly moved up and down. I'd planned on making a basic flight attachment and a set of animations to allow me to fly around in-world by flapping my arms (using two such devices, one for each hand). Unfortunately, my shoulders started making quite alarming popping and crackling noises after only a few wing strokes, so I shelved the project. Evidently, if men (or at least this man) were meant to fly, they would have been given not only wings, but more robust shoulder sockets. Too bad. No physical manifestation of the "I just flew in from Gibson, and boy are my arms tired!" joke.

That's really kind of a pity. I'm a sucker for physical comedy.
Posted by Moriash Moreau at 1:31 PM