Second Life on a Mobile Phone Nii Annan September 2011 Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of Science in Information Technology Department of Computing Science and Mathematics University of Stirling



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Second Life on a Mobile Phone

Nii Annan

September 2011

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of
Master of Science in Information Technology

Department of Computing Science and Mathematics
University of Stirling

Abstract


Second Life™ is a multi-user virtual world which provides a three dimensional space shared by a number of avatars. They interact with their environment and one another through instant messaging as well as voice communications. The Inter-life project is developing a private island on Second Life to provide an educational research space aimed at finding ways to aid young people in developing social skills and navigating difficult transitions in their lives [1]. On this private island, the number of avatars in world at any given time may be small. This could make going in-world uninviting and thus overall interest reduces.

The objective of this project was to change this by allowing a user to see who was in-world using a mobile phone application. This project aimed at developing a mobile phone application which would display a map of the Inter-life Island and indicate the current location of users online. The mobile platform of choice was an HTC 7 Trophy Windows Phone device running a Release Candidate version of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 operating system code named “Mango”.

Methodology involved determining the requirements of the application, analysing the components needed, designing the system, implementation of software code and testing the application to eliminate errors.

The most significant achievements in this project included, creating a log-in user interface, the map interface and features for showing the information of avatars online as well as plotting their location on the Inter-life Island map. A basic version of Twitter was also developed (Twittledoo) and incorporated within the main Inter-life application for sending messages.



Attestation

I understand the nature of plagiarism, and I am aware of the University’s policy on this

I certify that this dissertation reports original work by me during my University project except for the following:

The Code for the Twitter Client was helped developed by Dennis Delimarsky



Signature (you must sign and date this page) Date

Acknowledgements


This project would not have materialized without the help and guidance of a few people.

Sincere gratitude goes to Cliff Simpkins (Senior Product Manager; Windows Phone Developer Experience) who gave me the green light to use the freshly released Windows Phone Mango Beta for this work. In his words and I quote “You're good to use this to develop apps for a school project, and present about it and whatever”

I would like to thank Dr Mario Kolberg for being of tremendous help during this period for giving me various insights as to how the Inter-life server works. Much appreciation also goes to Professor Magill and Dr Karla Parussel who gave me a detailed description of the Inter-life server architecture. Many thanks go to Dennis Delimarsky for helping out with the twitter code used within the Inter-life Windows Phone application. Much appreciation goes to Marco Giuliani for helping out with sections of the code in my work. Thanks to Pablo Almunia for supplying me with C# books and reference materials.

Finally, loads of appreciation goes to all the staff at the Institute of Computing Science and Mathematics as well as course mates who made this entire academic year at the University of Stirling a part of my life I will always cherish.


Table of Contents


Second Life on a Mobile Phone 1

Abstract 2

Acknowledgements 4

Table of Contents 5

List of Figures 6

1Introduction 7

Background and Context 7

Scope and Objectives 8

Achievements 9

Overview of Dissertation 9

2State-of-The-Art 11

Second Life™ 11

The Inter-Life Project 11

Second Life Apps 11

Developing Applications for Windows 13

The .NET Framework 13

Programming in C-Sharp (C#) 14

Relationship between C-Sharp and the .Net Framework 15

Versions of Windows Phone – Brief Overview 15

Microsoft’s answer to Windows Mobile OS – Windows Phone 16

Market Share Projections 16

Networking and Web Services for Windows Phone 16

Using Sockets on Windows Phone 16

Character Encoding for Windows Phone 18

3Early Stages of Development 19

Requirement Phase 19

Use Case Diagrams for the System 19

Use Case for Component 1: Login and Avatar Details 19

Use Case for Component 2: Communication Support 20

Class Diagrams for the System 21

Class Diagram for Component 1 21

Class Diagram for Component 2: Communication Support 23

Designing the User Interfaces of the System 26

4Implementation Phase 28

Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone IDE 28

Writing XAML 29

Code Behind 29

Walkthrough of Apps Key Functionalities 30

SocketClient Class 31

SignInPage Class 31

MapPage Class 31

String Manipulation: Highly Essential 32

AvatarStuff Class 34

Plotting Avatar Location 36

Twittledoo – in-built Twitter Client for Inter-Life App Messaging 38

Registering an application name with Twitter - Twittledoo 38

AuthConstants Class 39

UserTwitterStuff Class 39

UrlConstants Class 40

OAuthClient Class 40

Twittledoo and Authentication Process 41

Testing 45

Testing for Suitable Encoding 45

Sending data using Unicode (little-endian) 45

Receiving data using Unicode (little-endian) 45

Receiving data using Unicode (big-endian) 46

Testing Range of Values for Plotting Avatar Locations 46

Multi-user Testing 46

Software Maintenance 47

User Feedback 48

5Conclusion 49

Summary 49

Evaluation 49

What worked 49

What did not work so well 50

Future Work 50

Region Expansion 50

Traveling Across Regions 50

Real Time Chatting Experience 51

Empty Strings from Inter-life server 51

Automatic Updates 51

Log out Button 51

Miscellaneous Bits 51

Pushing mobile hardware to its limits 51

Limited Knowledge of Programming in C# 52

References 53

Appendix 1 55






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