The deadline for the screenshot competition is now over - I have a few hours to get the designs incorporated into our materials and get them off to the printers. We’ve had a couple of folks interested in helping man the booth - at this stage it looks like we’ll have between 5 and 7 people there at all times which is a great turnout. Look forward to seeing everyone then!

I’ve got a whole bunch of screen shots so far (if you haven’t got a reply from  me yet - please wait until Tuesday when I do the selections). I will be closing submissions on Tuesday, if you haven’t got your submissions in, I need them by Tuesday, 12PM Lunchtime GMT, however I’d really appreciate them all in by Monday evening.

Your screenshots will be featured on some of the posters we’re designing at the Virtual Worlds conference, we’re including an image credit and URL on them. Some may also be used in the information booklet we’re preparing to have printed for visitors to our booth.

We’ve got a couple of tickets available for people who can help us explain OpenSim to conference attendees in our very-spacious booth being sponsored by DeepThink, Genkii, RealXtend, SineWave and ISID.

If you want to get a free pass to attend in return for helping us out:

• You must know your stuff - you must be a regular user of OpenSim and/or RealXtend, ideally hanging on the IRC channels or reading the mailing lists too.
• Be prepared to spend at least a couple of hours in our booth (you don’t have to stay for the whole time)

If you are interested - send me an email or leave a comment where I can contact you. We’ve got a number of free passes so the more the merrier.

What this competition is about

For the upcoming Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in LA, myself and some of the other OpenSim contributors and developers have decided to sponsor a large booth, and we’d like to cover it with screen shots of the best and most innovative uses of OpenSim out there today.

What we need

We need high resolution screen shots from your builds, ideally these should be captured at a minimum of 1600×1200 pixels (if you are using the Second Life™ viewer, the “High Resolution Screen shots” option works well). All settings should be set to maximum, ideally with anti aliasing, screen shots should have a minimal amount of adjustment (limited to cropping, brightness) and originals should be provided.

The Specifics

• High Resolution - We’re printing onto a 300 DPI surface, this means we absolutely need the highest possible resolution when printing to make sure we have crisp clean non-blurry images. While there isnt a definition of what is or isnt high resolution - try submit screenshots at least 1600×1200, higher is preferred.
• Submit in a lossless format - We need images provided in either 24-bit PNG, TIFF or BMP. As these files tend to be rather large, please zip or rar them with maximum compression.
• If you are submitting a manipulated image, the original is required as well. There is no guarantee that the manipulated version will be used. (We are trying to provide accurate but nifty portrayals of what OpenSim can do.)
• Deadline - submit your images before Wednesday, 27th August 2008. Sooner is appreciated as we will begin incorporating images into the layout as soon as they are received.
• How to submit images - Please use a service such as yousendit.com to transfer the archived files, send your message to “adam@deepthink.com.au”. My inbox will reject files larger than 10mb, so please do not send these directly.
• Judging will be done by myself in conjunction with the other people sponsoring the booth. Decisions whether to utilize an image will be based on constraints such as whether or not we can work them into the larger montage and do so in a way which highlights OpenSim in a positive way.
• Some tips - People/avatars always look good. Eye candy is always a plus. Showing scenes where this is in production and potentially useful for people interested in using it are also going to be in demand.

What you get?

Accepted and utilized images will get 6 months free standard-class region hosting from DeepThink to a grid of your choice. The Judges may provide hosting for images of excellent quality which are unable to be used, however this is soley at the discretion of the judges.