Un-packing

If you bought your Globe Clock from the Vengeance Studio Gadget Store you won't have to un-pack it. If you bought it from XStreetSL you'll need to un-pack it before you can use it.

To un-pack the globe, rez the package in-world by dragging it from your inventory to the ground, and then touch the package to open it. You'll then be given the option to copy the contents to your inventory. Once you've done so you can delete the package that is rezzed in-world.

Using the globe

The Globe Clock does not require setting. It adjusts to daylight savings time automatically for all the cities in its database. Please check for updates (available on the menu, described below) at least once or twice per year to keep the daylight savings information up-to-date. A future version may check for daylight savings changes automatically.

To display the time and current weather conditions for a city, locate it and touch it. Because there are so many cities, though, this can be more challenging than it sounds, even for cities you are familiar with. The NASA Earth-at-Night image on the face of the globe removes some of the challenge, but you may still have to touch a few different locations before you find the city you're looking for.

A Future version may offer an option to reduce the list of cities so you could, for example, click anywhere in Japan to locate Tokyo, but I think you'll find exploring the points of light that represent cities to be quite a lot of fun, so I for now I think the challenge is a feature and not a shortcoming. If you really get stumped, try using Google maps to locate your desired city relative to points you are able to find on the globe.

Notice that when you select a city, a white dot moves to show where the selected city is located. If you touch this dot, the globe will display in your text chat window two links you can follow for more information. One is a Google search page for general information about the city and one is a search page that should contain weather forecasts.

Features

Anyone can touch the globe, so your visitors can use it, too. You might sometimes come home to find it displaying information in a language you don't recognize. What happened? One of your visitors had their language preference set differently in their Second Life viewer. The globe displays information in the language of the person who touches it. It currently recognizes eight languages (English, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese), so you might come home to find it looking like any of the following:

~ Terminator Ring

There are a number of rings and other features surrounding the globe, and each serves a purpose. The ring that stands vertically on its edge, perpendicular to the ground, is called the terminator ring. Because the globe does not show night and day, the terminator ring serves to show which half of the world is in sunlight. Notice that the terminator ring appears as a solid, white band on one side and two slim rings on the other. The white side faces the sun.

~ Pole

The bar that extends through the poles shows the axial tilt of the earth. In the spring and fall both poles are near the terminator and the length of the day and night are nearly the same for all latitudes. In the summer the north pole points toward the sun and daytimes are longer than nighttimes in the northern hemisphere and shorter in the south. In the winter the opposite is true. Latitudes farthest from the equator have the greatest difference in night and day lengths. During the winter and summer there are locations near the poles that are in daylight or in darkness 24 hours.

The following animation shows what the axial tilt looks like relative to the terminator over the course of a year.

~ Selected City Pointer and Longitude Ring

The outer ruled equatorial ring is the longitude ring. The longest lines in the rule represent 0, 90, and 180 degrees East and West longitude. The arrow outside the longitude ring points to the selected city. Both the longitude ring and the city pointer rotate with the earth, of course.

~ Day Length Ring

The inner, un-ruled equatorial ring is the day length ring. It shows graphically the length of the day for the current time of year for the selected city. It doesn't rotate with the earth.

The image below shows the large difference in day length between summer and winter for the city of London.

~ Time Ring

Between the day length ring and the longitude ring is the time ring. Each of its major divisions is an hour in length. Use it and the day length ring to measure both the length of the day and also the time since or until daylight and nightfall for the selected city.

To measure the length of the day, count the number of hours difference from the terminator (12 hours) and double it. For example, if the day length ring extends an hour into the nighttime side of the globe (on each side), the length of the day is about 14 hours. In the above image, left side (June 21), the day length ring extends about 2 1/4 hours into the nighttime side of the globe, so the day length would be 12 plus 4 1/2, or 16 1/2 hours. In the December image the day length graphic falls more than an hour short of the terminator, so the day length would be less than 10 hours.

The smallest division on the time ring is five minutes.

To measure the time until or since daylight or nightfall, count the number of hours between the city pointer and the division of night and day on the day length ring. The following image shows Tokyo about an hour from daylight. The length of the day is about 14 1/2 hours.

Menu

There aren't any options to set, so the menu is very simple. It gives you access to the web documentation and allows you to reset the globe or check for updates.

To access the menu, touch the globe and hold the touch for a couple seconds. Only the owner has access to the menu.