Our section in Second Life, kindly donated by Nature, is focused on communicating city space. As such the image of San Francisco from Virtual Earth, created as part of our tutorial on Virtual Earth panoramas, is a natural choice to include within the environment.
Central to this is the need to ensure that the original visual fidelity is withheld. In Second Life the maximum texture size is 1024x1024 pixels resulting in a 6 to 1 compression of our panoramic image. There is however a simple way to match the original resolution as closely as possible by splitting the image up into tiles in Photoshop, as pictured below:
By noting down the pixel size of each tile a 'prim' in Second Life can be created at the required aspect ratio - thus to recreate the whole image 16 'prims' are required aligned using the grid snap option.
This quick and easy method results in a visually impressive image wall - as pictured below (click for a larger version):
Drop in and see us in Second Life - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Second Nature/232/169/116 or IM Smithee Bertrand and we will send you a teleport link.
As a side note to this post - the interchangeability between systems such as Virtual Earth, Google Earth and Second Life raises various issues of copyright.
The creation of panoramas essentially strips out all reference to the images source, as such this is an issue to watch.