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15
HUDs in Virtual Environments
Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.
—Steve Wozniak
15.1 WHAT ARE HUDS?
Not surprisingly, HUDs or heads-up displays are made from the same stuff that makes up the rest of your
virtual world: prims and meshes, textures, and scripts. They are custom concoctions of shapes, colors, tex-
tures, and scripting that are created by content makers to help you access the functionality of their virtual
products or to provide game-playing devices like tools, weapons, or counters. Instead of wearing a HUD on
your avatar or walking your avatar into a HUD, you attach it to your screen. The HUD will occupy par