3pointD.com

VRoot blogs two cool interfaces in development, one a neural interface for gaming, and the other a free PlaydoCAM. Nice.

Ogle Earth blogs one of the coolest models yet created for Google Earth, the space station from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I was going to let the image speak for itself, but it put me in mind of a cool idea: Google Space. Can’t wait to dial into http://space.google.com and see what lurks among the stars.

About two weeks ago, we asked the question, Will Second Life Ever Be Safe? That day may come, but it hasn’t yet arrived. As noted in the previous post here, the virtual world of Second Life was today hit by yet another attack that necessitated Linden Lab’s closing its Grid, the third time in two weeks. (The last attack, which came just yesterday, was blogged by Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture.) The attacks all have one thing in common: they take advantage of the single most attractive aspect of SL — the ability for users to create their own objects — and turn it against the virtual world. (more…)

For the third time in two weeks, the virtual world of Second Life has been hit by a world-shaking attack that’s necessitated Linden Lab’s closing the Grid to all comers. “I know this is totally frustrating — for us too,” writes Robin Linden (aka Robin Harper, LL’s VP for community development and support) in a forum posting today. “We’re working with the authorities to go after the people responsible for these attacks, as you know. When I have information to share I’ll pass it on.” Stay tuned for updates.

Here’s an idea that’s been kicking around in my head lately: PeopleTagging. It grows out of the question of who I am online. Am I my Web site? Am I my email address? My toon name? My password? Or am I the person sitting at the keyboard, and if so, how do you translate that into various online contexts?

PeopleTagging first, deep techno-philosophical questions to follow. PeopleTagging presumes a world in which we all have easy access to wireless RFID- and GSM-enabled devices (if we want them). It would also be helped along by an app like Wayfinder, a 3D digital earth for Java-enabled mobile phones that should be in beta as of May 2 (according to Ogle Earth), or Google Maps Mobile, a 2D version of the same idea. The basic concept is that you’d use your computer or your mobile device to search for someone within a network of friends or some other community, click on their name, and have your browser zoom in to their location anywhere in the world. Maybe you can then open a communication link to them — voice, IM, SMS, whatever — or, if they happen to be cruising around Second Life or There.com at the moment, would let you drill down further to find them within that world and even launch the application so you could meet up with them there. (more…)

Several Chinese research institutes are seeking to preserve a few deteriorating cultural treasures by recreating them online in full 3D, according to this story from China news site CRI English. While the story doesn’t mention what technology’s being used, it sounds slow and expensive, but highly detailed.

This is a great idea. Digital recreations can’t take the place of actually visiting places like Yuxu Palace and Wudang Mountain (”splendid buildings related to the magnificent Taoism culture. But some of the cultural relics have simply been eroded by time; many were destroyed; and some others have been submerged under water.”). But for those who will never be able to travel to the sites, for students, and for sites or artifacts that may be damaged by exposure to visitors, pixelation seems an excellent alternative.

My brother Jeremy sends along a link to a truly mind-blowing video that demonstrates a multi-touch interface screen similar to the multi-touch table I blogged here a while back, but with far more interesting widgets on display. I want, and that’s putting it mildly. Developed by a group at the NYU Media Lab led by a fellow named Jefferson Han, this thing looks really powerful in the video. A wide variety of interface modes are on display — dragging and resizing not only objects but interface elements, animating drawings in 2D, rotating objects in 3D, zooming into maps and cruising through topographical information from what I think is the NASA World Wind project, scratching records, mixing music, play games — whew. I’m not sure how “live” some of these applications are or whether they’re just interface mock-ups for the demo, but they’re damn impressive, and could turn 3D navigation and content creation into a whole new and more tactile experience. [UPDATE: Forgot to mention how cool the soundtrack is.] (more…)

20-something hipster boy to 20-something hipster girl getting off the subway in Manhattan’s East Village last night: “Yeah, we had to cancel the raid because our Druid didn’t show up.”

Jeremiah Owyang sends over a link to a podcast he’s just posted on his blog, in which he interviews two Second Life users from opposite ends of the SL spectrum. One is his friend Chris Salazar, a 20-year-old Santa Clara University student who’s just been introduced to the virtual world, and the other is Robert Scoble of Microsoft, who’s been evangelizing SL left and right lately. (more…)

Eric Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 blog ponders whether Google’s purchase of SketchUp means the company is thinking about turning Google Earth into “a virtual world where visitors can create their own buildings, vehicles, and other objects or just roam around.” [Via Croquet 2 Play.] This is something my metaversal friends and I have been thinking about for a while now, the prospect of some kind of shared, multi-user, avatarized layer or functionality for Google Earth. Google, I know, is interested in the space at least enough to entertain presentations and meetings with various emissaries from the metaverse, including from Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. If Google were to make some kind of move into the virtual world space, I imagine they’d do it very carefully. The challenge would be to keep such an app as open and versatile as the rest of their fare. I, for one, am very much looking forward to hearing about developments in this area.

YouTube has an interesting video of a pretty extensive hobo village that’s been built in Second Life. Click in the SLurlPane at the top of the right column here to visit, while the link lasts, or just click this SL link.

One of the best things about going to tech conferences is running into Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal and an original author of the cluetrain manifesto. Doc is really smart and really nice, and he comes at technology solidly from the point of view of the people who use it, which I think is the most important angle. I just came across this podcast of a talk Doc gave last December, in which he talks about pending legislation, cable companies, and the importance of keeping the Internet and World Wide Web an open place for the creation of and access to content and information — or at least of deciding whether that’s what it’s actually going to be. Definitely recommended listening. (more…)

With the announcement the other day that Google was making SketchUp available for free also came news of 3D Warehouse, Google’s free repository for SketchUp models that can be imported into Google Earth. Now, Stefan Geens at Ogle Earth posts a very perceptive essay about some of the problems with Google’s not-quite-free and not-quite-open model. (more…)

200,747 registered members as of this morning. It actually passed the mark around 9pm Eastern last night. I got the text message from a friend, but I was out. Various people have a bet going as to whether Second Life will reach a million by the end of the year. I’ve been betting against, but at the rate things have been going, I wouldn’t be surprised — nor displeased — to see myself lose that bet.

Tech Warfare

Second Life’s 2006 Game Developers Contest has reached the finals, with eight games arrayed around two sims in SL for the public to play and judge. If you haven’t seen what can be done by talented scripters in Second Life, this is a good place to experience it. The games will be up through May 11th. We toured the games last night as part of an upcoming SecondCast show. I’ll touch on two here, though most all of them were fun and interesting. (more…)

An all-too-brief video accompanies this MSNBC.com story about the Geospatial Decision Making project at the University of Southern California (aka GeoDec), which layers real-time video atop a virtual 3D environment. The video shows live shots of cars passing along the streets of a virtual city. A pair of “data gloves” is used to control the app. Interesting possibilities here — including some frightening ones in the area of surveillance. But a nice-looking technology nonetheless. GeoDec can apparently combine sources from several data streams in a smooth and timely fashion. And it’s multi-user, apparently:

GeoDec could conceivably be applied to fields ranging from urban planning to emergency response to military surveillance — with multiple agents accessing the same multilayered database.

If Google buys you, it generally sets you free. That’s now the case with the cool 3D environment-building tool SketchUp (note new SketchUp URL), which Google bought not too long ago. I’m looking forward to experimenting, as the demo’s I’ve seen make SketchUp look fairly powerful and easy to use. Fun and free tools for creating your own 3D virtual spaces? I’m so there. [Via Ogle Earth.]

Intel’s Miramar 3D Workspace

Eleanor Wynn, a Social Technology Architect at Intel (and a co-editor of the journal Information Technology & People) sends along the screenshot above to illustrate Intel’s Miramar project, which we blogged a couple of days back. While things are still at an early stage, Wynn mentions that the 3D collaborative workspace system is currently being prototyped “for exploration for distributed engineering work.” The image appears to have been created within a Croquet environment, although my first impression appears not to have been correct. The image above is actually the Miramar environment itself, which doesn’t yet support multiple users, though that’s the goal. Wynn says Intel at this point is “only thinking” about whether Croquet is the right place for it. “A Second Life underlayer is not out of the question.”

Comic book, game and anything else writer Warren Ellis has been mucking about in Second Life at least long enough to know how to SLurl something. Yesterday he SLurl’d the place where blogger Tom Reynolds is giving away (or “practically giving away”) SL t-shirts emblazoned with the logo of Ellis’s discussion site, The Engine. That’s pretty cool, if you’re a fan, but here’s my question: When do we get the Warren Ellis comic that’s released exclusively in-world? Comics seem to be one of the few kinds of reading material that work well within Second Life. So how ’bout it, Warren?

Tim O’Reilly has an interesting post on the slow but continuing move at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, “away from custom C++/messaging and into Web services” in their back-end architecture. Tim talks briefly to LL’s Cory Ondrejka and Ian Wilder Wilkes, who shed not much more light than we’ve already seen, but who promise more to come. It’s worth a read, but we look forward to bringing you updates.

If you’ll be in LA for E3 (as I will), you may be interested to drop by the University of Southern California’s Center for Public Diplomacy on May 8, where they’ll be announcing the results of their Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games contest. The contest asked entrants to “design, conceive, and build a game or game prototype that employs the principles of public diplomacy.” Finalists have already been announced. (more…)

I’m still baffled as to why anyone would navigate to pixel-selling ad sites like Million Dollar Homepage — unless it’s that they found the link in a blog like this. In any case, I find it highly amusing that the latest such site, Virtual World Real Estate, is selling little pieces of a Microsoft Virtual Earth map to all comers. The more recent buyer took all of Pennsylvania and Israel for a whopping $77,777(!), according to this press release. The virtual world just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Ogle Earth’s Stefan Geens has located a Japanese 3d-to-KML app called SOLA, and despite the fact that it lacks English instructions, managed to upload a 3D KML Tyrannosaurus Rex to an environment there. What’s nice about SOLA is that it’s “a converter program for both Windows and Mac that takes any old W3D (Shockwave), 3DS and DXF (AutoDesk) and OBJ (Wavefront) file and turns it into KML fit for Google Earth.” I’m not sure if these kinds of apps are simple enough yet for just anyone to use, but it seems they’re getting there. If you can handle them, please note that Geens is waiting on King Kong. Let us know when he reaches the top of the Empire State Building.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! gives a nice interview about “social search” in this video on MarketWatch. I like that he says that the right way to come upon Flickr is to have a relative tell you he’s posted his wedding photos there. I turned a filmmaker on to video-sharing sites like YouTube just yesterday. He said it was “a life-changing experience.” That’s a good way to describe all these tools. What’s interesting about the interview is how Yahoo! is going about rolling out this stuff, letting things like its My Web 2.0 service be adopted naturally through sites like Flickr, for instance. Nice.

Microsoft is getting in on the social networking space as well, announcing late last night [press release] that it’s creating a new start-up in Silicon Valley called Wallop Inc., which is headed by longtime entrepreneur Karl Jacob. Though the Wallop site already has a useless animated cube on it (is there any better Microsoft branding than that?), the description of what’s to be developed there sounds interesting — if not entirely desirable:

Launching later this year, Wallop . . . will introduce an entirely new way for consumers to express their individuality online. For example, today’s social networks have difficulty enabling people to interact in a way similar to the way they would in the real world. . . . Wallop departs from the friend-of-a-friend model common in all social networks today and the root of many of their problems. Instead, Wallop developed a unique set of algorithms that respond to social interactions to automatically build and maintain a person’s social network.

That cube isn’t the only thing typically Microsoft. Me, I don’t want Bill Gates or anyone else for that matter automatically building and maintaining my social network. (more…)

The very interesting news of yesterday afternoon was the the BBC’s online offerings will soon undergo a major overhaul, one that will see the Beeb’s Web site retooled to focus on, “user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com,” according to The Guardian newspaper. The BBC’s own announcement is here., with a few more releases and presentations available at this link. [From the Social Software Weblog, via Glitchy.] (more…)

The Acceleration Studies Foundation, which is putting on the Metaverse Roadmap meeting in a couple of weeks (which I’ll be attending), has a call for participation out, asking interested parties to contribute any metaversal resources they come across to the Roadmap’s home page. Send links or news to roadmap [at] accelerating [dot] org, and stay tuned for the Metaverse Roadmap’s public wiki, which should help get public participation in the Roadmap off the ground. (And which should really be live by now, if you ask me.)

Philip Torrone’s virtual reality headset

Philip Torrone look out. SpatiaLight, which manufactures “ultra high-resolution Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) microdisplays for the high definition television market,” has a press release accouncing that it’s now developing “a 3-D eyeglass-type display device for use with wireless phones, personal digital assistants and personal media players, which enable the viewing of broadband content, cable and satellite television, music videos as well as playing of video games, all with the experience of high definition large screen television.” Imagine: instead of all the laptops at Starbucks, we’ll one day see a bunch of people logging into the virtual world via a hyper-powered Blackberry and their SpatiaLight VR glasses. I’m not sure I want to have a coffee in that particular Starbucks, but it sure could be a cool way to take your 3pointD on the road.

CNet reports that the Explorer geocoding technology developed by California firm SRC has just been made open-source. [Press release.] SRC describes Explorer as “the industry’s first open sourced geocoder that is data and country independent, enabling developers to integrate digital address databases in any country to support geocoding processes.” There’s a lot of open-source action in the mapping community, so I’m not sure if this is big news or small beer, but it sounds a useful tool. SRC also has a cool-looking Google Maps-demographics mashup that can actually take any appropriate data set and map up a report from it. Neat.

There’s a nice article in the Orange County Register describing the ways people have begun to use virtual worlds as meeting spaces for their real-world ventures. Columnist Colin Stewart describes the conferences held by Aerospace Corporation software engineer Michael O’Brien in the virtual world of Second Life, but he also touches on the Miramar 3D collaborative workspace tool that Intel has been working on for some time. (more…)

By this point, actually, there seem to be at least 70. That’s according to the Second Life Society for Virtual Architecture, anyway, which will hold a meeting this evening (4pm Pacific time) to share the wondrous sights (and sites) its members and other interested parties have stumbled on in their travels, and perhaps hash out criteria for determining what constitutes a wonder of the virtual world. If there’s a place you’d like to nominate or if you just want to hear about interesting builds to visit in the world, click this SL link or navigate via the SlurlPane at the top of the right column here, while the link lasts. More information in this SL forum posting, or contact Meridian Maginot in-world.

Queens, New York, in Second Life

Slowly but surely, Second Life is coming to be seen as a tool not just for geeks and techies, but for everyone. That’s the paradigm shift you want to look for, as that’s the kind of thing that will eventually launch us into the 3pointD world. One sign can be found in the humble borough of Queens, New York, where a local community board is holding the first meeting of the Juggernaut Club this Saturday. The long-term goal of the club is to “introduce young adults living in northwest Queens to the economic opportunities this new world offers, to help them be creators of knowledge.” The club’s first project, intended in part to get people familiar with virtual life and work, will be to contribute to the development of a seven-acre park by hashing out ideas in Second Life. (more…)