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Philip Torrone at the Make Magazine blog reports that the Eyebeam OpenLab, the people who brought you OGLE (the Open GL Extractor that can export the shape of a 3D object from within a virtual world like World of Warcraft), have now made it possible to export the texture map of an object from within some such worlds as well. “As of OGLE 0.3b, it is possible to capture texture coordinates (UV) for vertices that have them,” Eybeam reports here. One step closer to being able to export from one virtual world all the information you’d need to re-create the same object in another online space. Imagine the day you can take your avatar — and your entire virtual identity, for that matter — from World of Warcraft and bring it into Second Life or another virtual world. International virtual travel awaits!

Glitchy Gumshoe over at the SL Future Salon flags a few lines of code written by Jarod Russell that apparently let Second Life residents control their iTunes applications from within the virtual world. The system is called primTuner, and while there may be a few bugs left to be ironed out, is a very cool example of the kind of VW-RL linkups we like to see in the 3pointD world.

As the Second Life Herald reports this morning, Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, has apparently banned the main account of one of its largest customers, land baron Anshe Chung, after she tried to withdraw more than US$50,000 from one of her Linden accounts and dangled the idea of starting up her own virtual currency to compete with the Linden dollar. Anshe pays LL something like US$30,000 in fees every month on the virtual real estate she owns there, but was apparently suspended from the world for being one day late on a US$5,000 bill. The move is apparently not an April Fool’s joke, as Anshe’s name has disappeared from the world’s Find interface. As the Herald sees it, the move was either a mistake (which speaks ill of LL’s management controls), or an active move against Anshe (which speaks ill of business conditions on SL’s Grid). Of course, we haven’t heard LL’s side of things yet. Anshe earns more than US$100,000 in Second Life, and is regularly touted by Linden Lab as an example of what’s possible in their world. Are they now trying to shut her down? Or have they just made a dire mistake? Stay tuned.

…and welcome.

This is 3pointD.com, a source for news and information about the 3D Web — sometimes called the metaverse — in all its manifestations. From virtual worlds like Second Life to applications like Google Earth, from cool mapping hacks that link up real-world locations to new ways of creating virtual ones, from concepts like folksonomy to the culture of online worlds, 3pointD.com will carry news and feature articles about all that and more. (more…)