3pointD.com

The SecondCast cast

Johnny Ming, the host and producer of the SecondCast podcast we tape every Wednesday (where I appear as Walker Spaight, publisher and editor of the Second Life Herald), has kindly provided me with the code to stick a very cool audio player, featuring multiple streams to choose from, in the right-hand sidebar (below the SLurlPane) so that interested 3pointD readers can hear what the cast, and our guests, have to say about Second Life and the metaverse in general each week. Enjoy!

GeoSim Systems’ virtual Philadelphia

An interesting article in today’s edition of Israeli business periodical GLOBES profiles a company called GeoSim Systems, which is creating navigable, interactable, markup-capable 3D virtual environments as a service to everyone from governments to entertainment companies, retailers, media and advertising firms and more. Watch a nice, if brief, clip of an aerial camera-flight through their virtual Philadelphia at this link. The virtual city, which cost about $1 million to build, according to CEO Dr. Victor Shenkar, “will be launched in a couple months and will be available for use free of charge on the website of the University of Pennsylvania. (more…)

One small hopeful snippet from the American Bar Association’s Cyberspace Law Committee’s eCommerce Subcommittee can be read at the subcommittee’s blog: “Hank Judy [formerly of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation] spoke of his growing sense that the Cyberspace world was better explained through a property law analysis than the long-standing presumption that there is such a thing as a ‘virtual’ world.” Hard to tell what this will eventually mean in the 3pointD world, but it seems a promising direction to move, as it makes the tacit assumption that there are few fundamental differences between property rights in the real world and those in the virtual world. But the law moves slowly. The question to be decided, it seems, is whether pixelated “items” are in fact property as the law understands the term. There are a lot of great minds working in this area (and many of them blogging over at Terra Nova, including in this post from Dan Hunter), but so far little action. How these questions are decided, though, will have a huge impact on what will and won’t be possible in the metaverse, so they’re well worth paying attention to.

James Au at New World Notes reports that a live streaming music concert to be held in Second Life later this month will be “indirectly” sponsored by Coca-Cola. The concert will be held on April 22 at 1:00pm Pacific time in the Menorca region of SL, will feature “a stunning line up of musicians from Second Life,” according to its organizer, and will be directly sponsored by City Stages. “We have permission to build it here and use the [Coca-Cola] logo,” Au quotes SL resident Zenigma Suntzu, coordinator of the event, as saying of the concert venue, pictured above. It’s not clear why Zenigma chose to include the Coke logo if the company isn’t actually sponsoring the event, but it does mark one of the first sanctioned entries of a major brand trademark into Second Life. The powers that be at Linden Lab recently instructed their employees to summarily delete any user-created content they came across that seemed to violate trademark or copyright infringement laws.

Starting in September, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing will have a new address — at least, for a year. He’s been chosen to become the first holder of the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, at the University of Southern California, according to a USC press release. (more…)