3pointD.com

Another gaming league announces a keystone deal. This time it’s Major League Gaming, which bills itself as “the first professional video game league” (though I’m not sure quite what that means). In any case, MLG has hit the big-time — or as big as pro gaming has ever gotten — with a deal to have its Pro Circuit tour televised on the USA Network in seven one-hour programs this holiday season. [Press release.] As far as I know, this is a first: video gaming gets its own basic cable slot, at least for the moment. Certainly, it’s a coup for the USA Network. Look for more tie-ups like this in the near future. There are other gaming leagues out there which will be looking to cut similar deals. (And the others actually pre-date MLG, I believe.) Note that the season kicks off this weekend at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. Admission is free. Register for a seat at the MGL site.

From the ever cool Make magazine blog comes this report of a webcam app called Minority Cube that lets you manipulate a virtual cube on your computer screen in much the same manner as Tom Cruise manipulated the hovering computer display in the movie Minority Report. A Minority Report interface to a 3D virtual world is something I’ve wistfully pondered with friends before. Actually, there is work going on in this area already, from the U.S. military and others. The rest of us, for now, can only dream.

Ars Virtua, a gallery space in Second Life that “leverages the tension between the 3d rendered game space and the real,” has a call for entries to a juried show featuring works “that reference, reflect on, make fun of, hint at, ignore, harass, vilify, exalt, or otherwise deal with The Real.” Click in the SLurlPane at the top of the right column here to visit — then get to work on your virtual canvas.

SW City’s Cirrus Street

This blog post alerted me to what sounds like a huge and thriving city in ActiveWorld that I hadn’t heard of before. SW City apparently covers 130 square km. of virtual space, and is filled with impressive builds, judging from this YouTube video. Billed as “the largest city in ActiveWorlds,” the place was founded in 1999, has over 200 “citizens,” a government, a census bureau and an active media sector. The video makes a great advertisement for AW, and seems to be inviting new users to “come build with us” in SW City. We don’t hear a lot about AW or the other big virtual world, There.com (which actually claims around twice as many members as Second Life), but I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more about both later this year.

Here’s a good report from the GigaOm blog on Cyworld, the latest entrant in the U.S. to the avatarized social-software space currently dominated by MySpace. Already hugely profitable in Korea, Cyworld may present some stiff competition to MySpace, Malik notes. Read more on Mashable.

Virtual mouse pursues virtual man (left) based on real mouse’s actions (right)

Wired News features a game in development called Mice Arena in which a player is chased through a virtual environment by an onscreen adversary controlled by a mouse or a hamster. That’s right, your own pet hamster. The hamster gets to play too, pursuing a piece of bait that’s controlled by the player’s actions through a high-tech cage. Infrared sensors pass information about the hamster’s movements to the game, and the game sends signals to the hamster cage that make the floors and walls deform to simulate the passage of territory. This has to be one of the funniest manifestations of 3pointD technology yet. Demo expected by November. But that’s not all: “In addition to Mice Arena, two other games in the Metazoa Ludens series have been proposed. In Chicken Petman, a real chicken will don the role of a ghost and chase movable bait controlled by a person within a maze. In Jellyfishtrone, the team plans to translate the swimming motion of a jellyfish into the serpent’s movements in the traditional game of Snake.”

The virtual world of Second Life ground almost to a halt this past Saturday night after being attacked by malicious, self-replicating objects that prevented users from conducting business as usual. Several similar attacks shut the world down completely last year. This one only made it impossible for avatars to move around normally, and led to Linden Lab having to temporarily switch off much of the world’s functionality (including the ability for anyone to log in) while they cleaned up the mess. The attacks raise an interesting question: Can a place where users are free to create their own content ever be made completely safe from attacks like these? (more…)

There’s a nice article up by Randall Newton, the editor-in-chief of AECnews.com (that’s “Architecture, Engineering and Construction,” via Ogle Earth), in which he ponders the future of his industry in the Google Earth age — what I’d call the 3pointD world, actually. SketchUp figures prominently in his thoughts, as well as Autodesk (who may or may not be working on a solution for getting AutoCAD models into Google Earth), 3D gliders for navigating Google Earth, and the sensor Web. (more…)