3pointD.com

Want to know what’ll be happening in the metaverse in a decade’s time? A group of metaversal thinkers (myself included) will get together in California next month to start hacking out their vision of what might come to pass. The Metaverse Roadmap is a project of the Acceleration Studies Foundation that will seek to come up with “a 10-year scenario, possibility, and challenge document for the development of the 3D Web” and related 3pointD technologies (including massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds like Second Life, social software and Web 2.0 apps, among other things). [Press release.] It promises to be a heady event, with participants including Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Esther Dyson, Randy Farmer of Yahoo! and John Hanke of Google Earth, among others. The public is invited to participate as well, through an open wiki and mailing list, though I’m not sure whether these have been implemented yet. I’ll be blogging the event, and (with any luck) Johnny Ming of SecondCast will be podcasting things at some point. If nothing else, the resulting document will be fascinating look at some of the more blue-sky ideas that are knocking around the 3pointD world at this point. And plans are to update the roadmap on a recurring basis in order to keep pace with whatever does come to pass. Hopefully, it will be a document that will foster new ideas, new directions and new developments in all aspects of 3pointD.

The Make Magazine Makers Faire kicks off this Saturday, April 22, in San Mateo, California. See what people are making in the real world these days. Of course, the virtual world will be represented as well. Linden Lab will be there, demo’ing their virtual world and the ways it can interact with the real one. Fun.

Second Life resident Tateru Nino’s blog mentions a Community Fair that’s on in SL for the next two weeks.

Want to find out more about being a volunteer in SL? Swing by the booth and collect some info. Learn more about the Live Music Scene in SL, or Deevyde Maelstrom’s particular brand of Mad Science. Learn more about our residents with Autism, SL’s New Resident support organisations, RL work in SL, the Foundation For Rich Content, Art and Sculpture, SL Parks and Recreation Services and yet more.

More information in this SL forum thread. Click in the SLurlPane at the top of the right column here to visit, while the link lasts, or just click here.

Another collaborative map-tagging app I’ve just run across (via we-make-money-not-art) is Blue Puddle, which lets users create, tag and even combine maps that “draw on users´ collective memory and subjective experience of a city. These maps foster the emergence of stories about the city that are more rich than any single author could create.”

Blue Puddle joins apps like Platial and Community Walk in what seems to be a rapidly growing collaborative map-tagging space. 3pointD.com, of course, has its own collaborative map going on over at Community Walk (chosen from the field for no particular reason). The map is open to all, so we encourage you to go tag up your favorite 3pointD-related sites.

Forbes.com discovers virtual worlds today, but slightly misses the point. Their article on Reshaping Reality hits a couple of good points, but winds up characterizing virtual worlds as something too removed from the world around us. (more…)

Clickable Culture’s Tony Walsh sends word of a virtual London that’s been released by ImageCat Inc., who are creating 3D models for use in risk management by sectors like insurance, asset management and security. The model was created using satellite imagery from a company called DigitalGlobe, but what’s most interesting is that the model “can be visualized using popular online and off-the-shelf software packages including GoogleEarth, MSN Virtual Earth, VRML, ESRI 3D Analyst and other common GIS applications,” according to a press release. (more…)