3pointD.com

[UPDATE: Seems the video I was hoping for is not yet ready for prime time. The NMC prefers to wait for a fully edited piece. We’ll update you when it’s available.] (more…)

Croquet Mars connected via “hyper-portal” to another Croquet space

Aldo Castaneda at The Story of Digital Identity sends along the news that the Croquet Project, an open-source platform for creating 3D online environments, released a beta version of its SDK a few days ago. According to the Croquet news page, this is “the first complete public release of the core Croquet technology.” One of the most intriguing things about Croquet is that Croquet spaces can be connected via “hyper-portals,” so that a number of users could create a web (as in 3D Web?) of connected Croquet spaces and even spaces within spaces, etc. That’s right in line with a vision of the evolving 3D online space as a number of tangentially connected 3D spaces, rather than the contiguous Grid of Second Life. So pick up the SDK and let us know what you make of with it.

Yuku is yet another social-software site, this time one that lets you blog, share images and create your own message boards all in one place. Notably, it lets you maintain up to five different profiles on the same account. This is a distant cousin to the identity aggregator for virtual worlds that I’d like to see. But Yuku probably won’t have the right kind of hooks out to those places. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore addresses a related question when he asks whether this kind of “everythingitis” can fly. His answer: No. Start-ups like Yuku should stay away from the all-services portal, in Cashmore’s view. “Specialized services that weave their way into the fabric of the web via open APIs and web widgets will likely see more growth,” he says.

Music site Pitchfork has a nice piece today on the live music scene in Second Life. In fact, you can check that scene out for yourself tomorrow, when City Stages streams part of its music festival live into the virtual world, at 1:00pm Pacific time in the Menorca region of SL. “Is this a sneak preview of the future,” asks Pitchfork, “where our grandkids will plug in Matrix-style to Woodstock 2069, and instead of complaining about the pigs and the overpriced water, everyone stands around bitching about lag?” You bet.

The recently released Google Data APIs (”a new protocol based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0″) feature a couple of interesting geolocative elements I just learned about through Stefan Geens’ excellent Ogle Earth blog. These include a tag for latitude, longitude and elevation, one for a place such as an event location, and one for a postal address. These are the kind of tools we need for creating 3pointD apps — i.e., apps that harness the collaborative power of Web 2.0, but which take the “placeness” of both virtual worlds and the world around us into account. (more…)

EON Reality Inc. is offering its EON Raptor 5.5 as a free 3dsMax plug-in “that enables you to display and interact with 3ds Max content in real-time with intuitive controls,” and “explore and share your models in full virtual reality,” according to a press release. The system seems to layer a user-friendly GUI-based point-and-click interface over 3ds Max’s authoring system, allowing users to not only create Web-based or standalone 3D environments, but share and interact with them as well. I’m not clear on how this could be made to interoperate on a broader basis, but you can get a free 30-day trial of 3ds Max at the Autodesk link above, so it will be interesting to see what the more ambitious 3pointDers out there come up with.

Business Week is running a Second Life package in its current issue — a cover story, no less, complete with podcast. The package starts here, and of course features Anshe Chung, the world’s most famous real-estate magnate, whose avatar is plastered across the magazine’s cover. Though the piece calls the SL scene “seriously weird,” it’s also one of the first to take the business aspect of VWs seriously, including mention of Microsoft’s Robert Scoble’s interest in SL, and, unfortunately, the $100,000 purchase of a space station in Project Entropia, now Entropia Universe that turned out to have been made by someone working for the company. All in all, though, it’s good, balanced, recommended reading.