3pointD.com

Intel’s Miramar 3D Workspace

Eleanor Wynn, a Social Technology Architect at Intel (and a co-editor of the journal Information Technology & People) sends along the screenshot above to illustrate Intel’s Miramar project, which we blogged a couple of days back. While things are still at an early stage, Wynn mentions that the 3D collaborative workspace system is currently being prototyped “for exploration for distributed engineering work.” The image appears to have been created within a Croquet environment, although my first impression appears not to have been correct. The image above is actually the Miramar environment itself, which doesn’t yet support multiple users, though that’s the goal. Wynn says Intel at this point is “only thinking” about whether Croquet is the right place for it. “A Second Life underlayer is not out of the question.”

Comic book, game and anything else writer Warren Ellis has been mucking about in Second Life at least long enough to know how to SLurl something. Yesterday he SLurl’d the place where blogger Tom Reynolds is giving away (or “practically giving away”) SL t-shirts emblazoned with the logo of Ellis’s discussion site, The Engine. That’s pretty cool, if you’re a fan, but here’s my question: When do we get the Warren Ellis comic that’s released exclusively in-world? Comics seem to be one of the few kinds of reading material that work well within Second Life. So how ’bout it, Warren?

Tim O’Reilly has an interesting post on the slow but continuing move at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, “away from custom C++/messaging and into Web services” in their back-end architecture. Tim talks briefly to LL’s Cory Ondrejka and Ian Wilder Wilkes, who shed not much more light than we’ve already seen, but who promise more to come. It’s worth a read, but we look forward to bringing you updates.

If you’ll be in LA for E3 (as I will), you may be interested to drop by the University of Southern California’s Center for Public Diplomacy on May 8, where they’ll be announcing the results of their Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games contest. The contest asked entrants to “design, conceive, and build a game or game prototype that employs the principles of public diplomacy.” Finalists have already been announced. (more…)

I’m still baffled as to why anyone would navigate to pixel-selling ad sites like Million Dollar Homepage — unless it’s that they found the link in a blog like this. In any case, I find it highly amusing that the latest such site, Virtual World Real Estate, is selling little pieces of a Microsoft Virtual Earth map to all comers. The more recent buyer took all of Pennsylvania and Israel for a whopping $77,777(!), according to this press release. The virtual world just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Ogle Earth’s Stefan Geens has located a Japanese 3d-to-KML app called SOLA, and despite the fact that it lacks English instructions, managed to upload a 3D KML Tyrannosaurus Rex to an environment there. What’s nice about SOLA is that it’s “a converter program for both Windows and Mac that takes any old W3D (Shockwave), 3DS and DXF (AutoDesk) and OBJ (Wavefront) file and turns it into KML fit for Google Earth.” I’m not sure if these kinds of apps are simple enough yet for just anyone to use, but it seems they’re getting there. If you can handle them, please note that Geens is waiting on King Kong. Let us know when he reaches the top of the Empire State Building.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! gives a nice interview about “social search” in this video on MarketWatch. I like that he says that the right way to come upon Flickr is to have a relative tell you he’s posted his wedding photos there. I turned a filmmaker on to video-sharing sites like YouTube just yesterday. He said it was “a life-changing experience.” That’s a good way to describe all these tools. What’s interesting about the interview is how Yahoo! is going about rolling out this stuff, letting things like its My Web 2.0 service be adopted naturally through sites like Flickr, for instance. Nice.

Microsoft is getting in on the social networking space as well, announcing late last night [press release] that it’s creating a new start-up in Silicon Valley called Wallop Inc., which is headed by longtime entrepreneur Karl Jacob. Though the Wallop site already has a useless animated cube on it (is there any better Microsoft branding than that?), the description of what’s to be developed there sounds interesting — if not entirely desirable:

Launching later this year, Wallop . . . will introduce an entirely new way for consumers to express their individuality online. For example, today’s social networks have difficulty enabling people to interact in a way similar to the way they would in the real world. . . . Wallop departs from the friend-of-a-friend model common in all social networks today and the root of many of their problems. Instead, Wallop developed a unique set of algorithms that respond to social interactions to automatically build and maintain a person’s social network.

That cube isn’t the only thing typically Microsoft. Me, I don’t want Bill Gates or anyone else for that matter automatically building and maintaining my social network. (more…)

The very interesting news of yesterday afternoon was the the BBC’s online offerings will soon undergo a major overhaul, one that will see the Beeb’s Web site retooled to focus on, “user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com,” according to The Guardian newspaper. The BBC’s own announcement is here., with a few more releases and presentations available at this link. [From the Social Software Weblog, via Glitchy.] (more…)