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Tech Warfare

Second Life’s 2006 Game Developers Contest has reached the finals, with eight games arrayed around two sims in SL for the public to play and judge. If you haven’t seen what can be done by talented scripters in Second Life, this is a good place to experience it. The games will be up through May 11th. We toured the games last night as part of an upcoming SecondCast show. I’ll touch on two here, though most all of them were fun and interesting. (more…)

An all-too-brief video accompanies this MSNBC.com story about the Geospatial Decision Making project at the University of Southern California (aka GeoDec), which layers real-time video atop a virtual 3D environment. The video shows live shots of cars passing along the streets of a virtual city. A pair of “data gloves” is used to control the app. Interesting possibilities here — including some frightening ones in the area of surveillance. But a nice-looking technology nonetheless. GeoDec can apparently combine sources from several data streams in a smooth and timely fashion. And it’s multi-user, apparently:

GeoDec could conceivably be applied to fields ranging from urban planning to emergency response to military surveillance — with multiple agents accessing the same multilayered database.

If Google buys you, it generally sets you free. That’s now the case with the cool 3D environment-building tool SketchUp (note new SketchUp URL), which Google bought not too long ago. I’m looking forward to experimenting, as the demo’s I’ve seen make SketchUp look fairly powerful and easy to use. Fun and free tools for creating your own 3D virtual spaces? I’m so there. [Via Ogle Earth.]