3pointD.com

Just got off the phone with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab (creators of Second Life, who tells me that LL will soon start regular releases of select economic data about its virtual world. The first such release is to come later today, in conjunction with the recent change to the SL economy that removes cash payments to popular locations. Among the figures LL is currently looking at:

Money supply is growing at a rate of something like 6 percent a month or perhaps a bit more.

Land mass is growing at around 10 percent a month. (There are currently 2,262 “sims” for a total of about 141 square km. of virtual real estate.)

Population growth, of course, is huge, with more than 185,000 members at the moment. Just a year ago, SL’s population was in the range of only 28,000.

The Electric Sheep Company (anchor sponsor of this blog) sends word of the grand opening of the New Media Consortium’s campus in Second Life (built by the Sheep), which is slated for this Thursday, April 20, from 4:00-10:00pm Eastern time. The NMC bills itself as “a not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies.” Events will include building demonstrations, dance parties, an Electric Sheep Q&A panel and tours of NMC’s island. Space is limited, so to reserve a spot, send an email with your SL name to johnson [AT] nmc [DOT] org or send an in-world IM to Larry Pixel or Ninmah Ash. A TeamSpeak server is also being set up to support the event in voice. [UPDATE: Grab this PDF for more details.]

Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, made an announcement yesterday about a change in the virtual world’s economy. No longer will LL make cash awards to property owners based on the amount of traffic their parcels see each month. Because of the particular way the SL economy works, this amounts to a significant change, something akin to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank raising a key interest rate by half a percentage point or so. For LL, it’s a step in the right direction, moving the world toward a more liberal open-market economy, and should help foster the kind of development LL would like to see there. The question now is whether LL is ready to go as far as will be necessary, in terms of transparency and fiscal responsibility, to make its world truly robust. (more…)

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…)

The 13th Barcelona International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art runs from 15-17 June, and the theme of this year’s Digital Art a la Carte section is Google Earth and Google Maps Hacks. Regine from we-make-money-not-art has been invited to curate that Googlicious a la Carte section and is looking for suggestions over at their very cool blog.

Raph Koster has a really interesting post up on his blog about what game-makers can learn from what’s going on on the Web these days, and what Web-programmers can learn from what’s going on in game development. Games have things to teach in the areas of interface, content, entertainment, feedback, identity and depth, Raph says, while lessons from the Web include stuff about distribution, platforms, databases, chunking, simplicity and client agnosticism. Raph just touches the surface of how the vague, overarching, unconscious design paradigms of the two realms could come together; there’s a lot in his post that merits much deeper exploration by designers in both mediums. I’d love to see a game where part of the gameplay included players tagging locations or items, which in turn affected what went on in the world. Much tasty food for thought here.

I want this, even though the post I’m about to link is two weeks old. The HipTech blog reports on the MERL DiamondTouch Table, a flat, interactive panel that not only displays screen images but takes input via touch and gesture — including from more than one user at a time. There’s a video of people scribbling on screens and resizing windows at the MERL site, but far better is the YouTube video linked by HipTech, which shows someone playing the real-time strategy game Warcraft III by using a DiamondTouch table and some voice-recognition software. (Via Brad King.)

What’s so 3pointD about playing a video game using touch and voice? Everything. (more…)

Fred Limp of the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas has the first of three articles up on geoplace.com, titled An Impending Massive 3D Mashup, which look at how 3D technologies are going to have a greater and greater impact on the world. (I hesitate to send readers to geoplace’s crappy Web site, but it makes good reading if you can overlook all the awful bells and whistles.) The first article looks at some of the technologies that will contribute to the 3pointD-ization of the world, with the impact of such technologies to be explored in parts 2 and 3. A taste of what’s to come:

The technologies behind MMOGs, when integrated with the other aspects, will change the “(Geo)world” completely, and it will happen soon — if not right now. What will the new (Geo)world look like? Where will we get and store all the data? How will we integrate different workflows and (sometimes) conflicting professional attitudes and perspectives? And, perhaps most importantly, why is this inevitable?

(Via Ogle Earth.)

Clickable Culture reports that Zach Brock of alwaysBETA will be liveblogging during a raid in World of Warcraft’s BlackWing Lair, one of the toughest instances in the game. The raid is set to start Saturday, April 15, at 7pm Eastern. I kinda wish this was a podcast, but it should be a nice look into what the most formidable reaches are like in one of the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online games.

For those who missed it a couple of days ago, it’s worth reading this essay on Serious Games Source, a new sister site of Gamasutra, in which David Rejeski of the Wilson Center think tank calls for the formation of a Corporation for Public Gaming, after the model of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which brings you your local public television channel wherever you are.

A Corporation for Public Gaming (CPG) could be established that would operate on a model similar to its broadcasting equivalent, providing grants to develop a diversity of games for the public good. Like CPB, the goal of the CPG would be to provide high-quality games, which “inform, enlighten and enrich the public.”

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Etsy.com is the craft Froogle, only better (apparently). It’s “your place to buy and sell all things handmade,” and its home page features very neat tools like a very 3pointD geolocator that lets you search for products by location, a “Shop by Color” function, and the ability to browse the thousand or so listings that went up on any particular day in the past. In best 2.0 spirit, there’s even a “coproduction” contest, in which Etsy sellers are asked to form teams and create things to sell on the site. Clickable Culture’s Tony Walsh passed an Etsy link along to me, though, because of the recent Town Hall meeting the community held, which took place in full 3pointD. (more…)

The LA Times reports that Microsoft will be sponsoring the World Cyber Games [<-- annoying music] through 2008, making Windows and the Xbox360 the official platforms of what bills itself as the "world's largest computer and video game festival." This will no doubt help push the visibility of gaming as a pro sport, but I wonder what impact it will have on the Cyberathelete Professional League, which has been around at least as long. With Microsoft leveraging its weight to box out other consoles, it seems there’s still room for some PlayStation or other kind of competition elsewhere — although almost all pro gaming takes place on PC. In any case, this could be a coup on Microsoft’s part to put the XBox360 into ever more hands. Hopefully, it won’t water down events like this.

Oh, to be a hip games writer and grad student on the cutting edge of virtual worlds. Aleks Krotoski is headed to something called the Cast Iron Workshop, where she’ll be rendering Second Life social networks in metal, based on the results of her recent studies. How cool is that?

OPAL (Online Programming for All Libraries), “an international collaborative effort by libraries of all types to provide Web-based programs and training for library users and library staff members,” is about to start operating in Second Life, according to this blog post from a Massachusetts library association.

Book discussions, training sessions, and other programs will be offered to current virtual residents. The goal of the project is to promote the real library and online library services to adults who might not otherwise use the library.

Jim Rossignol over at Gamasutra reports on Uni-Verse, a new “distributed interactive audi-visual virtual reality system.” I’ve yet to delve very deeply into it, but it sounds like a virtual world in which collaborative design is possible (one of the selling points of Second Life), but where, unlike in SL, you can work in any 3D design software you like. How does Uni-Verse accomplish this? By adding a network layer that acts as a communications protocol for 3D data. I’ve italicized that idea because if it works (and catches on), the implications could be significant, giving users the capability to port their virtual creations between worlds and perhaps tieing all these 3D environments together just as the Internet’s protocols tie Web pages and other aspects of the net into a common system. One possible drawback: Uni-Verse is open-source, but it seems that its licenses cover only “home, public and personal use” at the moment. That will have to expand to commercial uses eventually, if the system is ever to gain real adoption. In any case, I’m very interested to check this out, and to hear what kinds of experience others have had with Uni-Verse. [Via qDot at MMOrgy.com. <– NSFW]

Is the massively multiplayer game Project Entropia “evolving” into a non-game virtual world? That’s what GameZone reports, along with a change in name from Project Entropia to Entropia Universe.

The new name embodies the concept of Entropia Universe as more than just another MMORPG, but rather a complete virtual world with the unique identifier of allowing players to utilize a RCE (Real Cash Economy). The built-in RCE links the internal Entropia Universe economy to that of a real world through a fixed exchange rate of $1 USD for 10 PED (project entropia dollars).

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Geoblogger Dan Catts, now of Yahoo! (via Flickr) reports on his blog that Yahoo! Maps has now added the rest of the world to its satellite imagery, rectifying what was a fairly large gray area (i.e., most of the globe) that it had heretofore left out. More details for developers here.

Wendy Rockett of New American Media writes here about having her Friendster identity “stolen.” In fact, she was cloned, in a practice that’s been going on in virtual worlds like The Sims Online for years: rather than hijack Wendy’s profile by stealing her password, someone created a profile that looked very much like Wendy’s, then simply tried to pass themselves off as the original.

In trying to assume my life, this “Wendy” was making a complete mockery of it. “Wendy” had pictures of me on her site, my approximate age, astrology sign, and meticulous (and correct) details, such as the publisher I worked for in New York before moving to San Francisco. Otherwise, everything else about this “Wendy” was not me. I would never say something as cheesy as, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” My favorite movies are those of indie Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai. Fake Wendy likes the Indiana Jones series.

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Tringo is a game developed by Second Life resident Kermitt Quirk over a Christmas holiday. Combining Bingo and Tetris, the game proved wildly addictive to Second Life residents, who snapped up hundreds of copies of it within the virtual world. Now, a real-world game company has shipped a version of Tringo that can be played on the Game Boy Advance. [LINK] The virtual has played itself right into the real.

Glitchy points out this Forbes magazine story about the cottage industry that’s sprung up on the periphery of MySpace, with people offering to help MySpace users trick out their profiles or giving them tools that let them automate tasks like inviting, accepting and contacting new friends.

Louis Ramos, a freshman at Southern Illinois University, says he has made more than $200,000 since last June by running Pimpmyspace.com [that’s a Forbes typo; it should be Pimpmyspace.org] and Myspaceeditor.org, two Web sites that offer MySpace users free tools to upgrade and spruce up their profiles with colors and images.

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If tracking your rankings on Microsoft’s Xbox Live service isn’t doing it for you, you can now up the stakes at the Under Ground X-Change, a Web-based service that matches Xbox and PS2 players who want to bet on the outcome of their own matches. [Via press release. And follow this link if you don’t get the headline reference.] UGX servers will match players in a variety of games, and even adds a way to distribute winnings among members of a team. What it doesn’t seem to do is allow spectators to bet on the outcome of matches. That’s something that would drive pro gaming in this country in a much bigger way.

Tony Walsh has a nice article up on his site about Vivox, a VoIP company that has designed a very cool application that interfaces with Second Life. The Vivox voice app runs behind the SL viewer, but residents can initiate calls from within the world, either via a heads-up display or via Vivox’s phone booths. Calls can terminate either at a VoIP client or at a land-line or cell phone, if you belong to a service like Skype Out. You can also place a “microphone” in-world that will add Vivox-enabled users to a local voice channel; move far enough away and you drop out of the channel. Move into range of a different mic and you’re automatically added to that channel. This adds voice to the Grid in a really seamless and comfortable (and opt-outable) way. I met the Vivox guys at South by Southwest and was very impressed by what I saw. Tony’s piece gives a nice look at the company, its background and what they’re offering. And he claims it’s been edited by yours truly, though all I really did was look the thing over and tell Tony I thought it was awesome.

Second Life’s first voice-enabled Town Hall meeting, featuring Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, is now available for listening or download at this link. Some highlights after the jump. (more…)

The dates aren’t official yet and could well change, but according to more than one person who’s in touch with the Electric Sheep Company (and who isn’t me), the 2006 edition of the Second Life Community Convention is now tentatively scheduled to take place around the second or third week of August, in San Francisco. (more…)

Walker Spaight takes the field of honor

Second Life resident Ordinal Malaprop has created a new dispute resolution tool for Second Life: a set of dueling pistols and a ring specifically designed for, as Ordinal puts it on her blog, “the settling of scores by the skill of arms.” The pistols are easy to use, can be loaded with a single bullet at a time (in proper yesteryear duelling fashion), and announce to all in the area who has drawn first blood. I’d love to see residents start using dueling pistols as a real dispute-resolution mechanism, but I’m skeptical that Second Life — or any other virtual world, for that matter — could support a system of ethics and honor that significantly surpasses that of the world around us. Still, these should be fun. Grab your own at Ordinal’s property in Theretra. [<–SL link] Pistols at dawn, anyone?