3pointD.com

Jeff Jarvis points out a Wall Street Journal article describing a new initiative from ABC that will let viewers gather in online chat rooms to watch shows together:

On April 30, ABC will unveil a revamped Web site that will include a “theater” where people with broadband connections can watch free episodes of “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost” and other hit shows on their computers. . . . As part of an effort to engage the online community, viewers from around the country will be able to gather in “rooms” online to watch an episode of, say, “Lost” and chat about it. Disney will also promote the creation of fan sites for various shows.

(Via Glitchy.) (more…)

There’s a nice piece in the Columbia Spectator titled “Facebook Official,” all about how the “Relationship Status” field on Facebook profiles is affecting users’ offline relationships. This is another good example (see this earlier example) of how small things in software design can have larger social reverberations for the people who are using the tools.

The writer, Miriam Datskovsky, quotes the Urban Dictionary definition of the term:

Facebook Official
The ultimate definition of a college relationship - when on one’s facebook profile it says “In A Relationship” and your significant other’s name.

“are adam and courtney dating?”
“i don’t know, they’re not facebook official yet.”

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Well, that’s what I’m calling it. we-make-money-not-art is calling it a video game you can play on a sculpture. It’s basically a platformer, played using “standard game controllers,” but with a “screen” that consists of a three-dimensional reification of a Mario-type level. I’m unclear how the images are getting onto the “screen” (a projection?) — and on whether to call it a screen at all. In any case, 3D games ftw! With a video on YouTube. The game, called xBlocks, was developed for the Play Experiences for the Next Generation segment of the Mattel Design Challenge 2005.

Om Malik and Niall Kennedy’s latest podsession deals with geolocative services provided via free WiFi like the stuff Google wants to do, starting in San Francisco. Malik has concerns over privacy — free WiFi may mean that not only can companies and government entitites know who you are, they can know where you are as well, due to the GPS services that are increasingly layered atop wireless broadband as well as cellular phone networks. Geolocation over WiFi should definitely add capabilities of various sorts, but what are we giving up in terms of privacy, security and the costs (in terms of targeted advertising getting pushed at the user, among other things) of access? Grab the podcast here.

Emergent Chaos flags the live launch of the Cabspotting project, which tracks GPS information for Yellow Cabs traveling around San Francisco and uses them to create maps and other geo-centric Web experiences. Nice example of how real-world information can be made to collide (sorry) with Internet-based technologies so as to create a new layer of information. This in and of itself isn’t so remarkable, but what inevitably happens is that this kind of geographical information gets combined with the collaborative forces of the Web 2.0 environment into something that will enhance what we’re able to do both on- and offline. That’s 3pointD at work.

The International Herald Tribune reports that Adidas is planning to launch a free massively multiplayer online soccer game as a promotion to coincide with the World Cup, which kicks off in June. The article makes it sound like the game will be of limited duration, though: “Billed as the first foray into so-called massive multiplayer games by a company outside the video game industry, The Ultimate Team will be a keystone in the Adidas World Cup promotions strategy when it is introduced in May for the duration of the tournament.” It would be great if Adidas could find a way to keep it going, as MMO sports games have great promise, if you ask me. Getting involved in an MMO is much like getting involved in a real-world amateur sports league; you’re fiercely committed and end up building solid, significant relationships with the other people involved, but in the end it’s a pursuit that doesn’t have much of an impact on anything outside it, just a way to take a break from the rest of one’s life. Here’s another, which does look like it’ll survive: Ultimate Baseball.

An interesting Trackback showed up on 3pointD.com this evening, from a reader called babysista_13, who wondered, “How can I get my identity off myspace.com?” Turns out babysista_13 isn’t a reader at all, just a panicked MySpace member who couldn’t figure out how to leave the MySpace service, and had posted a query over at Help.com. Following the link reminded me of something I think many of us don’t consider often enough: that there are even seemingly insignificant things about the interface design of sites like MySpace and Help.com that can have a real social impact on the people who use them. (more…)

Recursive Instruments is two students at the Art Institute of Chicago who’ve recently got hold of some Eyebeam OpenLab technology known as OGLE (for Open GL Extractor) and have been using it to create foam models of various structures from within the virtual world of Second Life. The images above represent the process of mapping and then milling a 3D representation from within the virtual world (in this case, of a sheep from the Electric Sheep Company’s Sheep Island; ESC is, of course, the anchor sponsor of this blog). Follow their progress and see lots more pink images at their blog. It seems only a matter of time before this kind of technology is put to some more directly useful purpose: prototyping, architecture, design testing — this is going to be very interesting to watch happen.

Model of proposed steampunk sim in Second Life

Second Life resident and filmmaker Dagny Hemingway has put together a perfect little one-minute video showing off a new project in Second Life, a steampunk region for which a new residents group is now raising money. What’s interesting about the project is how the group is going about promoting it: by advertising a scale model of what the region will look like once it’s been built out. (more…)

If you’re going to be in Irvine, California, on April 20th, there’s still time to register for the MASSIVE conference on “the future of networked multiplayer games” being held by the Game Culture and Technology Lab at the University of California at Irvine’s Institute for Software Research. There are a number of interesting panels, including one on “the art of social sculpting,” one on “networked play cultures” (featuring Betsy Book of There.com and Bob Moore of PlayOn), and one on “new production models and infrastructures,” which features Corey Bridges of the Multiverse and Robin Harper of Linden Lab (though the technical side of things at LL usually falls to Cory Ondrejka to explain). Both LL and Blizzard Entertainment, which is located just down the road, will have recruitment tables at the event as well.

Stefan Geens at Ogle Earth uses Google Earth to ponder what the World Trade Center site in New York City would be like with several different buildings on it: the old WTC, the newly designed Freedom Tower, and the under-construction Burj Dubai. (Warning: the post contains an image of the old WTC in flames, for comparison.) You can also grab the KMZ file of the buildings to check things out for yourself. (more…)

(Via Clickable Culture.) Ethan Kaplan, the Director of Technology for Warner Bros. Music, is looking for someone to build out a Second Life installation for one of Warner Bros.’ bands. “Please contact me if you’re 2ndLife Mojo is on overdrive and you want some cash. (ethan A T warnerbrosrecords.com).” No word on which group is involved, but it’s worth noting that Ethan has been running the R.E.M. fan site Murmurs.com for the last 10 years, “in a sort of collaboration with the band R.E.M. “

Steve Rubel points out two cool sites where you can “slice through the Web 2.0 hype.” DV Guru compares ten of the new video-sharing services that have flooded the Web in recent months, testing each one for video quality, site interface, community features and functionality, plus bloggability, where applicable. And BuzzShout uses the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 itself to “cut through the cruff” and “garner quality reviews that have been shouted by users.” Go there if you want to help shout down the hype.

(Via Clickable Culture.) According to this article in MIT’s Technology Review, the U.S. Army is about to test “a wearable health-status monitoring system” that will beam information about individual soldiers’ health, hydration, sleep and state of mind, among other things, back to a medic with a Microsoft PDA (pictured at left). Some aspects of the system sound very close to the heads-up display (HUD) found in many real-time strategy (RTS) games like Age of Empires.

A medic or commander can also view the information on a battlefield map that shows the location of each soldier and his or her health status: green (okay), yellow (look), red (look now), blue (unknown), or grey (absence of life signs for over five minutes). Or he could zero in on individual soldiers and get information about their vital signs, position, and how much they’ve slept or had to drink.

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The SecondCast cast

Johnny Ming, the host and producer of the SecondCast podcast we tape every Wednesday (where I appear as Walker Spaight, publisher and editor of the Second Life Herald), has kindly provided me with the code to stick a very cool audio player, featuring multiple streams to choose from, in the right-hand sidebar (below the SLurlPane) so that interested 3pointD readers can hear what the cast, and our guests, have to say about Second Life and the metaverse in general each week. Enjoy!

GeoSim Systems’ virtual Philadelphia

An interesting article in today’s edition of Israeli business periodical GLOBES profiles a company called GeoSim Systems, which is creating navigable, interactable, markup-capable 3D virtual environments as a service to everyone from governments to entertainment companies, retailers, media and advertising firms and more. Watch a nice, if brief, clip of an aerial camera-flight through their virtual Philadelphia at this link. The virtual city, which cost about $1 million to build, according to CEO Dr. Victor Shenkar, “will be launched in a couple months and will be available for use free of charge on the website of the University of Pennsylvania. (more…)

One small hopeful snippet from the American Bar Association’s Cyberspace Law Committee’s eCommerce Subcommittee can be read at the subcommittee’s blog: “Hank Judy [formerly of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation] spoke of his growing sense that the Cyberspace world was better explained through a property law analysis than the long-standing presumption that there is such a thing as a ‘virtual’ world.” Hard to tell what this will eventually mean in the 3pointD world, but it seems a promising direction to move, as it makes the tacit assumption that there are few fundamental differences between property rights in the real world and those in the virtual world. But the law moves slowly. The question to be decided, it seems, is whether pixelated “items” are in fact property as the law understands the term. There are a lot of great minds working in this area (and many of them blogging over at Terra Nova, including in this post from Dan Hunter), but so far little action. How these questions are decided, though, will have a huge impact on what will and won’t be possible in the metaverse, so they’re well worth paying attention to.

James Au at New World Notes reports that a live streaming music concert to be held in Second Life later this month will be “indirectly” sponsored by Coca-Cola. The concert will be held on April 22 at 1:00pm Pacific time in the Menorca region of SL, will feature “a stunning line up of musicians from Second Life,” according to its organizer, and will be directly sponsored by City Stages. “We have permission to build it here and use the [Coca-Cola] logo,” Au quotes SL resident Zenigma Suntzu, coordinator of the event, as saying of the concert venue, pictured above. It’s not clear why Zenigma chose to include the Coke logo if the company isn’t actually sponsoring the event, but it does mark one of the first sanctioned entries of a major brand trademark into Second Life. The powers that be at Linden Lab recently instructed their employees to summarily delete any user-created content they came across that seemed to violate trademark or copyright infringement laws.

Starting in September, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing will have a new address — at least, for a year. He’s been chosen to become the first holder of the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, at the University of Southern California, according to a USC press release. (more…)

(Via Ogle Earth.) Mac users of Google Earth are getting a new kind of “thank you” after downloading the app. One of the “featured KML links” on the download page is to a giant KML cover of Maxim magazine, of all things. Is this the dawn of KML advertising on Google Earth? If you already have the app or if you’re on a PC, just dial over to GE’s Mac download page, cancel the download, and launch GE from the Maxim pic, while it’s still there. Actually, you should be able to launch it from this KML link too.

I like this post from Erin Banister, who runs the “virtual assistant” firm Trinity Jacobs:

Last night my niece came to me asking for some help with her MySpace page, and I couldn’t help but ask what drew her to MySpace to begin with. As I was fiddling around with her page, she delved into these intense relationships she’s developed with other people who have MySpace accounts (most of whom she knew in the ‘real world’ beforehand), the feeling of belonging (from having a bazillion ‘friends’), and just being able to post her feelings at any time. Mostly, she said, having a MySpace account makes her feel popular.

With a little help from Jeremiah Owyang, Erin goes on to consider what it means to have a younger generation coming up that’s being introduced to tools like blogging, social software and avatarized environments like MySpace at an early age. (more…)

Discovery Communications (they of the Discovery Channel) announced today that their video content would soon be available on Google Earth. (Via Glitchy.) The initial release will offer “informative and engaging video content showcasing 10 of America’s most popular National Parks,” according to Discovery’s press release. “By clicking on Discovery’s globe icon shown at destination sites at which Discovery video content is available, Google Earth users will launch an interactive broadband player hosted by Discovery that will enable them to select from several two- to four-minute compelling videos from Discovery’s rich archive at each target destination.” Nice idea. Nicer idea: Users being able to add their own video links to Google Earth. Is this possible already? Not sure.

There’s a good article at MTV.com (via Glitchy) about the new weather system that was recently added to World of Warcraft. Developer Blizzard Entertainment is starting, not surprisingly, with storms. The article goes into a nice level of detail about what they’re envisioning for the weather system and how they’re implementing it. It won’t have any effects on gameplay, but it could make the world a more immersive — or dreary — place. With a name like Blizzard, the only surprise is that it took them this long to add snowstorms to their virtual world.

Ogle Earth reports on this message board post by the Rev. Dan Catt, who’s been doing cool stuff connecting the Web to real-world locations and is now working for Flickr, in which Catt “unofficially” mentions a service he may or may not be working on to replace the old Geobloggers site (which was all about collaboratively mapping location-tagged photos) with “a service . . . that’ll aggregate the data and make it available via an API.” Very interesting implications for the kind of collaborative virtual location-mapping I was pondering here, especially if it can be made to work with Google Earth.

Journalist Noche Kandora, known in Second Life as Cheri Horton, has been on an interesting quest in recent weeks: to create an avatar that mimics her real-life appearance as closely as possible. “Users also have the option of purchasing ‘skins’ that can add an original dimension to an avatar’s image,” Kandora writes in this blog post (which is not necessarily safe for work). “What I plan to do now is replicate my real-life likeness and use it as my new avatar skin.” (Image lifted from Kandora’s site, apogeevr.com.) (more…)

Virtual-world to real-world crossovers don’t have to take place only on the Web. As readers of my other blog well know, one of my favorite virtual worlds is the space opera EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online game that affords its players far more freedom than most. Players respond accordingly, creating fantastic emergent gameplay moments not just in the game but in the real world as well. EVE fanfic abounds, but my favorite 3pointD crossover of recent weeks has been the pint glasses that the father of one of my corp-mates has been engraving for us based on screenshots of in-game ships. Pictured above is an Executioner, an Amarr frigate designed to take out enemy ships of similar size. (more…)

Tim Beermann at the Interactive Earth blog recently posted this precis (via Ogle Earth) of how he’s importing shape files to Google Earth using software that’s all freely available on the Internet, including his Shape2Earth open-source shapefile-to-KML converter. I’m not sure how easy it is to create shapefiles (Tim downloaded free ones) or what the interoperability of SketchUp will be in this area, but it all looks like another cool tool to consider, at the very least.

Glitchy sends news of what appears to be video of a highly detailed, 3D navigable virtual France. Of course, the video is in French — all 11 minutes of it — but the GéoPortail app it demonstrates, from l’Institut Géographique National, is fascinating. Based on the video and according to this post on the Ogle Earth blog, the app layers a lot of information atop the kind of geographical data Google Earth provides: “In addition to aerial imagery, the video shows that there will also be topo maps and property maps (7:50) available, and 3D buildings (4:48), roads (4:30), all French postal addresses (7:10), and more. Some of these features will be pay services.” And all browsable in three dimensions. (more…)

One of the cool Google Maps hacks on display at South by Southwest this year was Community Walk, a site that lets users create collaboratively tagged maps of real locations. But with the Second Life map API being open as well (see the SLurlPane at the top of the right sidebar here), I figured it couldn’t be a bad thing to hack a Second Life location into a Community Walk community. Not that the current incarnation is much of a hack, but if you dial into this Community Walk map, zoom out and look for the mint-green, upside-down teardrops, you’ll find links to the virtual version of two real-world locations: a Hawaiian island, and a coffee shop in Washington DC. (more…)

Jerry Paffendorf of the Electric Sheep Company (who sponsor this blog) is pretty excited to have gotten the go-ahead to give a brief presentation at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, June 13-14 in San Jose CA. Jerry will be talking about some new ways to connect the virtual to the real that the Sheep are working on, including the idea of adding a virtual layer atop Google Earth. One effect this might have is to turn an app like Google Earth into a portal to useful locations in the virtual world. Here’s how. (more…)

Internet marketing man Shimon Sandler brings news (via Glitchy and Steve Rubel) of a new Google real estate app, not yet officially released, it seems, in which Google mashes up their own search and mapping apps to create a Craigslist-like real estate search site. Expect more of this kind of thing as Google keeps buying up companies and the primordial ooze they have going on behind the scenes there gives rise to new and different 3pointD life forms. Especially with their recent purchase of SketchUp, they’re now beginning to approach a critical mass of 3pointD services that are just waiting to be put together into something pretty grand.

Two interesting payment models to note where virtual worlds, both single- and multi-player, are concerned: First, SL resident Glitchy Gumshoe at the SL Future Salon flags a post by Raph Koster in which the legendary MMO developer talks about “company-sanctioned RMT” in the single-player game Oblivion. (Also from Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry Hryb’s blog.)

Basically, it seems you can swap points in Oblivion for downloadable armor for your mount. (And if this catches on, there’s certainly more to come.) Since Oblivion is a single-player game, this would seem to circumvent the usual objections over “real-money trade.” But as Raph points out, the Xbox Live ranking system essentially makes a massively multiplayer universe out of everyone’s single-player Xbox games by letting other players view your progress and accomplishments. (more…)