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PlayNoEvil notices that a company called Wager Island has leased a virtual island for $320,000 where online gambling will be the order of the day, according to a press release. It’ll be interesting to see whether avatarization draws more people into the already vast market for online gambling. The most intriguing element of the venture, though, is that “players can opt to become involved in the island’s political structure which include 6 party factions that influence law and regulations on the island. A Wager Island virtual media network also allows players to stay abreast of current events to make better informed wagers.” That’s a strange combination, if you ask me.

Sixth-graders in Wisconsin are apparently using an avatarized virtual environment built at Harvard to learn about science. MUVEES, which is saddled with one of the most unwieldy names I’ve come across in virtual worlds (Multi-User Virtual Environment Experimental Simulator), lets users don avatars to navigate a shared 3D online space filled with “virtual architectures,” “digital artifacts,” and “museum-related multimedia and virtual environments for teaching and learning science.” But why aren’t these people just using Second Life, There.com, or ActiveWorlds, any of which could almost certainly do the job better? It seems that market education in this area still has a long way to go.

Paul Hemp of the Harvard Business Review has an interesting article in the current issue about “Avatar-Based Marketing,” i.e., marketing to avatars in virtual worlds. What’s interesting about the piece is Hemp’s oblique examination of identity; does the fact that you’re inhabiting an avatar when you’re receiving a marketing message affect your purchasing decisions? Or is marketing to avatars the same as marketing to the people behind them? A good read if you haven’t already checked it out.

From Ogle Earth comes a link to the file that will put the rocketship from the Tintin books Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon into your Google Earth, as above. I had to have this. As those who’ve ever drilled down to my original Web site, BoyReporter.com, will realize, I’ve been a huge fan of Tintin ever since I was a wee tot. (I’ll show you the tatoo sometime.) Wanting more Tintin assets for Google Earth got me thinking, though: Why not put an entire book into the app? Or at least some kind of interactive adventure based on a book. Tintin was always haring off to real-world locations, and Herge’s drawings provide some impressive (and impressively detailed) models that could be thrown together in SketchUp. With a flying tour and some interactive clickability, you could probably put together a pretty entertaining narrative.

Social virtual world There.com has launched an alpha version of its service in the Philippines in association with local social networking site Groovenet, according to this announcement on the There site. There Philippines exists separate from the main There grid, on its own hardware, though it may eventually be merged with the current grid, according to CEO Michael Wilson. It sounds like Filipino There residents will be jacking in for the most part from Internet cafes, which should is an interesting twist. The move could give There a strong toehold in Asia, which is a potentially enormous market, given the vast number of MMO players in the region. We await further developments.

Spotted on VRoot: Art Interactive, a non-profit experimental art space in Boston, is putting on an Urban Networks show in June and July (timing details available only on the site’s front page, for some reason) that will showcase five “interactive art projects that examine social encounters and explorations in urban places.” While the projects are more novelties than tools, they should show off some of the techniques that could be used to build more robust connections among people, places and things via the grand mashup of wireless technologies, location-based computing and virtual worlds.

Via Glitchy comes a blog post from “creative technologist” Matt Biddulph, who has written a Second Life hack that brings Flickr pics into SL by grabbing a random selection from a tag that you submit within the world. This one does make use of SL’s new http call functionality. Wouldn’t be hard to make it a slide show, as well. A nice complement to the “Flickr of SL” we blogged about the other day. Oh and there’s a nice video on Matt’s site demoonstrating how it works.

The Taiwan Economic News reports that a “micro system technology laboratory under the government-backed Industrial Technology Research Institute” has developed a wireless, wrist-mounted computer mouse that provides input in three dimensions. Make Magazine’s Philip Torrone hacked something like this together for a mixed-reality event recently. Neither seem to have been commercialized yet. Other than the fact that your arm might get tired, it’s a very nice idea. Imagine a wireless pen device with which you could draw on your screen in three dimensions. Not bad.

Got any ideas for how to mashup Second Life and World of Warcraft? Post them over at the Second Life of Warcraft wiki page, where Jerry Paffendorf of 3pointD sponsor the Electric Sheep Company is putting together an event we blogged back in April, now planned for this summer, that will stream WoW into SL and recreate bits of the popular MMO in the virtual world. Because WoW doesn’t feature user-created content, it’s a bit of a one-way affair, but it should be interesting nonetheless, and at the very least will raise some fascinating issue of what the virtual world will be like when some 3D online spaces allow us to travel freely from one to the next.

For a long time now, I’ve been waiting for someone to build a Web-based social software app for use within Second Life, something whereby you’d be able to tag a location from within the virtual world, then navigate out to the Web to refine your tags and/or make it part of a group list or what have you. Now, with the advent of http calls that can be made from within SL, someone’s done just that (almost). In SL’s Taco sim [<-- SL link] you can acquire a device called a SLurlmarker, which lets you automatically post a del.icio.us tag containing a Second Life location and linking to a SLurl page that lets you navigate directly to that location from within SL. (Actually, I realize now that http calls aren’t needed for this; it could have been done long ago.) (more…)

Second Life resident aDen Ennui has built a faithful and impressive recreation of some of the artifacts from Robyn Miller’s ground-breaking video game, Myst. [Via Torley.] aDen posts from screens of his (her?) creations on a bit of a browser-choking Web page, but they’re worth checking out. (more…)

Click the image above to go to Torley Linden’s Snapzilla page

Second Life resident Cristiano Midnight’s Snapzilla — which has firmly established itself as the Flickr of SL, with 200,000 visitors and half a million snapshots viewed in April — has added a new feature, called the Snapzilla Live Panel, which works more or less like a Flickr badge (which is the thing that displays the 3pointD images in the middle column here). The Live Panel seems to be iframe only and not java, but I imagine this will catch on quick. Though the slightly clunky site only has 1,600 users and under 73,000 screenshots in its archives, it has become a great place to get a quick read on some of the things going on in Second Life, and is also a rich resource of the Grid’s visual history. (Interestingly, the site didn’t have a way to delete screenshots until recently.) It’s well worth checking out for a good visual take on SL, and if you’re already a user, go get a Live Panel and slap it up on your site. As I’m going to do now.

Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick took an interesting tack recently to introducing his audience to a few metaversal concepts. In a slightly odd post on the CNNMoney.com site, he relates a conversation with three hip, young (and anonymous) metaversal friends about what’s going on now in virtual worlds and online social spaces. Most of the random quotes cover salient phenomena that many CNNMoney.com readers are probably not familiar with. Pretty good food for thought, especially in its presentation.

Wikimapia [via Glitchy] seeks to “describe the whole planet Earth” using the open-editing principles of Wikipedia, but in a map-based format. It’s a nice-idea, but it seems to be a bit buggy still, and not all that different from Platial or Community Walk. Ogle Earth also flags a new mapping app that sounds slightly more interesting: Pin in the Map lets you quickly add a marker to Google Maps that you can then send to a friend, complete with a link to the Google Earth location, if you like. And you don’t need to create an account to use it. It’s the TinyURL of place, as Stefan says.

Virtual world marketing and services company Rivers Run Red has chosen the Extreme Cred Card as the “payment card of choice” for Rivers’s virtual world services division, according to a press release. What this means, exactly, is unclear. From the tone of the press release, though, two possibilities present themselves: either Rivers will offer in-world products and services through Web-based venues that will support the Extreme card and use real-world currencies, or the Extreme card will be able at some point to record virtual currency balances. AnsheChung.com, which already has a tie-up with Rivers, will also use Extreme Cred, according to the release. (more…)

CNet’s Dan Terdiman has a great story today on a project at the University of California at San Diego’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. The project, Scalable City, seeks to demonstrate the danger of treating human beings as data points, and reminds us that while there may be algorithmic ways to make things more efficient, that’s not the same as making things better. (more…)

This is one of those things that might not ever really get here (then again it might), but I absolutely love the idea: Adrian Holovaty, head of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek Interactive, had a story recently on XML.com in which he explains his ideas for dynamic news stories. Holovaty doesn’t get all that blue-sky in the piece, pondering things like dynamically updating time words (today, yesterday, last week), currency rates and other commonly taggable items, but at the end he toys with a really promising tangent:

Isolating people and quotes: How about marking up each quote, and associating it with the person who said it, so it would be possible to automatically retrieve all quotes by a given person, and all articles in which a given person was quoted?

Isolating individual facts: This is a pipe dream, but how about giving each and every fact a unique ID, and doing things like ? This would let journalists and readers create elaborate “fact trees,” which could display the relationship between information.

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From TechMeme and many other places comes the news that O’Reilly has trademarked the term “Web 2.0″ and has sent a cease-and-desist letter to IT@Cork, a small non-profit networking organization for IT professionals, which has been planning a Web 2.0 half-day conference for some months now. I have to admit, I find both parts of the story, the trademark and the letter, inexcusable. [UPDATE: It’s actually CMP that’s responsible for both legal actions. But as I point out in the comments below, O’Reilly has been acting as the shepherd of this meme, and should at least have told CMP to call off the dogs.] (more…)

As some 3pointD readers know, I also serve as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Second Life Herald, working in the guise of avatar Walker Spaight with Editor Emeritus Urizenus Sklar, who founded the Herald on the Alphaville server of The Sims Online back in 2003. Lately, I’ve found I can’t give the Herald the attention it deserves and still fulfill my other responsibilities. So I’ve just posted a help wanted ad for an underpaid, overworked Managing Editor. If you’re interested in getting involved in one of the best publications in virtual worlds, feel free to drop me a line.

The New York Times has a story about a new GPS system that learns and follows your favored routes, instead of giving you the weird pathways that things like Google Maps and most GPS systems tend to come up with. Plus: “With accessories, the unit can play Sirius or XM satellite radio, show which roads are jammed, connect to Bluetooth cellphones, operate an iPod and display images from a rearview camera.” It’s new to me, and to the Times, but the product (which retails for about $2,250) has been available for about six months now.

The Register reports that the new television network planned by Rupert Murdoch, MyNetworkTV, will leverage Murdoch’s ownership of MySpace to form a similar social network around its shows. Clips will be freely shareable among members of an upcoming MyNetworkTV.com site, and the network will of course be cross-promoted on MySpace. (I missed this story when it broke last week, but I haven’t seen or heard of it in any of the regular metaverse channels, so it seemed worthy of a post here.) Another feature of MyNet, as the Hollywood Reporter is calling the network, will be Casting Call, in which aspiring actors will be able to post their videos, and have them voted on as to who should get parts in MyNet shows. Could MyNet do for those people what MySpace has done for aspiring rockers? (Note that some people don’t think it’s done all that much.) And why not just wrap this into MySpace itself? Is it wise and/or useful to try to make a second such social network work?

Raph Koster yesterday extended some ideas from the Metaverse Grudge Match that began last week. Raph talks about the kinds of power users and administrators have over the virtual worlds they occupy and run, and the fact that both camps ultimately find themselves at a stand-off where their final recourse is mutually assured destruction: if governance sucks, users can leave, depriving the administrator of operating income; if the users are out of line, adminstrators can kick everyone out and shut down the world themselves. Until we can break this stalemate, Raph says, there’s no really good reason for administrators to share power. Can we break it, though? Perhaps. (more…)

Glitchy links to “a sweet X-Men promo” called X-Planet that layers a fan-based social network on top of a browser-based Google Earth-powered app (or Google Earthsat data, at least). Click around the map and you can find your fellow mutants, see their profiles and links, zoom in on their GPS locations, add them to your buddy list, join fan squads and assign yourself mutant powers. Around 4,500 members have joined so far.There doesn’t seem to be a way for members to communicate with each other, but it’s an interesting use of geospatial data and a cool way to represent a social network. Imagine all of MySpace plotted as dots in your Google Earth. (Sites like Platial and Community Walk are doing similar things with Google Maps, of course.)

Alan Levine at Cog Dog Blog has a bone to pick with Flickr. I’d have one too, if I were him. It seems, according to Alan, that a Flickr admin has deemed his screenshots of Second Life to be contravening the site’s Community Guidelines — which they clearly do not — and has shoved his Pro account into the not-for-public-consumption area. His follow-up emails have gotten no response. I’m baffled as to why SL screens should be deemed unworthy, especially when there are so many World of Warcraft screens on Flickr. Game companies are generally fine with making screenshots available for public use, and Second Life expressly grants users the IP rights in their creations, so what’s the problem? Alan appeals for help at his blog, so get in touch with him there if you have any suggestions. I’m blogging it here for that reason, but also because the 3pointD world deserves to have its images given similar respect to those coming out of the real world. The real world will always be more real, make no mistake, but I see no reason to disallow images from the virtual world on a site like Flickr. The social, commercial and other experiences that take place in virtual worlds are no less “real” than the interactions we have in the physical world. Visual recordings of such moments should be able to take their place beside photos from the physicial world on a site like Flickr.

If you travel in virtual worlds, you may know that Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling is a big EverQuest II fan. Now the rest of the world will know it as well, when Schilling takes on all comers in a series of virtual duels being held to raise money for the fight against Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. According to a press release, it sounds as if Schilling is getting a new character just for the event, which will see Sony Online Entertainment donate $5 each time Schilling is defeated (up to a maximum $10,000). Does this mean Schilling, an EverQuest veteran, is going to throw his matches for a good cause? The matches will take place June 5-7, during a series between the Yankees and the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium — which makes me wonder whether it will actually be Schilling playing his character, or an SOE stand-in. In any case, it’s probably a good move for Sony and a great way to raise money for a good cause. It sounds like you’ll be able to get into EQII for free during the event here.

The Second Life Future Salon has found a new date for its machinima night after the last one had to be postponed due to a Grid-crashing attack on the virtual world. The event takes places this Thursday, May 25, at 5:00pm SL time, and features SL filmmaker Pierce Portocarrero and Paul Marino, who runs the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences. More details about the event at this link.

The title says it all. PCMag.com articles here and here, product from Immersion Corp.

Texas Instruments is looking to hire two positions into what sounds like an effort to get more TI product into games on both the harware and software levels. TI recruiter Brent Rogers tells me the company is looking for one “3D software design engineer” (an entry-level position) and one “gaming professional,” who would presumably help with contacts at game companies. (more…)

Occasionally, having an anchor corporate sponsor provides me with a good excuse to do something I wouldn’t normally be able to do — like blog about the 10,000 sheep that were created by online workers hired through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, an online employment exchange for micro-tasks that need to be done by a person but which can be parcelled out via the Web. [Via we-make-money-not-art.] Actually, this is not so very un-3pointD at all. (more…)

Second Life resident Pierce Portocarrero is one of the virtual world’s premier machinima-makers. Part of the team working on the Ideal World documentary about SL fashion designer Nephilaine Protagonist (a film that will combine real-world and virtual-world footage), Pierce is also an enthusiastic SL resident, and seems to love digging up cool stuff and filming adventures and oddities about the world. He recently launched a new Web site, and though it’s not quite complete (and has some currently unavoidable audio on the home page), it showcases a lot of Pierce’s excellent work (he really knows how to work a camera in SL) and promises a steady stream of stuff to come. Above, Pierce’s prologue to Second Life, which gives you a better picture of his take on things.

We originally envisioned The Metaverse Sessions as a weekly serise (well, John Swords envisioned it; I just came along for the ride), but we bumped into so many good interview subjects in Palo Alto that we’re squeezing out episodes on a slightly accelerated schedule. One of the people we were very fortunate to cross paths with was Doug Engelbart, who is best known for building the first mouse and graphical user interface, but is simply a pioneer in personal computing like almost no other. He may not be very metaversal, but you wouldn’t want to pass up the chance at a chat with someone of Dr. Engelbart’s stature in the history of computing. In fact, the metaverse owes to him the very idea that computers could be used to augment an individual’s intelligence and capabilties in the world. Finally beginning to realize a dream that began more than 50 years ago, Engelbart talks about his “country boy” upbringing, changes in the Valley (where he’s lived since 1948 or so), the coinage of the word “online,” and the birth of the personal computer in his anxiety over his impending marriage. Well, I may be pushing that last one, but only a little bit. (Honest.) Listen here to a brief conversation with a man who has somehow managed to remain gracious and kind despite the world’s having largely ignored his brilliant ideas. (Read more about Engelbart’s Hyperscope project.)

It might as well be Second Life

Justin Bovington’s Rivers Run Red apparently screened extended trailers and footage of the third X-Men movie, X-Men: The Last Stand, in Second Life earlier this evening, in conjunction with the world premiere of the movie at Cannes. I missed the event itself, but it was put on “in association with 20th Century Fox“, according to an announcement on the Second Life Web site, and included a live video stream from Cannes complete with live commentary, exclusive to Second Life, from X-Woman Ellen Page, who plays Kitty Pryde (aka Shadowcat) in the movie — though in the Rivers announcement she’s called Ellen Parry. (more…)