3pointD.com

Second Life residents will soon be able to order up physical versions of their avatars, their builds or their favorite Second Life objects in full 3D, and in a variety of materials, thanks to a pair of students at the Art Institute of Chicago. Simon Spartalian (aka Simon Jezebel in SL) and Mike Beradino (a recent graduate of the Art Institute) will launch the service on June 1, offering to mill SL objects up to 9″X 5″X 5″ out of anything from foam to wax to stainless steel. The pair are already documenting their milling efforts at their Recursive Instruments blog. (more…)

Dave Birch at the Digital Money Forum recently invited Richard Bartle and Aleks Krotoski to speak to the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation.

There was a lot of talk of virtual property and secondary markets and other such sensible things. . . . I also enjoyed the whole spectacle of people discussing World of Warcraft spot and future gold markets in front of both the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England!

I’d love to hear more about their remarks, and about the reactions of the bankers. (I didn’t know there was a futures market for WoW gold, though it doesn’t surprise me.) It’s good that this kind of information is beginning to filter out to the world of real-world commerce, but more interesting would be to school such august financial types in the more open markets of Second Life and hear their take on that.

Guus van den Brekel of the DigiCMB blog reports the news that among the Second Life library programs we blogged about a while back will be a trial run of EBSCO’s Consumer Health Database, coming in June and July. Along with it will come “workshops to explain how to search this resource and how to find medical info on the Web for SL patrons,” van den Brekel says. This strikes me as something SL residents will eat up. It’s also just the kind of portal to the real world that will help make 3D spaces like SL truly useful.

Check out the 3D geometric art of Bathseba Grossman in a cool video over at Make magazine’s blog. Bathseba uses 3D printing techniques to create geometric sculptures that apparently can’t be produced by any other means. Very nice stuff, too. And I wonder whether that holds implications for more structural creations; are there more utilitarian things that 3D printers can create that can be created nowhere else?

This press release from Microsoft flags their free downloadable MapCruncher tool. which lets users “take existing road maps and aerial imagery and overlay particular, specialized maps to create unique mash-ups tailored to the user’s specific interests.” The user maps get layered atop Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, and then registered and tiled into something useful. As far as I can tell from the examples that are liked from the Microsoft site, this is actually pretty unexciting stuff. It’s nice to be able to match up registrations, but the tool doesn’t seem to add much (any?) interactability — though I imagine that could be layered on through the API. Anyway, for those with more time than me who will want to play around with it (and hopefully report back their findings), there’s a tutorial linked here.

The future of 3pointD is getting an important test in PCD Music Lounge, the new 3D social space being launched by San Francisco startup company Doppelganger in a deal with Interscope records. Much has been written about this already (I was on a plane back from California at the time), so I’ll just add the 3pointD perspective: I call PCD Music Lounge and Doppelganger an important test because it’s one of the first things that will begin to move the MySpace crowd into 3D online spaces. There are still a lot of dots missing on the line between MySpace and 3D platform-like worlds like Second Life, but Doppelganger could start filling in some of them. (more…)