3pointD.com

For 3pointD developers: A pair of press releases this week flag a new partner for Google Earth and new .NET toolkit support. First up, an announcement from engineering firm CH2M HILL that its Enterprise Spatial Solutions unit has become the first Google Earth certified partner in the Google Enterprise Professional Program. Then there’s also the announcement that the Carbon Project’s newest “open-geospatial .NET toolkit,” CarbonTools PRO, will include support for “an extensive range of new location content and services including Google Earth KML, ESRI Shapefiles, MapInfo and Autodesk formats as well as support to services such as Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) WCS and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation’s (OSGeo) MapGuide.” (more…)

Apple has filed a U.S. Patent Application for some multipoint touchscreen technology. [Via Virtual Worldlets in a story I found on the excellent VRoot.] With all the cool new 3D interfaces in development, it seems only a matter of time before our desktops become something else altogether, something that looks and feels far more 3pointD than out laptop and desktop computers do today.

Science a Go Go is running a story on the NEW TIES project, a virtual world that’s to be populated with 1,000 artificial personalities who (”that”?) will hopefully evolve into “an artificial society capable of exploring and understanding its environment through cooperation and interaction.” (more…)

The following link is definitely Not Safe For Work, but it is 3pointD: Red Light Center, “the first adults-only massively multi-user, online-reality erotica community,” recently launched in “pre-beta” and is making a limited number of basic memberships available for free, according to a press release. Of course, Red Light Center is hardly the first 3D adult world, but judging from the screenshots and video tour on the site, it’s pretty well put together — if you like that sort of thing. (more…)

Over at the Second Life Herald, we’re running a story on one of the periodic Town Hall meetings held by Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale. In yesterday’s live chat with residents, Philip confirmed that LL had indeed reported griefers to the FBI, as had been hinted at in the past. “In cases where we are able to establish a reasonable equivalance between that kind of disruption, we have, and we will be, and we will get better at, turning those people in, in general to the FBI here in the US,” Rosedale said. “We are serious about doing this and we have done it.”

Perhaps more notably, Rosedale mentioned that for “criminal acts below the threshold where you’d see RL authorities getting involved,” user-led dispute resolution would probably be the best approach. This is a shift from Linden Lab’s direction in the past, though it remains to be seen how closely the company can hew to such a direction. (more…)