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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…)