3pointD.com

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.