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Warner Brothers’ Sire Records is launching “an interactive virtual listening party” for songstress Regina Spektor’s new album, “Begin to Hope,” next week in the virtual world of Second Life. The event marks “the first time a major record company has launched a virtual record release in Second Life and held a listening party for one of its artists,” according to a press release. In a series of locations around SL that were built out by Reuben Steiger’s virtual world services company, Millions of Us, residents will be able to hang out, chat and listen to songs from the album in their entirety, according to Steiger. The album itself isn’t due in stores until June 13. (more…)

Emily Chang at eHub flags a new app called PlacesTodo, which lets you tag a list of places using your mobile phone or a Web site, then retrieve your PlacesTodo list on the fly to see if there’s anything nearby that you wanted to check out. Nice way to use the Web and mobile devices to connect to the real world, if you ask me. Very 3pointD.

Way to go, metaverse meme! VerySpatial’s latest podcast covers lots of 3pointD issues, including the land lawsuit against Linden Lab blogged here May 9, 3D desktops, MySpace and the Metaverse Roadmap. There’s a bit of catch-up going on here (they can’t figure out whether of not Second Life is a game, for instance), but it’s recommended listening nonetheless.

A few days old, but worth flagging: Michael Arrington posts the news that eBay has begun banning selective links to users’ reputation profiles on Rapleaf. I point it out mostly because I’m interested in reputation solutions for virtual spaces, but also because eBay has been a leader here, leveraging the network power of its user base into useful reputation information, and it’s a shame that the company would try to quash the use a similar system on its site.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch flags an unfortunately named app called Mytago, which lets you tag the real-world stuff around you for later access on the Web by putting a scanable sticker on it. I’m not convinced (neither is Michael). This kind of physical tagging of real-world objects only makes sense if you’re tagging someone else’s stuff; if it’s your own, there are plenty of better ways to upload things and acquire a Web presence for them. Tagging items out in the world for people to see and share on the Web is a great idea, but I doubt it will be accomplished by introducing a new protocol into the mix. Arrington prefers Mozes, which lets you bookmark things via text messaging. That’s a nice idea, but aren’t our mobile devices soon going to be more powerful than that? In a couple of years, pretty much everyone’s going to be able to Digg (or insert name of new app) pretty much anything they want. I doubt it will be via Mytago or Mozes, however.

VR Juggler is a virtual reality platform I hadn’t heard of before, in development at the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University. According to VRoot, the development team is seeking feedback and suggestions on how to improve its tool. Have a look, and see if you can come up with anything that might help.

The Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre in Australia is bringing positional voice and audio to online games and 3D virtual spaces. Its Immersive Communications Environment will represent environmental audio and users’ voices positionally: the gamers and gunshots that are closer to you will sound louder, while those that are further away will sound fainter or won’t be heard at all. For gamers, this is a step forward in games like World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike, and could add a great deal to virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com, for those who care to adopt it. The system can only support around 1,000 users per server at the moment, but for most conversations and contexts, that will be more than enough. It doesn’t seem to be commercially available at the moment, but I’m betting it’s only a matter of time. I definitely want to hear my guildies’ voices echoing down the halls of WoW instances in a positional, directional way, rather than just everyone shouting at once. [Via Glitchy.]

Now available: Metaverse Session #2, our interview with Reuben Steiger, head of virtual world services company Millions of Us (which 3pointD wrote about when it launched). My podcasting partner, John Swords, has been doing the heavy lifting of editing the half-dozen or so interviews we did when we were out in Palo Alto for SDForum and the Metaverse Roadmap. Reuben is the second installment, after our chat with the Electric Sheep Company’s resident futurist, Jerry Paffendorf. (more…)

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…)

A “virtual reality room” at Iowa State University is getting an upgrade courtesy of Fakespace Systems, according to a press release. The room, which consists of full screens covering all four walls, the floor and the ceiling, is used for things like visualizing genetic data, developing tools to help engineers in decision-making, and as a control room for the military’s unmanned vehicles. Researchers are building “a virtual environment that allows operators to see the vehicles, the surrounding airspace, the terrain they’re flying over as well as information from instruments, cameras, radar and weapons systems. The system would allow a single operator to control many vehicles.” The room will cost more than $4 million to upgrade, and will feature a total of 100 million pixels on display.

Forbes.com (on Wired News) flags 10 of their favorite GPS devices — including the GPS-enabled wheelchair pictured above. Get directions, geotag photos, keep track of family members (or ex-cons) and go off-roading even if you can’t walk. Good stuff.

If you’re in New York or Washington over the next several weeks, you’ll have the chance to have your consciousness raised in 3D by an “interactive virtual reality installation” called Beyond Manzanar, created by Tamiko Thiel, who worked on Steven Spielberg’s Starbright World, and Iranian-American writer and multimedia artist Zara Houshmand. The show, whose title refers to a World War Two-era American internment camp for Japanese, plays on themes of xenophobia in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the World Trade Center attacks of 2001. [Via Chris Carella.] (more…)

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…)

In the wake of the Metaverse Roadmap (are you tired of hearing about this event yet?) a really interesting distributed conversation has developed that has as its main interlocutors massively multiplayer game designer Raph Koster, chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka of Linden Lab (makers of Second Life), and SL resident Prokofy Neva, one of the most outspoken activists in the metaverse for the cause of avatar rights. The main issues here seem to come down to how the metaverse will emerge and whether 3D is the right thing to emphasize. Raph presents a skeptical argument on the value of “social” virtual worlds, while Prok waxes eloquent on the “momentous occasion” that is the emergence of places like Second Life. As usual, I come down somewhere in the middle, though I do think both Raph and Prok are missing the point somewhat, while Cory is probably closer to the mark: Second Life is less a social virtual world than it is a tool or development platform. As such, its adoption curve will have less to do with games or traditional VWs and more to do with things like the Internet and World Wide Web. My vision of the metaverse horizon has SL — or something like it — moving out of the VW space altogether and becoming something we’ll think of more as an interface that will be useful for some things and not for others. Raph does get it right when he says “some of the best indicators of coming metaverses are Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, MySpace, Amazon, and eBay.” But I’d argue that some of these apps will naturally evolve at least partially toward 3D spaces, and will come to include geospatial hooks from flat Web pages to real places. (more…)

There’s got to be a better name for it than that. (A Minority Report interface?) In any case, it’s just gotten larger, with the release of IO2 Technology’s second generation Heliodisplay M2, which projects a video display in mid-air, and, in the M2i model, makes it interactive using 3D tracking technology. The latest release gives you a 30-inch diagonal display (87 percent larger than the M1), at up to 1,280 X 1,024 pixels. As many people have pointed out, this kind of thing is going to make your arms tired. But it’s still pretty cool.

John Swords is a fool for podcasting. Not only does he host SecondCast, the always entertaining talk show on all things Second Life, now he and I have started a new show, The Metaverse Sessions, which aims to be a weekly podcast conversation on the emerging metaverse and 3D Web, in all its forms. Our first show has just gone up on the site, featuring a rambling chat with futurist Jerry Paffendorf, who works for the Electric Sheep Company (who sponsor this blog). (more…)

Both Facebook and Google Talk are going mobile, according to stories in Red Herring and the Wall Street Journal. CNet flags the Journal story, about Google teaming up with Finnish cell-phone company Nokia to offer its Google Talk instant-message service on a Wi-Fi enabled device similar to its Nokia 770 Intertet Tablet, rather than over a cellular network. (An announcement is expected Tuesday.) Meanwhile, Red Herring reports that Facebook is building a WAP site that will let its 7 million members browse their friend networks from mobile devices. (more…)

Telcontar, which provides location-based software solutions to companies like Yahoo! and Rand McNally, among others, has announced an interesting new API designed to facilitate development of AJAX-based mapping apps. FWIW.

Just heard from Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red on the follow-up questions I had about his company’s bringing Swedish social-networking community PlayAhead into Second Life. According to Bovington, Rivers is going ahead with the project while consulting Linden Lab as little as possible. “We’re attempting to do everything we can within the parameters of the current feature set,” Bovington said in an email. “We’re looking at working with the development of the Linden Lab road map. We appreciate that Linden Lab are developing everything they can, as fast as they can.”

Bovington also confirmed that the June launch of the project will be on the main Grid. He added, though, that PlayAhead is looking at the option of a Teen Grid version, depending “on the project and the demands of their user base.” (more…)

It seems that Second Life is about to get its first social-networking mashup — not as a stand-alone app, but as a dedicated service designed to bring the connections made on one social-networking site into the 3D virtual world of Second Life. According to Justin Bovington of SL/RL services company Rivers Run Red (aka Second Life resident Fizik Baskerville), his company is all set for the June launch of a service that will make an integrated Second Life experience available to the 800,000 active users of PlayAhead, a Swedish social-networking site aimed mostly at teenagers. Bovington, whom I spoke with at E3 this week, says the service will integrate various SL grouping and communication tools with the Web-based services of PlayAhead, and will eventually include the ability to pull up PlayAhead profiles in a HUD, plus other nifty widgets that will be made possible by html calls and Web-on-a-prim, once those features arrive in SL. (more…)

3pointD is on the road again today, heading up to San Francisco after an interesting but exhausting time at E3. When we return this weekend, however, look for an exclusive story on a social networking site that’s headed into Second Life. Quite intriguing. . . .

Podcaster John Swords send a link to a cool — if janky — Google Maps mashup that traces the physical route of your Internet connection. Click the Traceroute link to check it out, or read the documentation. “Very old technology and sometimes very inaccurate but still a creative thought,” John writes. Doesn’t seem to always work, either, but worth checking out.

It’s not a very good shot, but if you look closely you can see Robin Williams in the lower left of the photo above, giving a demo of Will Wright’s new game, Spore, at E3. Of course, Will had already done the official demo, which was hilarious in itself, but not so funny as to watch Williams demonstrate how easy it is to use the creature creation tool, all the while giving a running commentary on how he was making a creature that could kiss its own ass, etc. A video of the event will be posted to YouTube, according to the Spore team, but it doesn’t seem to be up there yet. (more…)