3pointD.com

There’s so much more 3pointD to blog today, but I’m leaving for California in an hour and 40 minutes and I haven’t packed yet. I’m off to attend SDForum and the Metaverse Roadmap, and after that heading down to E3 — plus I may try to poke my head into the cool-sounding MeshForum in between, with any luck. I’ll be blogging from all these places, and John Swords and I will be taping podcasts there for a new show we’ll soon be starting, so stay tuned.

The moon in Earth orbit — but not Google Earth

Thank the stars for readers. A few posts ago I was pondering how cool it would be if Google were to come out with a Google Space application, and reader Adam Blumenthal pointed out that such a thing already exists, not from Google, but in the form of a free app called Celestia (for Windows, OS X or Linux), which, if you know what’s good for, you’ll download and check out before you even read the rest of this post. I don’t want to tell you how late I was up last night playing around in this thing. (more…)

It’s about time we had an avatar blogging here. 3pointD is proud to announce the addition of Glitchy Links to the site. Dial down the right-hand column for the latest headline round-up from the metaverse, Web 2.0, interactive entertainment, games, music, video, film and a bunch of other places — all hopefully related in some way to the 3pointD things we’ve been flagging here for a month(!) now. (more…)

Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture blogs a strategic alliance between two of the most prominent actors in Second Life’s business community, Anshe Chung Studios and branding concern Rivers Run Red. The tie-up was announced about a week ago via an Anshe Chung press release, which says the agreement “will see both parties developing large scale builds, in particular bridging the divide between real world strategic marketing solutions and the logistical deployment of virtual world branded content solutions for the B2B/C sector.” (more…)

TechCrunch has an interesting post that, along with its comments thread, mentions a few “meta” applications that can be used to build other apps without having to know how to code them yourself. I’m not a huge fan of form-based or drag-and-drop coding (it can never work as well as doing it yourself), but I think this new generation of tools could just give rise to some nice ideas. I wrote in a recent post about the 3pointD generation and how one of the things that will characterize it will be greater creation-power than ever before. Already, we’re seeing small teams of people create very powerful tools like Digg.com. Now we’re seeing people start to create the tools that can be used to create those tools. Stuff like WyaCracker and Zoho Creator may not be very powerful at the moment, but if people keep at it, they’ll eventually get somewhere. The challenge will be to create a tool that’s nearly as capable as a programming language, rather than something that simply lets you create variations on an already imagined theme. It doesn’t seem to be out there yet, but I’d wager it’s on its way.

The Flickr page of Linden Lab employee Pathfinder Linden has the pic above, of a Second Life recreation of Harvard University’s Austin Hall, where Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society holds many of its events. In this case, the hall is being recreated for the 2006 Beyond Broadcast conference on May 12th and 13th, which will explore the transition from traditional broadcast media to blogs, podcasting, social software and other current modes of communication. Video and and audio of the event will be streamed live to the SL Austin Hall. You can read more details here, and click in the SLurlPane at the top of the right column here to visit the virtual Austin Hall, while the link lasts. Or just click here [<– SL link].

VRoot flags a Hollywood Industry article describing a new version of the Toxik software from Autodesk. Toxik is “collaborative compositing software that includes an interactive Paint system — as well as a full 3D environment,” according to the article. This is movie-industry stuff and probably not for the general user, but what’s nice about it from the 3pointD perspective is its collaborative nature and the fact that it includes a full 3D evironment. What would be even cooler would be if you could export from that to something like a KML file — though I imagine what’s coming out of an industry-standard tool like Toxik might be far too many data points to be really useful in Google Earth. Autodesk says it’s also working on interoperability among its various tools, but that’s supported by their own fbx interchange format.

Ine Dehandschutter at Matuvu.nu brings news of the Virtual World of Art being created by new-media collective Workspace Unlimited [<-- Firefox unfriendly]. The project bills itself as "a series of new media art projects which subvert and reconfigure multi player game technology to create a network of artistic virtual environments." Three "nodes" (art installations that mix virtual and physical reality) are to be connected via the Internet, though only one is open at the moment. (more…)