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Second Life resident Ordinal Malaprop, who writes at the very nicely named blog An Engine Fit For my Proceeding, has apparently written a heads-up display for SL that lets you create a SLurl from within the world, rather than having to go out to a Web page to do so. What’s a SLurl? It’s an embeddable Web map of a portion of the SL grid, which includes a link that launches the application and teleports you directly to the location protrayed on the map. The SLurlPane at the top of the right sidebar on 3pointD (which needs to be updated) is my hack of the feature, so that you don’t have to go to a whole separate page. Ordinal earlier wrote the SLurlBuilder feature that lets you build a SLurl automatically instead of having to type the link out manually. The new HUD lets you simply stand in one place within Second Life, hit a button, and get the text for the link. Torley Linden blogs it today and says you can probably pick one up at Ordinal Enterprises [<– SL link] in Second Life, or simply contact Ordinal in-world. A nice new feature that pulls SL closer to the Web.

Sylvie Noel at Population of One blogs a haptic feedback system for touchscreens that could bring greater screen real estate to mobile devices. The system is from a company called Immersion that’s been making haptic feedback systems for gaming consoles and similar stuff. Their VibeTonz system can now provide tactile feedback when you hit a “button” represented on a screen. That means the entire surface of your mobile device could one day be a screen, with “keyboard” elements popping up only as needed. Nice idea.

The fashionistas of There.com are going frock to frock over the next nine weeks to find out who’s the best designer of fashions for the virtual world. The There Fashion Challenge pits a dozen of the world’s top designers in weekly design competitions, commencing with a pirate outfit challenge that’s currently up for judging. The competition is being run along the lines of a reality show, with residents voting a couple of designers out of the running each week. (more…)

The New York Times writes about “a missing link between cyberspace and the physical world” that comes in the form of a very 3pointD a GPS-enabled cell phone available in Japan that ties geolocative information into Internet-based data about your surroundings.

If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at. . . . The phones combine satellite-based navigation, precise to within 30 feet or less, with an electronic compass to provide a new dimension of orientation. Connect the device to the Internet and it is possible to overlay the point-and-click simplicity of a computer screen on top of the real world.

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Just stumbled on Realscan 3D, a company that does “mobile 3D scanning.” It sounds like they have a fast and accurate way of creating animatable 3D models by scanning real-life objects, including people. The company has done work for movies, and for game-makers Nintendo and Midway, among other people. Their technology apparently gets all the information it needs within a matter of seconds, in many cases. I’m sure it’s dead expensive still, but it’s interesting in terms of the ability to get reproductions of real objects into virtual worlds.

Glitchy sends along a press release from General Motors about a 3D virtual reality technology the company is using to design its new plants: “GM facility engineers can strap on special 3D goggles, step into a virtual cave, and see how a plant looks before the first piece of steel is put in place.” The technology, from a company called GHAFARI Associates, is not very metaversal (it doesn’t seem to be multi-user, let alone avatarized), but it’s an interesting example of a productive real-world application for a technology that doesn’t often get a useful rollout. Obviously, this kind of thing has been done before, but it doesn’t usually involve “virtual caves” and “3D goggles.” What will be interesting is when this kind of thing gets cheap enough for broad adoption, and when multi-user capabilities come in. That will summon shades of the Vernor Vinge book Rainbows End, which I finished a few days ago. Interesting read that I hope to post more about shortly. For now, though, it’s time to sweep out my virtual cave.

Ian Hughes at eightbar (a blog co-authored by four people “working in and around IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the UK”) has a fascinating bunch of screenshots and explanations up detailing a proof-of-concept build for some really nice functionality he’s created in Second Life, based around the Wimbledon tennis tournament. The build includes an RSS weather feed globe, a very cool data-tracking tennis court that seemingly reproduces every shot of a match (pictured above), a neat concept for ambient visual representation of the match score (consisting of two spheres that change sizes depending on who’s winning), and a bunch of other stuff. I really want to check this out, but SL is down for an update at the moment, so I’ll have to bring you the direct report later.

Reena Jana has a nice piece in Business Week updating the American Apparel story blogged here a couple of weeks ago. Some highlights:

The Los Angeles-based maker of trendy T-shirts is currently organizing a late-July soiree at its latest location: a computer-generated boutique within the parallel online universe of Second Life.

Next month, American Apparel will start hiring virtual sales clerks from among Second Life’s citizens.

The company is also planning to test-market its first line of jeans within its Second Life store this summer—two months before they hit physical stores in time for fall.

And in an effort to drive traffic to both the virtual and physical stores, anyone who buys clothes in Second Life after the grand opening party will receive a coupon for a 15% discount on merchandise bought in the real world.

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As we wrote about earlier on 3pointD, Linden Lab, creators of the virtual world of Second Life, has been met with an outcry over recent changes to their registration system, which no longer requires billing information or real-world identifying data of any kind. Now, to mollify residents’ concerns over unchecked griefing, LL is planning to scrape users’ hardware for identifying information, and to install tools that would let users ban non-paying members from their land, according to a blog post from LL’s VP for community and support Robin Harper. This is perilously close to jumping the shark, if you ask me, and certainly steers Second Life away from the open platform that LL CEO Philip Rosedale has said he wants it to become. (more…)

[But only because “How Much For That GuruBall In Your AlienPants?” didn’t fit on one line.] Reader Tom Gordon of AlienPants writes in reference to a recent 3pointD post on some Amazon.com employees who are trying to connect their service to the virtual world of Second Life. He makes an interesting point about pricing goods and services in SL. His thoughts after the jump: (more…)

Via Virtual Earth links to show|time|maps, a really nice movie listing mashup that uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth to produce a map of movies showing in your area. You can’t see this in the screenshot, but what’s nice about this little app is that when you mouse over a movie title, the squares where it’s next showing light up on the map with the cinema name beside them, and the showtimes show up in the window on the bottom left. (There are other navigation options as well.) I like how this mashup is so closely tied to time. Would be great on a portable device. At least, a portable device in Los Angeles or Austin TX, which are the only cities on the app at the moment.

Have any thoughts about “integrating cartographic data with geo-tagged knowledge repositories” and how “the emerging Geospatial Web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products”? If so, you may want to be in touch with Austria’s Know-Center project, which is seeking chapter submissions for an upcoming book on the geospatial Web. There’s a whole list of possible topics in the submission guidelines, including:

• State-of-the-art and emerging trends of geo-browsing platforms
• Knowledge acquisition and management in a geospatial context
• Knowledge relationship discovery and management (e.g. matching geospatial relationships with semantic or temporal relationships)
• Knowledge-intensive, location-based services
• Marketing of products and services via the Geospatial Web
• Content, annotation and ontology services as enablers of the Geospatial Web

Submissions are due by October 10, 2006 — so get to work.

CNet’s Daniel Terdiman has been on a bit of a 3pointD-style road trip lately, visiting five states with a carload of travel gadgets that help connect him to the rest of the world. Fun, interesting reading, including a few good 3pointD insights: “While I would reach my destination exactly as planned, I had absolutely no idea how I got there. I couldn’t even have begun to tell you what roads I took, or how to get back from there without this digital helper.”

Tony Walsh notes a post from Linden Lab VP for community and support Robin Harper in which she talks about a new system planned for identifying whether Second Life users are anonymous accounts that signed up under the new registration rules or have been “verified” by having paid money to LL at one point or another. Tony worries that making such information public will in effect create two classes of SL citizens and make it easy for residents (and LL?) to discriminate against one or the other. Note that there are already two classes of SL resident — Basic accounts, which pay no monthly fee to LL, and Premium accounts, which do pay for land. And that information is already public. Why that’s not sufficient is a bit unclear. (more…)

Attention, SL resident Jeffrey Gomez! Jeffrey, of course, is the guy who brought us the ability to export SL objects to Blender. Now comes the news from Ogle Earth that the latest release candidate of Blender can also import KMZ files created in SketchUp. Of course, this doesn’t imply it’s an easy step to get those into a format that SL understands. But Jeffrey was close to writing something that would export from Blender to SL, but held off because of IP issues. [See comments thread.] Here’s a great, non-IP-infringing use for such an app. It would be great to see Jeffrey or someone else complete the process. SketchUp is a fun tool, and there are great resources for SketchUp models out there, including a free warehouse and a marketplace for user-created models. Being able to get this stuff into SL would immediately open things up even more than they already are. The potential seems pretty exciting to me.

[NOTE: Second Life now supports maya and soon other formats in the form of scultped prims.]

No sooner did the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) re-launch SLBoutique, the shopping site for items created in the virtual world of Second Life, than they find themselves stumbling over the kind of intellectual property issues that crop up in SL every day. Apparently, an SL resident had listed a virtual reproduction of the surrealist artist Salvador Dali painting Landscape With Butterflies on the site. But when the Salvador Dali Museum got wind of this, they sent a letter to the Sheep, asking them to remove the IP-rights violating reproduction from the site — which the Sheep, quite properly, promptly did. Dali’s rights-holders have been notoriously tight about this kind of thing, as I recall (though I can’t find the link at the moment), as have the rights-holders of Joan Miro’s work. What the episode indicates, though, is that SL, the Sheep and SLBoutique are getting a higher profile, and that the many other IP violations in SL may soon come in for similar treatment. (more…)

SL machinima-maker Pierce Portocarrero caught some footage of a protest in the virtual world of Second Life today, held to coincide with the world’s third birthday. The protest was being held to voice some residents’ dissatisfaction with the new registration requirements (or lack thereof) we mentioned earlier today. I haven’t heard the narration on this yet, as I’m still at the Supernova conference, but the footage is engaging, and gives a good idea of what it’s like when a bunch of SL avatars get together for a protest — which is not an unusual thing in itself.

Well, that was an eye-opener. Amazon.com’s Werner Vogels just told the Supernova conference that the shopping site [well, some of its employees, anyway] is considering a move into the virtual world of Second Life. “There is a group of Amazonians in Second Life,” Vogels said, “and we are building a bridge between Amazon Web services and Second Life so you can go into Second Life and actually try things on there and buy them. There are people who want to use Amazon as a platform to buy and sell things in Second Life.” It’s not clear how far along the effort is or how much official support it has in the company ([see below], Vogels was speaking in response to a question from the audience), but it is clear that people at major Web-based retailers and eCommerce portals have begun to look at SL as a commercial platform. Watch out, SLBoutique? Time will tell. Stay tuned for more reports.

[Update:] Vogels, who is VP of worldwide architecture and chief technology officer at Amazon, tells me that there is indeed an “Amazonians” group in SL composed of Amazon employees, and that they are trying to see what it would take to create a Web-services bridge between the virtual world and the shopping site. The effort is not being done under the auspices of the company, he says. (more…)

Lili Cheng of Microsoft, who formerly ran the Social Computing Group there; Tom Ngo, CEO of NextPage; Chris Thomas, chief strategy officer at Intel; Gary Bennitt of Goowy; and Kevin Lynch of Adobe spoke about the future of the desktop at the Supernova conference during a lunchtime roundtable. Much of their discussion revolved around whether data would be centrally stored in future, or stored locally in a number of locations. Interesting privacy and identity issues came up (they start about halfway down this post), and panelists’ remarks also shed some long-term light on how the 3pointD world might become more mobile and distributed, and just how long that might take. (more…)

Machinima-master Paul Marino sends along the news of a machinima piece that’s come under scrutiny by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee recently. “The machinima was held up by ‘experts’ as propaganda and recruiting material for terrorists,” Paul writes. (And there’s video here.) While that doesn’t seem to be what’s actually happening, it’s interesting to consider the possibilties. In fact, what’s far more likely is that virtual worlds would be used by the U.S. government for similar purposes. The government already has an armed forces recruiting tool in the multiplayer first-person shooter game America’s Army, so it’s actually a short step for someone to start trying to win gamers’ hearts and minds through similar means. A number of people involved in virtual worlds have recently been testifying before various congressional and government intelligence bodies, 3pointD hears, and there has even been talk of U.S. government institutions opening an island in the virtual world of Second Life. While I don’t know that any of these discussions have involved machinima, it does seem that there will eventually be a government presence of some sort of another in virtual worlds. That will certainly change the landscape a bit.

The future of wireless and wireless broadband was the subject of a Friday midday panel at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today. The panel was moderated by Om Malik of GigaOm (and for a few more days part of Business 2.0, and featured Clint McClellan of Qualcomm; Juergen Urbanski of FON, “a wifi peer-to-peer grassroots community movement”; Pierre de Vries, a fellow at the Annenberg Center at USC who used to work on wireless technologies at Microsoft; and Selina Lo of Ruckus Wireless. (more…)

If you’re interested in some recent and/or potential promotional uses of Second Life and other virtual worlds, log into SL today at noon SL time for the Avatar-Based Marketing discussion, to take place at Harvard’s Berkman Island [<-- SL link]. Panelists include SL resident Cristiano Midnight of Snapzilla, blogger Tony Walsh (Zero Grace in SL) of Clickable Culture, SL resident Razor Rinkitink (American Apparel’s Director of Web Services, responsible for their recent project in SL), Paul Hemp (Hempman Richard in SL), author of the recent Avatar-Based Marketing article in the Harvard Business Review, and Jerry Paffendorf (SNOOPYbrown Zamboni in SL) of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsor of this blog). Should be an interesting examination of the issues. More information on Jerry’s blog.

Snapzilla, the Flickr-like site for Second Life screenshots, is taking the day off today, as a way to protest recent changes Linden Lab has made to the registration process for SL, changes that allow “complete unrestricted access to Second Life by minor children and destructive users with no accountability and no ability to ban problem users,” according to Snapzilla creator Cristiano Diaz. While the changes to the registration process may in fact be problematic, it’s strange to see one of the most popular SL-related Web-based services take itself off the air for a day in protest — especially on today, the virtual world’s third birthday, when Snapzilla should be a more popular destination than ever, given the number of birthday events going on this week. (more…)

A Thursday-afternoon panel at Supernova looked at the significance of games in business. Led by Dan Hunter of the Wharton School (and, of course, the Terra Nova blog, the panel also included Charles Moore of Reuters, Amy Jo Kim of Shufflebrain, Michael Zyda of the USC Gamepipe Lab, and Doug Failor of the Department of Defense’s Joint Futures Lab. Among the hot topics were blue-haired ladies and something called “the G word,” as panelists sought to explain how some of the lessons we could learn from games could be used in commercial and enterprise applications. (more…)

The EmSense Corporation gave a rather unexpected demo at Supernova today. EmSense makes a glasses-like headset that “senses your emotions,” according to the company. The headset reads biofeedback signals, apparently with some degree of accuracy. A video shown at Supernova demonstrated a player who could go into stealth mode when he held his breath in order to cross a minefield. Graphs of adrenalin and focus showed what the headset could read while a player was navigating the first particularly startling scene of Doom 3. Another mini-game allowed a player to cross a bridge as long as he was focusing on the task, but caused him to fall into a chasm when he lost focus. Avatars could also be made to blink their eyes when the player did. Training and education applications were demo’d as well. The slim headset is still rather obtrusive compared to how light it will eventually need to be, but it seems like things are on the way. There’s gotta be a ton of potential applications. I’m definitely buying any game where I can go into stealth mode just by thinking sneaky, anyway.

Does the Internet need a new scientific discipline? That was the contention of Usama Fayyad, Yahoo!’s chief data officer and senior vice president of Research & Strategic Data Solutions, who spoke about “the new science of the Internet” at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today.

“The Internet touches all of our lives, almost every aspect of our lives,” he said. “And yet, when you really ask what these things mean — what does community mean? what does it take to make a community thrive, or whither? what does it take to establish trust on the Internet? — these are questions that are all really fuzzy, and what you find when you dig into them as a scientist is that there’s no science behind them. What can we do to fish ourselves out of the dark?” (more…)

Real estate maps mashups were one of the first user-generated tools for apps like Google Maps. Now Century 21, the world’s largest real estate sales organization, has a mashup of its own, based in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and MapPoint, according to a press release. Century 21’s Property Search Gold lets prospective home-buyers browse sale properties on a satellite map based on their own search criteria. Not a hugely exciting new class of application, but interesting to see a big company buy into this kind of mashup on a big scale.

IBM exec Linda Sanford gave a big shout-out to “the gaming generation” today at the Supernova conference in San Francisco. Sanford, a senior vice president of IBM’s internal On Demand Transformation and Information Technology initiatives, talked about some of the principles of innovation that IBM has been using to guide its business recently. In mentioning where new leadership may come from, Sanford talked about “the need to tap into the creative minds of gamers and apply that in the work world. I can imagine phenomenal effects if we’re able to do that,” she said. Sanford gave the examples of Second Life and EverQuest II as places from which tomorrow’s leaders could emerge. “Gamers are bringing a whole new set of skills to the table,” she said. “Games — the really good ones — have an inherent level of education they’re providing. You learn as you play; you’re either going to master it, or be dead trying.” (more…)

Yeah, baby! That’s our reaction to the news that Peter Ludlow — aka Urizenus Sklar in the virtual world of Second Life — has been named one of the ten most influential gamers by no less august a body than MTV.

The Unwelcome Guest: Peter Ludlow. It’s not every day that getting kicked out of an online video game puts you on the front page of The New York Times. But University of Michigan professor Peter Ludlow’s disputably “bad” behavior in “The Sims Online” did just that in January of 2004, after the game’s publisher, Electronic Arts, revoked Ludlow’s online citizenship. The offense was Ludlow’s publication of a “TSO”-centric newspaper that chronicled creative and sometimes troublesome behavior of other gamers in the world, including allegations that under-age players were involved in virtual-sex-related activities. EA claimed Ludlow’s newspaper violated the terms of service for playing “TSO.” Ludlow quickly took his act to the online world “Second Life,” where he began to rake muck for a new newspaper, “The Second Life Herald.” If you, too, dream of playing a game so sensationally that the game’s creators take notice, then Ludlow is the role model.

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Here’s a 3pointD tidbit that was kicking around among one or two people at Supernova today: SoonR, an application that lets you use your mobile phone to make Skype calls and access files on your PC, will reportedly announce a version for the Macintosh this week. While SoonR, which is one of the companies being featured at Supernova on Thursday, isn’t the micro-miniaturized ubiquitous computing app that folks were envisioning at the Metaverse Roadmap summit, it does extend a certain amount of mobile computing functionality to ordinary cell phones, and SoonR users have been clamoring for a Mac version for some time. Seems that time is now, according to those who apparently know.

Is the patent system broken? According to Robert Barr of UC Berkeley, “The system’s not only broken, it’s a disaster.” While the panel that discussed the issue at Supernova today was only tangentially related to the issues that came up recently here on 3pointD, it did contain some interesting bits of news. The main problem under discussion was the great length of time it takes to get a patent examined at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. There are currently up to a million patent applications pending, according to Beth Noveck of the New York Law School (who runs that institution’s Democracy Island project in the virtual world of Second Life). Her solution? Create a peer-review system that leverages the power of the Web. Apparently, IBM and Microsoft have already agreed to have patents reviews through the system, Noveck said, and many other companies are ready to come on board. (more…)

Glitchy sends along a link to an interesting technology I hadn’t heard of before: 3D shape search. Apparently, a company called UGS Corp. has just bought a 3D shape search technology from German IT services firm software design & managment. UGS’s new Geolus Search product (formerly geolus SHAPE) “allows manufacturers to quickly locate 3D models of digitally defined parts from large heterogeneous data sources on the basis of geometric similarity,” according to a press release. (more…)