3pointD.com

This was going to be a brief post about some new features of the ActiveWorlds software that was just released, but it turned into a longer contemplation of how the 3D Internet will work once many, many more of us have a presence in such online spaces.

Chris from SWCity, a community in ActiveWorlds that I’ve been meaning to visit ever since I blogged it back in April (sorry, guys!), sends news that AW recently released a preliminary build of the new Version 4.1 of its software. I don’t spend a lot of time in ActiveWorlds so I can’t say how much better this is than the last version, but a couple of things jump out at me from the release notes that are notable or at least cool-sounding — including a kind of identity portability. And some of it seems to point, in a platform-agnostic way, to what would seem to be the future of 3D spaces on the Internet. But first the new AW stuff: (more…)

Via VRoot comes an interesting article in APC magazine about the “Linux of the future” and Novell’s XGL framework, “which provides modern 3D accelerated rendering and features to X Windows via OpenGL.” To demonstrate how this actually looks on your Linux desktop, Novell provides some brief videos. This is similar to what Microsoft’s Robert Scoble described to podcaster John Swords and I recently as being part of Windows Vista. Just what people will find to do with these kinds of capabilities in Windows or Linux remains to be seen, but as the APC article rightly points out:

At first, these features are mainly going to be used for eye-candy. While not a bad thing by any means, the initial applications of the technology will do very little to convince serious power users to try it, and even less to encourage developers to utilise it. Over time, however, people on both sides of the divide will hopefully think up some uses for the technology which aren’t just for show.