3pointD.com

Via Ogle Earth comes news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has released aerial imagery showing evidence of the Zimbabwe government’s alleged repression of political opponents. (Ogle Earth picked up the news from Ethan Zuckerman and Jason Kottke.) This is something we envisioned at the Metaverse Roadmap summit, where it sparked some heated discussion. At the time, I agreed with the critical voices who held that merely recreating such scenes in virtual worlds would not be as effective as other means of communication (and I still do) — though I disagreed that it was useless or even counter-productive. But the AAAS imagery is exactly the kind of information-dissemination that we said might help do the job better. (more…)

Wired News has a story today about mobile services that will let you search for open parking spots from your cell phone or other wireless devices. This is the metaworld in action: layering digital information over the real world around us. We look forward to more.

My partner in podcasting, John Swords, has just posted Metaverse Session Episode 4, our chat with Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble and his son Patrick, the Mini Scobleizer. (Listen in the sidebar here or at the Metaverse Sessions site.) In a pretty amusing chat, the Scobles talk about the perils faced by underage Second Life residents, and the elder Scobleizer weighs in on some of the things we’d been discussing at the Metaverse Roadmap summit.

Also on the site (and in the sidebar here) is the keynote speech by IMVU’s Will Harvery, delivered at the SDForum the same weekend. Harvey gives an interesting and very detailed study of the development and growth of IMVU. Good listening for anyone interested in how connectivity is evolving on the Web.

A cooperative effort by several Second Life residents has, after many months of work, produced an offline app that allows SL residents to build SL-friendly objects outside the world, then import them via the scripting system. [Thanks for the tip, Prok!] Led by resident Jeffrey Gomez, the project, described (if briefly) in this forum thread, seems to take the form of a plug-in for the Blender open-source 3D modeling software. Jeffrey has created a UI for the tool, known as Prim.Blender (after the primitives that are SL’s basic building blocks) that mimics Second Life’s Build tool, and produces objects that are described by the same parameters SL uses. Resident Thraxis Epsilon completed the circuit by writing a script that allows those objects to be imported into Second Life.

Download Blender
Download Prim.Blender

(more…)