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Mark McCahill at the Croquet-Bento blog sends news that it’s now possible to import avatars and animations designed in the Poser modeling and animation package into Croquet, the open-source, collaborative workspace/OS/virtual world/thinget. McCahill even found some Second Life avatars for Poser and imported those into the space. This is actually a much more important development than simple cosmetics. The biggest complaint heard after the recent round of truly impressive demos of Croquet is echoed in McCahill’s post: “I’ll be very happy to stop looking at the rabbit, the chicken, and Alice” — the three crude and static avatars that Croquet has featured thus far. Having reasonable avatars in Croquet should help drive adoption. Now: Anyone else out there using this stuff? Drop us a line.

Chief Puzzle Pirate Daniel James (who showed up to the Metaverse Roadmap summit in a pirate’s hat one day, as I recall), has an interesing post on his new blog in which he pulls apart the business model and philosophy of Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life. While his comments on SL as a religion are spot on, I’d take issues with his business model analysis. Perhaps most interesting about the post, though, as Scott Jennings points out, is that James says his company, Three Rings, “will develop something oriented towards player-created content.” Definitely looking forward to that. (more…)