3pointD.com

I’ll blog more on the 3D Web browsers ExtremeTech is flagging after I check them out. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s already had time to look around in these, though.

A couple of months ago I blogged about a really nice touch-screen interface on which Warcraft III was being demonstrated. Now Kotaku has posted the video above (from Edward Tse), showing the same table at work with Google Earth. I’m really looking forward to this kind of thing. And if you heard our interview with Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, you already know they’ve been experimenting with a similar interface as well.

The BBC has an interesting story from Friday how Big Brother’s presence will manifest itself in the metaverse, looking specifically at what companies are doing with the massive amounts of detailed data they’re able to farm from virtual worlds. Though it may seem trivial at the moment to wonder about whether your activities in a video game should be observed by the game-maker, these will be very important issues going forward. What rights to privacy do we have in virtual worlds? Are these public places, in which certain rights are protected? Or are they merely corporate applications? Even in company towns in the real world, though, residents enjoy certain rights. As virtual worlds become more closely knit with our real-world activities, a determination on these issues will weigh heavily on what we can and can’t do in the metaverse, and who will make those decisions. Not to be taken lightly.

I don’t usually post about Second Life membership numbers, but reaching the quarter-million mark (which I spotted on SL resident Tateru Nino’s blog) seems significant to me. Tateru follows up with a post attempting to look a bit more closely at the numbers. Neither she nor I have great insights into the matter, but the point here is that the quarter-million mark I just blogged is actually relatively meaningless, since as far as I know it merely counts number of characters that have been created historically. (These could be defunct accounts, multiple characters on the same account, etc.) A better number can be found on SL’s economic statistics page, where it says that 124,028 residents have logged in during the last 60 days. But even this is obscure, since it counts characters, and not actual real-world people. And neither of these numbers give any indication of how many people are actually paying money to Linden Lab (basic SL accounts are free). A month or two ago, when I chatted with LL CEO Philip Linden on related subjects, the company had only 12,000 or so paying customers. (more…)

I’m not clear on whether this is free or not, but GIS firm Cities Revealed has a press release in which it talks about making available 3D city building data for Google Earth covering 568 cities around the United Kingdom. (Some of those must be some pretty small cities.) Only central London is available at the moment, according to the release. An area around Buckingham Palace created from Cities Revealed data has already been added to the 3D Warehouse, however, as the release notes. And it looks like other free sample data is available on the company Web site. Enjoy.