3pointD.com

If you don’t hear from me on Monday morning, it’s because I’m on my way to Supernova. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the following hypothesis: Second Life’s innovative intellectual property rights regime, in which users are granted the IP rights in the things they create there, actually serves to stifle creativity in the world. Now, this is a bit of a straw man, I’ll admit. (I learned my screaming headlines from the best.) But it’s worth examining more closely, especially where it collides with SL’s technology. (more…)

VRoot flags a press release from the Caligari Corporation about their trueSpace7 collaborative 3D design software, which is being showcased at Siggraph 2006. Caligari calls it the “first and only 3D software application to feature real-time collaborative authoring technology, allowing remote product design teams, and graphic artists to create, manipulate and edit 3D objects within a shared virtual workspace, over the broadband internet.” (Although we blogged about this tool from Autodesk that seems to pre-date it.) With a $595 price point and what looks like support for the 3DS format, it sounds pretty useful, though the real-time collaboration is what’s most exciting here. Too high-end for most virtual-world residents? Maybe. But as the ability to import objects into virtual worlds grows, stuff made in apps like this is going to become increasingly tough competition for the designers who work only with tools native to those worlds — tools that are orders of magnitude less sophisticated.

When I posted the other day about going to the Supernova conference in San Francisco (I leave tomorrow), I forgot to mention that you’ll be able to virtually attend part of the conference by logging into Second Life this Thursday. And, probably not coincidentally, it looks like you’ll get a branded heads-up display when you attend, something that’s going to become more common as third parties become more closely integrated with the virtual world experience (see below).

As Jerry Paffendorf points out, the Electric Sheep Company (a sponsor of this blog) will put on one of its mixed-reality events, broadcasting Supernova’s Connected Innovator’s Showcase (held in association with TechCrunch) into SL on Thursday afternoon. (More details on the SL forums.) The showcase features a dozen forward-looking companies, most of which will be “launching or making significant announcements at the conference,” according to Supernova, so if you’re interested in what they have to say but can’t make it to the conference, this could be a good way to get the early news. It’s too bad the rest of the conference isn’t being shared this way, though. But I’ll be liveblogging most of the sessions I attend, so stay tuned.

One of the interesting things about this broadcast (if that’s the right word) is that it looks like attendees in Second Life will be given a branded heads-up display to facilitate the session. (more…)

bud.com is a “passively multiplayer online role-playing game” being developed by former uber-blogger Justin Hall in which your character progresses not by slaying Orcs and gathering gold, but by surfing the Web. (Thanks to Glitchy for the link.)

This is a massively multiplayer online game that rewards you with experience points and levels for daily activities. Reading news, checking webmail, browsing a concert schedule, trolling photos, each of these web activities leaves a signature trace on the user’s avatar.

I love this idea. Basically, you level up simply by going about your daily business on the Internet. But there’s more. (more…)

Over at the Metaverse Sessions site, John Swords has posted a keynote speech by venture capitalist Joi Ito in which the avid World of Warcraft player talks about “monochronic” and “polychronic” time, and gives the audience a look into the crowded world of his computer’s desktop. (I liveblogged the presentation at the time.) It’s a very interesting take on how Ito interacts with the real and virtual worlds at the same time, and definitely worth a listen. (You can listen here in the sidebar if you like, or on the site.)

A short piece in The New York Times today mentions a very nice tool created by SL resident Hiro Pendragon, a kind of 3D wiki that lets users collaboratively work on designs for the redevelopment of a real-world park. We blogged about the park project a while back, before the wiki was up, but this addition certainly merits more attention, as it’s a good example of the kind of tools that can be built in SL with a bit of thought, creativity and application — and also an unexpected case of a 2D tool suddenly sprouting a third dimension. (more…)

Finally had a chance to check out the video that was produced for the New Media Consoritum, showcasing their campus in Second Life. (Both campus and video were created by the Electric Sheep Company, 3pointD’s only sponsor at the moment.) The video, shot by talented SL machinima-maker Pierce Portocarrero, showcases what is a truly impressive build. The place looks great. Even at five and half minutes, though, the piece feels slightly long, and the narration definitely takes the optimistic view of activity in SL, quoting a few Linden Lab figures, including ones about how many content creators there are on the Grid — figures that don’t really tell the whole story. The video does a great job of showcasing a really professional build, though, and is well worth checking out. The one odd thing about it, to me, is that it isn’t posted on YouTube. This is the New Media Consortium, after all. Start using those new media delivery services, guys — if only because it will do a great deal to spread the word.

We’ll be on the road next week (or, more accurately, in the air), headed to the Supernova conference in San Francisco, where I’ll be moderating a workshop on the social, business and work-oriented lessons we can learn from massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. We’ll have two hours to fill, hopefully with plenty of audience participation, so if you’re at all interested, drop by Wharton West early on Tuesday Wednesday, June 21st. The four very cool panelists include Corey Bridges of Multiverse; Nic Ducheneaut, who’s doing awesome work scraping data on social interactions in World of Warcraft over at the PlayOn project at PARC; Jerry Paffendorf, the resident futurist over at the Electric Sheep Company (our main sponsor here at 3pointD); and Helen Cheng of Seriosity, which is studying the overlap between work and play. The rest of the conference is filled with interesting people as well, and I’m definitely looking forward to meeting a few of them and blogging what they have to say. If you’re in the area and have any 3pointD news or just want to chat, feel free to drop me a line. Keep in mind, though, that I’m actually very bad about returning my emails. In any case, I look forward to seeing who’s around next week. Should be fun.

There’s 3D all over the place these days. Its latest manifestation is Qubic Sphere, which bills itself as “the first dynamic, easy-to-use three-dimensional Web browser,” according to a press release. First? I’m not clear where the company has been for the last five to ten years or so, but it wasn’t There.com, Second Life or ActiveWorlds, apparently. Qubic Sphere president David Montour says, “While there are a few other products that enable users to open a small 3D window while on the Net, there is no other browser that allows you to be fully 3D and interactive with the Net at the same time.” Hmmmm. Qubic Sphere isn’t that browser either, but it is worth examining slightly more closely. (more…)

I like the idea of WidSets (which Joi Ito blogs today), a new service from Nokia that lets users create little widgets for Java-enabled phones that are delivered on the fly. Joi:

It’s a very cool service that allows people to make simple widgets which get sent to your phone and run on your phone. They are similar to OS X widgets and do various things like read RSS feeds, show flickr images for a particular tag, or show a Technorati feed. It’s still in Beta, but seems to work well. It works on Java phones so will work on non-Nokia phones as well.

Seems like you could do cool 3pointD-type stuff with this and GeoRSS, maybe even combining it with a GPS-enabled device for even better action. Like a quick feed of interesting places nearby. Easy to hack together. Should be interesting.

Andrew Hudson-Smith at Digitally Distributed Environments has posted some nice work that takes advantage of Google Earth 4.0’s new texturing features to recreate a street full of London row houses. (Hudson-Smith uses his own software to obtain “accurate height/facade data from photographic modelling” and then uses “a camera-calibrated algorithm” to place windows and doors and rapidly create city models.”) As Ogle Earth points out, the result is “very cool.” Now let’s get some avatars into that picture. Close-up after the jump. (more…)

Popular Second Life architect and content-creator Aimee Weber of in-world brand *PREEN* sends news that she’s just designed and built an in-world showroom for real-world fashion brand American Apparel. The store, located on a private island in Second Life, is set to open as soon as this weekend. The news has SL residents considering what it means that the first real-world fashion brand has made an entrance to Second Life. Fashion is one of the virtual world’s biggest industries, and the fashion business in SL is extremely competitive. So it’s not a surprise that the first real-world retail brand to set up shop in SL is a fashion retailer. (more…)

A while back, I blogged about a shopping site that let a community of individual makers of craft products put their stuff up for sale. My interest in it was in some of the geocentric search functions, and the fact that the community was using an avatarized Town Hall to take the pulse of its vendors and make decisions. Now Om Malik reports that Etsy has raised a round of seed funding from some pretty impressive investors. (Go, Etsy! Which is based in Brooklyn, like me.) Om also has a nice piece in Business 2.0 about eCommerce sites and other businesses that are increasingly run by their customers. What I’ll be interested to follow is how many of these communities make use of 3D and other virtual spaces to do their work in. All very promising developments in any case.

3D tech co. Media Machines has a press release announcing the release of its new KML-to-X3D translator for creating 3D browsable content that can be linked from Google Earth. The tool essentially takes KML models, like those found in Google’s 3D Warehouse full of SketchUp models, and translates it to the X3D open standard for 3D browsing. I’m not terribly impressed by what I’ve seen of X3D so far; the Google Earth-X3D mashup that Media Machines flags on its site “takes you to the Statue of Liberty, where a link launches FLUX Player running inside Google Earth’s embedded web browser!” Only it doesn’t, since my default browser is Firefox, and this needs IE. And in any case, when I did download the FLUX player and finally got the page to load, I found myself orbiting the Statue of Liberty in a Web browser (not in Google Earth’s browser, for some reason) while fireworks bloomed behind her and some music played. Seems like something you could do more easily in Flash. So I’m skeptical, but I’m willing to be convinced. It seems like there must be more impressive demonstrations than this. This disaster response app seems like it might take better advantage of the format, but it’s hard to tell. I’d love to see it in action.

Is a Southern Takeover of Second Life on the way? Hot on the heels of Warner Bros. launching Regina Spektor’s latest album in the virtual world of Second Life comes a press release from the Universal Motown Records Group promising “two first-ever virtual artist meet and greets which fans from all over the world can experience in real time.” The artists are hip-hop bad boy Chamillionaire, who will appear in SL on June 25, and frat-rockers Hinder, who will make their in-world appearance the next day. Given that Chamillionaire is a platinum-selling recording artist, this could be Second Life’s most attention-grabbing event to date. It also seems to mark the first ongoing commitment to a Second Life presence by a big real-world media company. But it raises some critical questions about the capacity of Linden Lab’s technology to handle the attention. (more…)

Amazingly, this Undead Mage has just hucked a fireball at that guy’s house! What’s amazing about it is not the fireball itself, but that he’s done it in a commercial for Farmer’s Insurance. If there’s any doubt that this is a commercial based on World of Warcraft or a similar swords-and-spells game, it’s dispelled by the first line spoken by the insurance agents once the scene cuts away from our friend, the Lord of Mishap. (Don’t worry: no spoilers here.) Kind of made my jaw drop. But the thing that makes 3pointD really care about this is the deep cultural penetration it’s evidence of. (more…)

Well, as old as the computer age, anyway. Teaching machines to correctly discern objects in three-dimensional scenes has long been a sticking point in artificial intelligence and robotics. Now, according to a UPI story, “Carnegie Mellon University scientists say it is now possible for computers to learn how to discern the geometric context of natural scenes, which, previously, has been a major roadblock for computer vision.” Said scientists will apparently be unveiling their creation at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, which starts this weekend. Intriguing. And these are the real deep geeks. Maybe I’ll try to go. [Thanks to Glitchy for the link.]

Very Spatial yesterday flagged an interesting story on the BBC about Google’s mobile aspirations for the future. That, combined with talk coming out of Google’s Geo Developers Day that various people have reported to me, has finally convinced me that Google may at least be starting to think about some kind of multi-user version of Google Earth. If it comes, it won’t be soon, but it’s worth recapping possible developments (if that makes any sense), though a lot of this talk has been circulating for some time. Mozilla as well seems to be thinking about related ideas. (more…)

There was lots of news out of Google’s Geo Developers Day, held yesterday ahead of O’Reilly’s’s Where 2.0 conference that starts today. Among the notable tidbits (mostly lifted from Ogle Earth, but also reported by Jerry Paffendorf, who’ll be speaking at Where 2.0 this afternoon):

• Here’s Google’s press release about it all.

• Google Earth in new version 4.0 beta is now available for Linux [<-- download] and on Mac [<-- download], as well as Windows [<-- download]. Good roundup of new/changed features on Ogle Earth, including support for textures and local lighting on SketchUp models.

• There’s a new KML 2.1 spec and tutorial. And you can now upload KML to Google Maps just by pasting in a URL, according to Ogle Earth.

• The Google Maps API also now supports Geocoding for many parts of the world.

• There’s a new Google Maps for Enterprise service (with fee) for business and government.

(more…)

This isn’t strictly the kind of mobile connectivity I usually cover here, but it’s right in the pocket in terms of convergence. A company called TVersity has a press release today about a new version of their Media Server that lets you stream Internet radio stations to your PSP. Now, I’m neither a PSP nor a streaming expert, but as far as I can tell this is the first service, outside of homebrew hacks that users have created, that lets you do this. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) What I like about it is that it harnesses the processing and adoption power of a games device to drive new kinds of connectivity. Anything that helps make the Internet more mobile is a good thing for the kind of 3pointD connectivity I’m always looking for: technology that helps people connect in the real world. Game devices feature some of the most powerful processing and some of the broadest adoption of any new devices out there (more than 17 million PSPs have been sold so far — though none to me, unfortunately), and have the potential to drive more generalized uses in a big way. I look forward to tuning in.

I just found out that SLBoutique, a Web-based shopping site for Second Life objects, has been relaunched with a new look and new functionality. The relaunch comes courtesy of the Electric Sheep Company (a sponsor of this blog), the virtual world services firm that bought SLBoutique some months back. SLB is one of a handful of sites that let SL users browse and purchase in-world items via the Web. Others include SLExchange, and Second Server, plus a few others I’ve no doubt forgotten or haven’t discovered yet. How significant is the SLB relaunch? Well, the site certainly is easier to use and look at, but it’s the new functionality that will make the difference. Or at least, will begin to. (more…)

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.

About a month ago, I posted about a meeting of the American Bar Association’s Cyberspace Law Committee, where a fellow named Henry Judy, who currently co-chairs that committee’s Internet Law Subcommittee, made some interesting remarks to the effect that cyberspace — a concept encompassing more or less everything that happens on the Internet — “was better explained through a property law analysis than the long-standing presumption that there is such a thing as a ‘virtual’ world.” While this may rub some virtual world residents the wrong way, it seemed to me that there was real weight behind it; Judy comes to many of the same conclusions as portions of the geek community (on things like open-source software and privacy, for instance), but gets their through the lens of established law, rather than having to invent new methods. In any case, why should the virtual world be any different from the real one? The virtual world is part of the real world, after all.

Judy explains it better, and has sent along a draft paper of his ideas, which I’m more than pleased to present after the jump. Many thanks to him for getting in touch. (more…)

Prototype 3D display from Toshiba

Glitchy sends along a story on Gamespot about a new generation of 3D monitors that don’t require users to wear those stupid glasses. Many have been on display at the Society for Information Display conference going on in San Francisco this week. Good news for gamers, and opens up even more possibilities for virtual worlds. Talk about the “3D Web.”

Corey Bridges of Multiverse was an amusing presence at the Metaverse Roadmap summit: a tall, wisecracking guy in cowboy boots who’s confident he’s changing the world of gaming, and maybe the wider wired world itself. An ex-Netscape product manager from the company’s pre-IPO days, Bridges has brought a few other Netscapers together in a small group of developers who are creating a platform that will let anyone create their own virtual world — for free. John Swords and I got him on the phone the other day for our latest Metaverse Session, in which we chat about the constellation of worlds that can be created with Multiverse, how they might fit into the broader metaverse, and whether filmmaker James Cameron, who sits on the Multiverse advisory board, might consider using the software in an upcoming film.

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…)

Glitchy sends along a press release from Skype and IT/telecomms company Comverse Technology about Skype Klonies, the new avatar personalization feature available to Skype users. (Dial it up here.) Like Saul Klein, Skype’s VP of marketing, I’m sure this will be popular. “Recent surveys we conducted show that personalization capabilities are important to the Skype community,” Klein says in the release. What the release doesn’t say is that you have to pay for your Klonie (which didn’t stop me, of course; it was only about $1.25, but for some reason I got charged in euros).

Strangely, my new Skype Klonie has got me thinking about whether VoIP has much of a future as a standalone service. Read on. (more…)