3pointD.com

Well, here we are. As I blogged earlier, you can now point Second Life’s in-world Mozilla browser at virtually any Web page you like. So I’m blogging this from within SL as an experiment. The browser is very kludgy, to be sure. Resize the window or click outside it and things seem to break down. Still, there’s great promise here. Big fun coming.

A couple of new pieces of Second Life-related Web functionality (or is that Web-related SL functionality?) caught my eye this morning. The first is a service called httpdb, which provides users with free, persistent out-of-world data storage (up to 250kb per user) that can be accessed by scripts within SL using the new llHTTPRequest function. [Via VTOR.] Data storage within SL is almost totally lacking; data can be stored dynamically in variables or statically in notecards, but both forms are quite unstable. httpdb attempts to solve the problem, at least for small data loads, and looks quite easy to use. A similar service is available from SL resident Carl Omlet.

The second has been kicking around the SL forums for about a week now, but has found a nice easy-to-use form courtesy of SL resident Velox Severine, described at resident Chandra Page’s site. [Also via VTOR.] This one lets you point the new in-world Mozilla browser at pretty much any page on the Web, rather than simply having access to the Linden Lab help page that’s provided as the only native option. (more…)

Those who experienced The Sims Online know how appealing it was for TSO residents to post their real-life details and photos on the Real Sims Online site. Now there’s a similar service for Second Life, in the form of a site called SLProfiles.com, where residents can match their photos of their avatars to photos of themselves in the real world. I’m not sure how long it’s been around, but it’s only got a couple of dozen members at the moment, so it can’t have launched all that long ago. Looks like May 27 was the launch date, actually, according to this forum posting from SL resident Yo Brewster, who put the site together. The site is similar to SLme, although that site is part of the larger Me.com network, and not specifically dedicated to Second Life. Still, despite its noisy interface, SLme, which has been around longer, seems to have more members. (more…)

The video bloggers gathering under the banner of Vloggercon (pronounciation up to you) will also have a presence in the virtual world of Second Life when the meet-up goes off on June 10-11 in San Francisco, according to SL video blogger Tao Takashi, who has also posted a nice video showing off the SL location for the event, the handsome Hipcast conference center in the Shalida sim, which is a project of resident Spin Martin (aka blogger and podcaster Eric Rice). Since the Vloggercon itself is sold out, this should be a nice way for people to attend in parallel and also see some of the videos being shown at the event.

Autodesk is holding a series of free geospatial Webcasts covering things like Autodesk Map 3D and integrating Autodesk products with Google Earth. The first one goes off next Thursday, June 15, with two more coming more or less monthly after that. Perhaps a good resource for mapdevs? You tell us. [via GISuser]

Alvis Birgis at the Second Life Future Salon has an interesting post on whether virtual worlds and related metaversal technologies will help catalyze broad change in the world. Hyperbole or considered foresight? You decide.

GovExec has an interesting story [via AllPointsBlog] about the political wrangling over a US Geological Survey mapping facility in Missouri. It seems the USGS wants to close an office there, but the state’s lawmakers want to hang onto the jobs it produces — even though it works on technology the USGS feels is outmoded. (more…)

SLBoutique is a Web site where residents of the virtual world of Second Life can sell the things they’ve created in the world. It accounts for a large portion of many SL vendors’ sales, and is quite popular (along with sites like SLExchange) among SL shoppers — mostly because it’s difficult to impossible to advertise products in an organized manner through the in-world interface. But even SLBoutique (which is owned by the Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog) has its limitations. That seems about to change slightly, however, with the news that vendors can now add tags to their products on SLBoutique, much as you’d tag a photo on Flickr. I don’t think shoppers can search on those tags yet, but that’s apparently forthcoming in a future version of the site. It’s nice to see services like this get more and more Web-friendly, and it seems Linden Lab is also getting the idea that SL will have to move toward a closer integration with the Web, something that’s happening already with the back-end move to a Web services architecture and indications that more such capabilties will be added in future.

Via a press release datelined “Framingham, Massachusetts and Uvvy Island, Second Life” comes news from VoIP company Vivox about a transhumanist seminar to be held in the virtual world of Second Life tomorrow, June 7, at 11am SL time. The seminar, sponsored by FutureTAG, will feature James Hughes, Giulio Prisco, and Philippe Van Nedervelde. Fascinating ideas about the future of humans are sure to be kicked around, but one thing that’s notable is that they’ll be kicked around in voice. Vivox has a nice application, which I’ve seen demoed, that runs behind SL (or another MMO) and does more than just connect people in chat rooms a la Skype or TeamSpeak. (more…)

From Fresh Creations [via the MAKE: Blog] comes a 3D instruction manual for assembling Ikea furniture (or at least, a demonstration of the concept of such a manual). It isn’t really clear from the site just how the demo was put together, but what is clear is that it’s definitely a great (potential?) use of 3pointD.

Second Life machinimist Pierce Portocarrero has posted the latest in a string of cute, short videos that collectively provide a fun and interesting look at life in Second Life. Today: Pierce goes gambling. Definitely worth your 1 minute, 19 seconds.

I want to make some kind of joke here that starts with “a guy walks through a Croquet portal with a duck on his head” but I can’t quite figure out what it is. Instead, I’ll just link to Qwaq, which is nothing more than a mission statement at the moment, but an intriguing one at that. Qwaq’s mission? “To enable a rich ecosystem of interlinked Croquet spaces, that is as easy to navigate and extend as today’s web.” So Croquet (which we’ve blogged about several times recently) has its first Web-based network hub — or it will have, as soon as Qwaq flaps its wings. Will users then put portals from each of their spaces to the next? And why not write a Qwaq plug-in so that you can browse the network from within Croquet? Croquet so open-source that you can edit the application’s code from within the application and see the effects on the fly, which is kind of mind-blowing, so a Qwaq plug-in shouldn’t be that hard. We’ll bring you more updates as we get them. Is anyone actually using Croquet now that the SDK is out in beta? We’d love to hear from you. [Via the Daily Graze.]

VRoot flags an interesting story in The Economist, in which new Autodesk CEO Carl Bass pushes his own version of virtual reality. “It will be the ability ‘to experience’ a thing before it is built, says Mr Bass.” And in all five senses. Interesting to learn that Bass is a veteran crafter and builder (and Maker?). The article is a good look at the kind of thinking that may well lead to the 3pointD tools of the future.

Stefan at Ogle Earth notices that an intriguing “launch” event (right after lunch) is scheduled into the Google Geo Developers Day next week (June 12). “1:00 - 2:30 Launch: We’ve got a few things up our sleeve, and you’ll be the first to see.” Very interesting. We look forward to news and insights.

Registration for the Second Life Community Convention, to be held August 18-20 in San Francisco, is now open at the SLCC site. The three-day event, which is still in the planning stages, will bring together several hundred Second Life residents, as well as representatives from Linden Lab. Virtual world marketing and services company Rivers Run Red will make a presentation, and if last year’s SLCC was any indication, an outstanding time will be had by all. (more…)

An unusual soccer ball from Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane

Stefan Geens, who writes one of the two blogs in the “top two” folder of my feedreader, has a really cool post today about whether virtual worlds and other 3D online spaces really need to mimic the topology and geography of Earth, as they do now. His answer: No, they don’t. (more…)

The San Jose Museum of Art will put a private island from the virtual world of Second Life on display in August, and submissions for artworks to fill the virtual space are currently being sought. The display will coincide with the ZeroOne festival of “art on the edge” and the 13th annual International Symposium of Electronic Arts, being held August 7-13 in San Jose. (more…)

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

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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.