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Podcaster extraordinaire Johnny Ming has just posted the two most recent episodes of our weekly Second Life podcast, SecondCast.

Episode 27 features SL resident Oz Spade, who recently returned from the Second Life Views event, in which Linden Lab flew eighty of the virtual world’s residents to San Francisco to gather their views on the direction of the place. (Official coverage of the initiative itself can be found on Robin Linden’s blog at the following links: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].)

I missed the session for Episode 28, and I’ve yet to give it a listen, but it sounds like a return to SecondCast’s free-wheeling form. Johnny Ming and the crew interview Cory Edo of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), discuss Cristiano Midnight’s ban from Second Life, and recap the SL Relay for Life last weekend that raised over $40,000. I’ve been told to stay with Episode 28 to the end for a nice (or not-so-nice, depending on your musical taste) surprise.

The upcoming Siggraph conference, which starts Sunday, will see demonstrations of a boatload of interesting new technologies, among them a fingertip digitizer developed by researchers at the University of Buffalo’s Virtual Reality Laboratory (which has a bunch of other cool projects going, to boot).

A small thimble-shaped device worn on the tip of a finger, the digitizer is interesting as an input device. Imagine dragging your finger across the surface of a solid object and having it gradually take shape on your screen, complete with surface texture. While devices exist to do such things already, a fingertip is arguably a more intuitive and responsive device than any stylus or other peripheral. The UB lab has also developed cool stuff like a touch-based CAD device. Toss ‘em all in the pot and you could very well have a powerful interface that closes the gap between personal intention and what a computer understands. [Via What’s Next Network.]

Building on the recent wave of promotional events in the virtual world of Second Life, independent film studio Lionsgate is releasing the first ten minutes of its animated Ultimate Avengers 2 feature film not in SL but via the isometric, teen-calibrated world of Habbo Hotel. “This event marks the first time the online community will be able to view 10 full minutes of a never-before-seen film prior to its release,” according to a press release on the Marvel.com Web site. The little Habbo sprites were even asked to dress up in black tie for the event! (more…)

Well, read about it, anyway. Dibbell, a journalist, Terra Nova contributor and author of the new book Play Money, Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, comes to the virtual world of Second Life today — not once, but twice — to promote his new publication (which is sitting on my desk at the moment, but which I’ve barely had time to crack yet). Check him out for a book signing and “informal chat” at noon SL time, and a live interview with New World Notes’s Hamlet Au at 6pm, followed by audience Q&A and more signing. (more…)

Go now and read this piece in Gamasutra to see how one the UK’s (or anywhere’s) best games journalists, Jim Rossignol, envisions gaming (and more) circa the year 3006. A taste:

Neuroscience has long been aware that the brain is little more than a pattern completion engine, so like all 31st century denizens I carry a personalised ludic pattern box, a handy device which produces generative gameworks——patterns that are suitable for my brain to complete on a subconscious level. I play the games without conscious reasoning——a vital exercise for the more strenuous activities I will later undertake. This kind of exercise is an aspect of ubiquitous gaming that goes unnoticed in 3006.

Actually, that hardly gives you the idea of the piece, which ranges across everything from singularity to some very post-3pointD ideas. But like I said at the beginning of this post, go. Now.

Ted Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and perhaps the person who’s done most to advance the study of MMOs as an academic discipline, has launched a new Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University.

The Synthetic Worlds Initiative is a research center at Indiana University whose aim is to promote innovative thinking on synthetic worlds. . . . Our goal is to learn about this technology and deploy it for research and education. The Initiative holds a bi-annual series of conferences, the Ludium, and is building Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, a massive synthetic world.

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I just had the chance to chat a bit with SL residents Dalian Hansen and Hunter Glass, the driving forces behind the SL Business Magazine I blogged about just now. It sounds like the pair have their hands full, but they also sound like capable hands.

Hunter, an American defense contractor based in Afghanistan, is acting as publisher for the venture, while Dalian, a creative director and photographer based in Manchuria, China, is the brains behind the scenes. The pair have hired Chloe Stanwell as director of ad sales, Faiyth Newell as Managing Editor and Charisma Toricellli as copy editor. While they declined to name early contributors, the first issue will weigh in at a whopping 30 pages or more, according to Dalian. Layout for the first issue is still being worked out. (more…)

While browsing the Second Life Podcast blog I found this link to the upcoming SL Business magazine, due to launch in-world and as a PDF on August 1. According to the mag’s media kit on SLExchange, it’s quite an ambitious undertaking. The media kit was posted by resident Dalian Hansen, but no staff is named in it, so I’m not yet clear on who’s behind the undertaking. Second Life could really use a good business publication, in my opinion, but it remains to be seen if this is it. (more…)

The Second Life Relay For Life that was held over the weekend, organized by SL resident Jade Lily working with Randy Mars of the American Cancer Society, was apparently a smashing success. From what I hear, it had raised more than $10,000 before it even started. I wouldn’t be surprised if it raised a total of $50,000 or more, considering that a virtual car at auction took in $2,000, and Electric Sheep Jerry Paffendorf cites a figure of $30,000 from Saturday. For my part, I offered a profile in the Second Life Herald to the highest bidder. That coveted prize went to SL resident Chance Takashi for L$11,525 — just under US$40. I love that a profile in a virtual tabloid is worth $40 to someone. One interesting result of the whole event, though, is that it has more people thinking about how SL could be used effectively for other similar causes. (more…)

During my brief stay at the University of California at Berkeley, one of my favorite classes was an introduction to the history of science. (Favorite in theory; I’m not sure how many sessions I actually showed up for.) Since then, I’ve always enjoyed reading science and technology histories, stuff like What the Dormouse Said, for instance (which made it even cooler to get to talk with Doug Engelbart). Now there’s a new history of GIS (geographical information science) out from the publishing arm of the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., a private-sector GIS research firm. The book is called Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS, and tells of a convergence of cartographers, artists and computer scientists at Harvard in the 1960s that eventually led to GIS as the science we know today. Sounds like good reading. And it comes in a nice multimedia package, as well. More information from ESRI. [Via press release, quoted below.] (more…)

Why put a pin in the map when you can just put a pin in the place itself. From the AP:

You know how some people mark a spot on a map with a push pin? That’s the idea behind a proposed sculpture in Davenport, Iowa. Officials want to mark the spot where two bike trails coverage with a 25-foot-tall push pin. But not everyone wants a giant push pin along the Mississippi River. Kelli Grubbs, a member of the city’s Levee Improvement Commission, calls it hideous. Mayor Ed Windborn wants the commission to give it serious consideration. He calls it a fun design.

Go, Ed! [Via All Points Blog.]

The All Points Blog flags this InformationWeek article about the wireless crisis alert system that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is building. As All Points points out, one of the technologies under consideration is especially interesting because it doesn’t need to track users’ locations to tell whether they should receive a message. Instead, an application on the device simply filters out messages that don’t apply. (more…)

Glitchy linked a story yesterday that seems to have slipped past most of the metaversal bloggers (including me — although not Steven Davis at PlayNoEvil, who it was a pleasure to meet at E3): Chinese users can now make purchases in the sprite-filled isometric virtual world of Habbo Hotel that are delivered to them both as virtual items and as real ones. “Through the service, users can purchase items such as flowers, clothes and movie tickets online in the virtual community and the physical items will be delivered to their homes the next day,” according to the Pacific Epoch news site. (more…)

After I blogged the location-tracker hacked up for use in Second Life by Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka the other day, Cory sent along a link to a similar service, SLStats [Cory also blogged it, I now see], that was started recently by SL resident Mark Barrett. I’ve also been meaning to look into the new blogHUD built by SL resident Koz Farina, which is currently in alpha. The cool thing about that is that it can be used as a kind of location-tracking device as well. (more…)

My partner in podcasting, John Swords, has posted one of the last interviews we did at the Metaverse Roadmap summit back in May. This one is with Sibley Verbeck, CEO of the Electric Sheep Company (who sponsor this blog). Take a listen and hear for yourself what it’s like when you put your money where your metaverse is. (And as always, you can listen in the sidebar here if you don’t want to navigate over to the Sessions site.)

If you’re going to be in London in September, you might want to drop in on the Association for Geographic Information’s AGI 2006 conference, being held September 12 - 14. The AGI includes not only geospatial industry members, but researchers, academics and simply interested individuals, as well, and its annual event will include speakers from Google, Microsoft and others who’ve been poking around in the field. The conference will include cool-sounding panels on the state of geospatial services in 2010 (”geospatial semantic grid” and “invisible GIS”) and “Geography: Revolution or Evolution?”, and will include two open debate sessions that the public will be able to participate in. If they can afford the 500-600 pound registration fee, that is.

Apologies to anyone who had trouble accessing 3pointD yesterday. Our hosting service, which I am from now on referring to as NightmareHost, was down almost all day yesterday, at least on the servers I’m using. It was also down much of Tuesday — all of which adds up to a situation that has me pretty steamed, and considering switching over to something like godaddy or bluehost. But switching hosts would be an enormous PITA, and I’m not convinced any other service will be more reliable than the one I already have. Grrr… Insights welcome.

we make money not art is running an interview with Wagner James Au today, who in the virtual world of Second Life is known as Hamlet Au, and who for three years was Hamlet Linden, contracted by Linden Lab as an “embedded journalist” in Second Life. Au now covers SL independently at New World Notes. The interview skews slightly in the direction of computer games, but that’s the interviewer’s bias, not that of James, who has a better grasp of how important reporting on virtual worlds is and will become. As James puts it, “virtual reporting will become an integral part of real world reporting in the next decade.” Couldn’t agree more. We ran our own interview with James at the Second Life Herald back in February on the eve of his leaving Linden Lab’s employ.

There’s another cool touchscreen interface on the move, this one coming out of Microsoft, though it’s just been licensed to EON Reality, who do the Raptor plug-in for 3dsMax. The interface is known as TouchLight, and is essentially a rear-projected vertical screen that takes gestural input, much like a number of interfaces I’ve blogged about before. I’m not sure if this is the same screen Robert Scoble told us about when he was on the Metaverse Sessions a few weeks ago, but it looks pretty good in this video. Actually, what’s suprising to me here is how quickly I start to take this stuff for granted. It’s not even on the market yet and already I’m watching this video going, “Oh yeah, there’s a ton of stuff like that out there.” Well, it’s not, really. But it will be soon. [Via press release.]

The Acceleration Studies Foundation is wrapping up its work on a first version of the Metaverse Roadmap, a document designed to look ahead at the next 10 years of the metaverse, and to be updated along the way. (I participated in the meetings that gathered thoughts for the Roadmap back in May.) To celebrate, the ASF is holding a pre-release party at EyeBeam in New York City on Thursday, August 10. The party is free and open to all, but space is limited, so RSVP on Jerry Paffendorf’s Sheep blog to reserve your ticket. (more…)

Cory Linden, aka Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, has sent along what looks like a nice SL-del.icio.us mashup that works as a kind of SL-centric “GPS” location-tracker and has the potential to become a piece of social networking software for SL as well. The slice of Linden Scripting Language code (aka LSL, pasted after the jump) goes in an attachment worn on your avatar, and periodically posts your location to del.icio.us under the “SLurlTrack” tag. If you want to monitor someone’s movements or track your own, just subscribe to the del.icio.us feed for the right user and the SLurlTrack tag. While Cory’s codeslice is a bit crude at the moment (codeslice? did I just coin that?), it contains the fundamental seeds of some interesting possibilities, and could easily be reworked to do some powerful stuff. (more…)

The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences is once again holding its annual Machinima Festival and Machinima Awards (known as “the Mackies”), on November 4-5 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. In recent years the festival has had a bit of trouble finding a home, so it’s great to know that the recent rise in interest in films made within 3D online worlds has given machinima enough cachet to once again land at the very cool Museum of the Moving Image. “Throughout each day, attendees will be able to view Machinima works, interact with Machinima demos, as well as speak with the artists themselves,” according to the announcment. The Academy will begin accepting entries on July 24th, so get in your favorite game and start shooting. And check out what’s probably the best collection of Machinima on the Web at the Academy’s sister site, Machinima.com. [Via Clickable Culture.]

Second Life resident Quirky McArdle, who in real life is executive producer of The Infinite Mind, a popular public radio show on health and science, sends along news that the show will soon open a virtual headquarters and broadcast facility in Second Life, where its episodes will be broadcast, including live guest appearances. Launching August 3, a series of live tapings are scheduled to be broadcast in-world, hosted by John Hockenberry, including a visit from Suzanne Vega, who will be the first major recording artist to perform live in SL avatar form, according to the press release; an interview with novelist Kurt Vonnegut (who is notoriously interview-shy); and a chat with cool futurist Howard Rheingold. The interviews will be broadcast nationally starting August 9 in a two-part series on virtual communities. (more…)

Henrik Linden at the Second Life Creativity blog has an interesting call out for former residents of Second Life, for his project studying creativity in Linden Lab’s virtual world.

To help me see a fuller picture I would really like to get in contact with former residents. It is no big secret that a substantial number of people come to Second Life and after spending relatively time there; they leave and often never return. If this sounds like you or you know someone that did this then I would love to hear from you. See About for some contact info or leave a comment.

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The Second Life Insider, a new blog from AOL’s Weblogs Inc., reports on the recent auction of a Second Life automobile that fetched US$2,000 for charity. (Also on Chris Carella’s Electric Sheep blog.) The auction was part of the fund-raising effort that’s on at the moment for the American Cancer Society’s second annual Second Life Relay for Life. Over at SecondCast, we interviewed the event’s organizers last week, and podcaster extraordinaire John Swords just posted the episode last night (which you can also listen to in the sidebar here). But $2,000 for a virtual car? Evidence of nothing more than that virtual worlds can be quite effective places to do charity work. The Relay event is this weekend, July 22-23, so log into SL now and get your virtual running shoes on. (more…)

Thank god I opened my feedreader this morning, or I’d never have known about the Battleship: Google Earth mashup that’s being created by Julian Bleecker at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. (Actually, thank Ogle Earth.) Bleecker is hacking together a system whereby one player plunks down a huge battleship in Google Earth (just like in the old Milton Bradley game), and the other tries to bomb it — only to do this you have to visit a real location with your GPS-enabled phone, dial in to the game engine, and say “drop.” The game puts a big red peg at your location — which is hopefully close enough to sink your opponent’s battleship. (more…)

Lego Mindstorms is the cool line of Lego robotics components that let you build little interactive thingets from the ace line of interlocking blocks. The Lego Mindstorms NXT line, which does even more, will be available next month, but you can get a sneak preview of the virtual version in Second Life, as part of an SL event being held on July 20th, where residents will get to show off their creations. Get a set of SL Legos just for joining the “Big Robot on Campus” group in Second Life, then build away. I’m going to check this out this weekend, but I don’t see how it won’t be extra cool. My question: Will Lego Mindstorms NXT kits be available for purchase on an ongoing basis once the event is over? Here’s hoping. (P.S. The Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog, seems to be involved in this project somehow, but I’m just running out to go see mom, so I’ll have to update you on the specifics of that in a follow-up post.)

There’s a new feature on 3pointD as of this morning: I’m now grabbing a feed of the latest SlurlMarkers in the right sidebar, just below the SlurlPane. What’s a SLurlMarker? It’s basically a link to a Second Life location that’s stored in del.icio.us after having been created from within SL using the cool SLurlMarker HUD created by SL scripters Cienna Rand, Epitaxial Playfair and Arito Cotton. You can search del.icio.us for the “SLurlMarker” tag to see all the SLurlMarkers that have been made already. I’m only grabbing the last two SLurlMarkers that have been posted at the moment, though I’ll probably expand that to 4-6 after I re-arrange some elements here on the site. (I almost need a separate 3pointD resources page, don’t I?) So this is my bid to get more people making SLurlMarkers. You can pick up the HUD in the Taco sim, I think. It’s a really cool way to let people know about interesting things you trip over in SL, but I don’t get the impression that all that many people are taking advantage of it. So check out the latest SLurlMarkers in the sidebar, grab a HUD, and get to marking. Markering. Whatever.

This is a cool idea: SL resident Spin Martin (aka media-maker Eric Rice) is starting a Second Life travel agency, tpTravel, and is seeking people to contribute content to its blog, for which they’ll be paid US$10 per (approved) post. VTOR linked the news, which came from the SLProfiles site.

We’ve created a new company called tpTravel, and it’s exactly what it sounds like… a travel agency within Second Life for Second Life, headquartered on the sim of Slackstreet. We are looking for well traveled residents to take snapshots, write descriptive posts, and create landmarks, SLurls, and machinima tours for posting on the blog that supports tpTravel.

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USC’s Annenberg School for Communication — home of the Annenberg Studies on Computer Games team and the Center for Public Diplomacy (which we’ve blogged about before), as well as many other innovative programs — is “seeking to hire one or two scholars whose research illuminates the formation, functioning and impact of online communities.” More information after the jump. (more…)

Second Life resident Torley Linden (formerly Torley Torgeson, until she became an employee of Linden Lab) has a post on her blog yesterday about how to stop notecard spam — i.e., the repeated delivery of notecards to your avatar from an automated object — in Second Life. While Torley notes that the problem is occasionally unintentional, it raises an interesting point. Podcaster extraordinaire John Swords (producer of SecondCast and the Metaverse Sessions) has a theory that no software platform can be called truly successful until people start writing security apps like spamblockers for it. The thing is, though, that SL’s in-world communication tools are fairly crude, so building a spamblocker may not even be possible. And we’ve yet to grapple with the problems and solutions that will arise as more and more SL functionality becomes Web-based. By John’s measure, though, notecard spam may be a good sign. Does Torley’s post mark the beginning of SL’s maturity?

I generally abhor posting about my own traffic stats (this will be the first time I have), but I’ve been waiting so long for this one that it seems worth a bit of hubris. (Actually, I’ve only been waiting three and a half months.) Seems 3pointD.com has finally broken into the top 10,000 blogs on Technorati. It’s at 9,254 right now, to be precise. Of course, I have little idea what this means in the grander scheme of things, but it’s personally pretty gratifying, and is actually really nice to think that so many people are interested in the emerging 3pointD space. That in itself is an interesting business indicator. (more…)