3pointD.com

The BBC has an interesting story on urban design work being done in virtual 3D models created by France’s Center for Building Technology. Especially in the areas of light and sound, the Center has apparently created 3D virtual mockups that mimic the properties of the real materials at a number of locations (including seafront towns and the bridges of Paris) so that designers can see in advance the effects that changes will have on the urban environment. “Each place has had detailed studies of the materials from which they are made and the computer-generated model reveals how various surfaces react to different light.” This sounds like high-powered technology that won’t be available to multi-user virtual worlds for some time, but it’s a nice demonstration of how 3pointD technology can be applied to the real world. And along similar lines, Glitchy links to a new book by Michael Batty, Professor of Spatial Analysis and Planning and Director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, titled Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals. That sounds fascinating.

The X3D community blog has link to the PlanetQuest app built by the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, flagging it as a “brilliant” example of the power of the X3D open-standards 3D Web format. I’m still not convinced — though I’m still open to persuasion. The app shows off the Milky Way galaxy from various angles and is nice looking on the first go-round, but it was also totally browser-breaking, for me, and I didn’t feel like I was looking at anything terribly new. Why not build something with the same functionality in a virtual world browser along the lines of Multiverse? At least make it so the music stops playing when I close the app and the Web page. I suspect I’m running into some technical difficulties here, but I’d still like to see more. For now, I’m sticking with Celestia.

A new report from Trendwatching.com on branding in virtual worlds has been getting some notice on various blogs lately. While the article doesn’t break terribly new ground, it rounds things up fairly nicely, and probably reaches an audience that hadn’t heard much about this stuff before. (more…)

As some readers of this blog know, I am also the editor of the Second Life Herald, an online newspaper covering events in the virtual world of Second Life. The paper was originally founded back in October 2003 as the Alphaville Herald (on the Alphaville server of The Sims Online) by University of Michigan philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, who soon found himself on the front page of The New York Times. (Peter and I recently co-wrote a book about his adventures in TSO and our continuing work on the Herald in Second Life, which should be out next spring.)

Peter always maintained (and I share this view) that though it was reporting an life in an online game, the Herald was covering issues that would be more and more important to everyone’s real lives as online and offline life became more and more integrated. A couple of recent stories have made this point quite eloquently, the latest being another case of bullying via MySpace. The Herald, it seems, was as spot on as we like to think it was. (more…)

Well, John Swords and I warned them when we interviewed the pair for our Metaverse Sessions podcast, but former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble and his son have finally been banned from Second Life. Young Patrick Scoble is only 12, not even quite old enough for the Teen Grid, but Robert lets him use his main Grid account anyway. The mistake was to do so as part of a presentation at a conference. Linden Lab’s reaction was perfectly in keeping with their Terms of Service. But do the Terms of Service make sense? (more…)