3pointD.com

The Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) are excited today about announcing a new project: a virtual Home Run Derby in Second Life that’s being held in conjunction with Major League Baseball’s own Home Run Derby, on Monday, July 10, at 5pm SL time (8pm Eastern). In fact, the virtual derby will not be a separate contest, but will be “a real-time Second Life re-enactment” of the real thing, featuring avatars for each of the eight Derby players — Major Leaguers competing to see who can hit the most home runs over the course of two rounds. (more…)

Here’s some fascinating stuff that appeals to the twisted part of my mind that wants to systematize everything it comes into contact with (which is also probably why I’ve always enjoyed reading Donald Knuth, but that’s a subject for another post — or another blog altogether). Anyway, there’s an interesting article on the Directions magazine site about something called CityGML, an open-standard, XML-based “common information model for the representation of 3D urban objects” that’s being developed in conjunction with the Open Geospatial Consortium and ISO TC211, which is responsible for the ISO’s geographic information series of standards.

[CityGML] defines classes and relations for the most relevant topographic objects in cities and regional models with respect to their geometric, topological, semantic and appearance properties. “City” is broadly defined to include not just built structures, but also elevation, vegetation, water bodies, “sidewalk furniture” and more. Included are generalization hierarchies between thematic classes, aggregations, relationships between objects and spatial properties. These thematic information types go beyond graphic exchange formats and allow users to employ virtual 3D city models for sophisticated analysis tasks in different application domains such as simulation, urban data mining, facilities management, decision support and thematic inquiries.

In other words, if I’m understanding things correctly, CityGML attempts to describe a data set that can be used to answer questions like What’s the best place to set up a crisis management center during a disaster that’s centered on the downtown area? But on the way to that, the standard itself has to talk about things like What is a building? What is a park bench? What’s the relationship between the intersection of Sixth and Main and the firehouse two blocks away? Fascinating questions. But can they be answered by blocks of code? (more…)

You have to admire a guy who blithely posts a 50-minute videoblog interview. But when the interview subject is venture capitalist and hardcore World of Warcraft player Joi Ito, it’s not so far-fetched to think people might watch it. (Which I plan to do, once it finishes downloading.) In any case, here’s the link, from TypePad’s Loic Le Meur, which I spotted on Deckuf’s always delightful MMO blog. Hadn’t seen it before, though it was posted two weeks ago. Enjoy.