3pointD.com

Trendspotting astrologer Philip Brown has the zodiacal explanation for the ongoing explosion of interest in virtual worlds: a Uranus-Neptune mutual reception that’s having noticeable effects on pretty much everyone under the sun:

The Uranus-Neptune mutual reception creates a longing for a Utopia and, since the everyday real world sorely lacks such perfection, the online world is becoming the closest thing some people have to a Utopian community.

Brown goes on to give Habbo Hotel and Neopets as examples, and mentions that he talks about avatars in his forthcoming book. Be warned, though: the current mutual reception lasts only until 2011. Let’s hope the virtual world is firmly established by then. To that end: someone get this guy into Second Life. I want my avatar’s chart read.

VRoot has the news that the Royal Academy was offering 3D tours of a virtual Mars at its annual Summer Science Exhibition, which has just ended. Cool. The article VRoot links doesn’t say what the technology behind the tours was, but if you drill down into the Royal Society site, you find its Rough Guide to Mars page and Life on Mars project, including a link to Google Mars, which is, of course, very cool. And on the about page of that app, the interesting question, “Can I see the Mars data using the Google Earth client?” And the even more interesting answer, “Not yet, but we’re working on it.”

German Flash programmer and Web designer Alex Frank has created a really intriguing Web interface which, while not entirely new and not entirely 3pointD, is definitely worthy of note here as a technique that could be of use in future 3pointD applications. Frank’s site (which was flagged to me by a reader at the Kesser Technical Group) was a final project for a diploma in communication design at the University of Essen-Duisburg in Germany, and is called DONTCLICK.IT — and that’s exactly what you do there: not click. The entire site (once you get beyond a brief introduction) is navigated by mousing over site elements in different ways. While this is essentially what Flash is used for already, Frank has taken it to greater lengths than most sites do, so that DONTCLICK.IT becomes a neat experiment in interface design and site navigation. Worth checking out.