3pointD.com

Second Life resident Tao Takashi has posted some nice screenshots on his blog of a replica of the London Eye that’s being built in Second Life by resident Timeless Prototype for the American Cancer Society’s Second Life Relay for Life fundraiser, scheduled for July 22-23. (There’s a video too.) Last year’s relay did really well and was a great time, to boot, and this year’s event is planned to be even larger. I’ve been on the real London Eye, and it’s a nice way to see the town from on high (very high). Should be a nice way to see SL as well, though processing power will prevent any but the most uber computers from really taking advantage of long draw distances. (What’s also cool about this image is that I discovered it while checking in with the 3pointD group on Flickr, which I started a while back and which is open for anyone to contribute to. Keep ‘em coming!) We’ll be interviewing the people in charge of organizing the SLRFL event on an upcoming episode of SecondCast, as well, so stay tuned for that. [Whoops, I unfortunately posted a draft of this post instead of the final version that was in my Word doc. Sorry for the amendment.]

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.

There’s a nice post up on eightbar about Adam Greenfield’s new book, Everyware, which I’m hoping to crack soon, and some of the things they’re working on over at IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the UK, from which eightbar (as well as a virtual Wimbledon) emerges.

Adam’s vision of Everyware is one of almost effortless and unknowing interactions with our surroundings, surroundings that are actually networked devices receiving and broadcasting information, which is collated, distributed and presented to users (I prefer participants) in intuitive, helpful and appropriate ways. . . . The theme struck a chord with me simply for the fact that we use a lot of these technologies here in the Emerging Tech group in Hursley (well we are emerging tech after all) . Motes, Zigbee enabled devices, RFID and other funky Gizmos can usually be found spilling out from under Dave Conway-Jones office door.

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I got a closer look yesterday at the virtual baseball stadium being built for MLB.com by the Electric Sheep Company in Second Life. The park itself, still in the final stages of construction, consists of a pretty cute diamond, scaled down to SL dimensions, surrounded by a lag-friendly number of seats in the stands. Hank Hoodoo of the Sheep also answered a couple of questions I’d had about the project. (more…)

The Rochester Institute of Technology, which has had a game design concentration for undergraduates for some time now, has just had a Masters Degree in Game Design and Development approved by the New York State Education Department, making it one of the first such programs in the U.S., and perhaps the first Masters program to focus on the computer game industry itself and on broadly integrated aspects of game design such as gameplay, balancing and the other ingredients that go into gamemaking, rather than only including more granular elements such as 3D asset design or more academic pursuits like the sociology of online games. (The Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University also offers a Masters, but its program is not as focused on game development specifically.)

Certification by the NYSED is a big step for RIT, which has been working on the approval for years, according to gamer and blogger Andy Phelps, who is the director of the program. Phelps described the process to me as “intense.” I can’t think of too many better people to run a program like this, given that Phelps is also the person who wrote one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read of emergent gameplay in massively multiplayer online games. I love Andy’s solid perspective as a player, which I imagine will do a lot for education in the field. (more…)

The SecondCast crew interviewed Linden Lab CEO and Second Life head honcho Philip Rosedale again the other day (which you can hear here). The interview covers a number of interesting topics, including Linden Lab’s friends in high places, the upcoming Second Life Community Convention, and the recent changes in SL registration policies. But before the taping, I met Philip on a new golf course that’s been built in Second Life, and was most impressed by what I saw. I made a return visit today to check things out more closely. The game turns out to be excellent fun. (more…)

The winner’s victory lap

I had the privilege of attending a starship race in the MMO EVE Online recently, and in return for the favor wrote a race report for the forum thread where races and announced and standings are tracked. That’s what’s so remarkable, to me, about this kind of phenomenon: the race I attended was the 11th race of a season that started at the beginning of the year, and which is being run with no input from the company behind the game at all. This is a completely emergent phenomenon, and it’s damn robust. It’s exciting, too, as I hope my race report conveys: (more…)

So far, this hasn’t been a very self-referential blog. That’s been a conscious choice and a natural decision, since it isn’t my first impulse to just bung the details of my personal life onto Teh IntarWeb. It’s been tempting, at times, but then I ask myself: How 3pointD is this really? And the answer is usually “Not very,” so I don’t see that changing much anytime soon. (Readers breathe collective sigh of relief.)

That said, this is a slightly self-referential post, but it has to do more with the content of the blog than with the content of my hours and days. Basically, I’m putting you all on notice that I plan to expand the scope of 3pointD.com slightly to occasionally take in a bit more of the cultural reportage on MMOs that used to appear on my now nearly defunct blog, Walkerings. (more…)

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.

Second Life resident Khamon Fate has an interesting post musing on the difference between owning property on Second Life’s main Grid, which is a contiguous land mass, and owning it on one of SL’s private island estates, which, while accessible to all, take marginally more work to locate, and provide the user with more tools. (One often stumbles across new locations on the Grid, while you rarely stumble across new locations on private islands because they’re not on any conceivable travel paths.)

Khamon compares the Grid to a LiveJournal community, and an island to a TypePad blog.

. . . migrating Fate Gardens from the mainland to an estate is similar to migrating a focused blog from randomish friends-based LiveJournal to a more independent location such as Typepad. Rather than relying on traffic from friends and their friends et al, a Typepader seriously blogs a subject and relies on links and shortcuts to garner traffic from people interested more in the subject than the blogger’s personal life. It’s similar to migrating away from a free hosting site to a paid facility where I have to do all the work, but can program the pages and scripts to organize and present material anyway I please without relying solely on provided tools and layouts.

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Sir Bruce Sterling Woodcock, who’s been studying subscriber numbers in massively multiplayer online games for years, has posted the latest update (the 21st!) to MMOGChart, where he graphs his data. New additions to the chart include Dungeons & Dragons Online and Auto Assault. EverQuest takes a tumble, and figures for Second Life, which Sir Bruce puts around 65,000, are sure to be as controversial as they have in the past.

Voice can be a contentious issue in virtual worlds. Many MMOs rely on it. It probably wouldn’t be possible to participate in the “end-game” in World of Warcraft and EVE Online without benefit of a VoIP app like TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. Using voice in Second Life is becoming more common, especially for making presentations. But many residents of virtual worlds shy away from it because they perceive it to be anonymity-breaking. A number of apps let you mask or change your voice in order to avoid this problem, the latest of which is linked from Gamasutra and is available for free from a company called Screaming Bee. Personally, I don’t need this kind of thing, since I don’t mind people hearing my voice. But do we think it will be popular among those who do?

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…)