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Remember the blonde-haired male avatar you were dancing with at that goth club in Second Life a couple of weeks ago, the one with a recent rez date who seemed like he might still be getting his legs in SL? It just might have been Nick Rhodes, keyboardist and songwriter for the platinum-selling new wave band Duran Duran. I just got off the phone with Rhodes, talking to him about the futuristic utopia the band is now working on creating in Second Life, and I was pleasantly surprised to find he really does seem to “get it” where the virtual world is concerned, and is actually quite excited about the possibilities SL holds as a way to communicate and interact with fans.

To Rhodes, Second Life has as much potential to revolutionize the music and entertainment industry as MTV did when it first came on the scene. And that avatar at the goth club? Rhodes reports that he’s been exploring SL quite a bit lately: “I’ve not actually had a whole day to sit there and do it [but] I’ve been to some clubs and danced with a few goths, looked at what people have created so far. The detail is what really impressed more than anything. For example, we came from a long way out and flew into one beautiful garden, and we went so close in, macro close, that we went inside of a flower — and there was a bee in there, and it was collecting pollen. Now that’s my kind of place.” (more…)

I had a great time at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival, where I was on a panel on “the secret sex lives of computer games” and did a presentation about the Second Life Herald with Herald founder Peter Ludlow. (In fact, it was right after SXSW that I first posted some early thoughts about the 3pointD world on my old blog, and this one was launched two weeks later.) I very much want to make it back next year, preferably running a couple of panels of my own this time. The organizers are in the process of selecting panels and panelists, and what’s nice is that they’re letting the community have a say this year in a kind of Hot Panel or Not competition. You can dial over to the 2007 SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal Picker to vote for the 10 panel ideas you find most interesting. I’ve proposed two, which you can find if you go to the “gaming / virtual worlds” section of the pull-down menu there and just look down the list for “Mark Wallace.” They’re described after the jump, but here on the front page I’d just like to make my plea that you vote early and often — if you like the ideas, that is. Voting deadline is September 8. (more…)

Second Life’s teen grid

I was browsing Cristiano Midnight’s Second Life snapshot site SnapZilla last night while we were recording SecondCast and came across the picture above, which is a screen grab of SL’s in-world user interface showing the map of the known Grid — only in this case it’s the Teen Grid, where users age 12-17 must start out before graduating to the 18-and-over Main Grid of SL proper. (If you’re under 12, you’re out of luck.) I post it here simply as an interesting insight into life on the Teen Grid, which doesn’t produce a lot of news, for various reasons (including issues of privacy). In fact, we’ve interviewed a teen Grid resident before on SecondCast, which made for an interesting show. Despite the fact that the size and population of the Teen Grid is much smaller (exact figures aren’t available from Linden Lab), the teens get up to much the same things the adults do. Although Barry Joseph of Global Kids, one of the few adults with access to a portion of the Teen Grid, has great insights into how life in the sister worlds differs in this episode of SecondCast.

For comparison, a shot of the map of the Main Grid after the jump. (more…)

3pointD has been missing London lately. So it was with no small amount of joy that we discovered that London is one of the cities featured in the especially cool Goggles: The Google Maps Flight Sim, created by London-based Flash developer Mark Caswell-Daniels (and linked in Glitchy links the other day). Goggles lets you fly a cute little cartoon plane around a Flash-based world built from Google Maps data. It looks better than the screen grab above, which is a bit juddery because it’s grabbing as the picture’s moving, but above all it’s a fun way to tour a bunch of the world’s great cities (and two more far-flung locations as well). You can speed up and slow down, bank, climb and dive (with a cute little explosion when you crash) and even fire little bubble shots from your forward-mounted bubble-gun. A massively multiplayer version of this would be outstanding. But read on for some slightly deeper thoughts on mapping technologies. (more…)