3pointD.com

The colorfully redesigned we make money not art links to an interesting experiment that was conducted recently at the International Symposium of Electronic Arts in San Jose. SIMVeillance brings passers-by on the plaza in front of the San Jose Museum of Art, where the festival was held, into the 3D virtual environment of The Sims 2 video game. (more…)

Tony Walsh over at Clickable Culture flags a post on the new official blog of Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, that talks about the way LL reports the number of SL “residents,” i.e., people who are members of the service. This number has generated no small amount of contention in the past, and it turns out that much of the criticism has been well placed. “The number that is currently on our home page is a time-weighted average between “total number of signups ever” and “total number of logged in users over the last 60 days”,” writes LL employee Sally Linden. The problem has been that LL failed until now to indicate how the number was calculated anywhere on their Web site or within their world. Fortunately, the two numbers are being unwound. Starting sometime this week, LL plans to publish them separately on their Web site. As of last Friday, total signups ever stood at 493,563, and total log-ins over the last 60 days stood at 225,028. (I’m assuming this latter number is for unique log-ins, though Sally doesn’t make that clear.) (more…)

Graphic novelist Warren Ellis (author of, among many, many others, the very cool Fell, for those who haven’t seen it before, which is illustrated by the outstanding Ben Templesmith and pictured above) has finally knuckled under to temptation and set up shop in the virtual world of Second Life. “After six or seven months of just peering at it occasionally (and finding out where the good music is streamed into SL), I’ve decided to make a little side project out of moving around SL and looking for the seeds of the future, if any, in it,” he writes over at his blog. Drop in over at Rogal (174, 120, 124) [<–SL link] and convince him to write an SL-centric book. We can’t wait.

After 3pointD quotes Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes as saying he would soon enter the virtual world of Second Life under his own name, reader Ordinal Malaprop commented that “There’s already a resident called Nick Rhodes, though. (There’s already a whole sim called Nick Rhodes too.) I wonder how that’s going to play out?” We hear that Linden Lab is now contemplating new naming schemes for residents (not as a result of Nick’s presence, to be sure), but the issue raises a host of interesting questions. (more…)