3pointD.com

• Flickr: Explore photos tagged with nyc on a Map
  flickr’d map of NYC
  (tags: flickr nyc yahoo)

I’ve played a bit of City of Heroes, but really not all that much, so I was interested to see the following tags attached to a friend’s COH screenshots on Flickr:

• City of Heroes
• coh
• cohtagged
• coh:x=-964
• coh:y=327
• coh:z=-662
• coh:zone=V_City_02_01

At first I was impressed that he had thought to tag his screens this way, but he informs me that the game embeds the information into the pics automatically. “When I upload them to Flickr, it just interprets them into tags,” he says. Interestingly, Second Life resident Lev Kamenev posted a similar idea to his blog the other day. All it needs now is someone to write a quick Flickr app to turn SL geotags into SLurls. (more…)

Trevor Smith, a former Xerox PARC researcher who’s busy creating Ogoglio, a project that explores “shared [3D] online worlds in the context of web enabled work,” has an interesting post about the concept of the back button in what he calls “3spaces.”

If you’ve been wandering around in a shared 3space for twenty minutes, what should happen when you press the back button? Should your POV shift back along the 3D path you’ve taken? What is the granularity of the history? Are its units ones of time, space, dwell time, or 3space landmark? Or, is it a continuous path? Is the beginning of the history at your entrance point to this 3space, or at the entrance to the first 3space in this browser session? Where is the balance between an understandable user concept of “back” and an engineer-able artifact of a back button and history?

(more…)

Take them for what you will, but press releases this week from two new gaming portals indicate to 3pointD that the momentum of games as a major entertainment medium continues, as does the migration of more and more gamers online. The services are Verizon’s PlayLinc, which lets gamers host their own FPS and other servers for free, and Ijji.com, a free single- and multi-player portal for more casual gamers from Korean game company NHN, which comes complete with a little customizable avatar to represent your online presence (though I couldn’t get the avatar creation screen to work on my Mac, for some reason — finally got it going in IE on my PC). (more…)