3pointD.com

• Why Johnny can’t code | Salon Technology
  “BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched — but today there’s no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.”
  (tags: education programming tech)

After chatting with Hal9k Andalso of the Fabjectory 3D printing service, we met up in Second Life and Hal snapped some shots of my avatar to prep for a 3D printing session. What this really means is that I stood on a pose stand while he ripped OpenGL and texture data out of the Second Life client using OGLE (Eyebeam’s OpenGL Extractor). Hal sent along some cool shots of the avatar model outside SL, in some 3D modeling software that’s being used to clearn stuff up before the actual printing commences. (Click the image above for a larger version on Flickr.) “This is a bit of an experiment of us as we’ve never even attempted Prim hair before (and might never again),” Hal9k writes. “Your sunglasses were an unfortunate casualty as well as I couldn’t get something that looked ok for them.” No worries, I’ll just keep wee Walker out of the light.

Taunt brings news that IMVU users can now develop for their world-like 3D chatspace using SketchUp, the free 3D design program bought by Google some months back. [Via Chris Carella.] SketchUp is definitely gaining in leaps and bounds. As Chris says: “Between IMVU and Multiverse there is going to be a lot of SketchUp content out there, which will make it easier for people to assemble their own worlds.” It would be nice to see Second Life implement a SketchUp importer, but even though CTO Cory Ondrejka has gazed ahead approvingly to such an app, I imagine it will be a very long time coming. Should be interesting to see what people get up to in IMVU, though. (IMVU even has a tutorial up.) Will it suddenly become a much more complex and sophisticated “world”?

There are still tickets available for the two Yankees-Red Sox games that are to be re-enacted live in the virtual world of Second Life tonight and Sunday. The games are being arranged for MLB.com by the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), and seem to be the first major league games to be “virtualized” in a world like SL. MLB.com and the Sheep previously put on the Home Run Derby in Second Life, an event that proved to be a pretty entertaining excuse to get together and socialize, for those who showed. Yankees-Red Sox is a serious rivalry, though, and it’ll be interesting to see whether these games lean more toward sports fans or more toward Second Life residents interested in getting in on the novelty factor. Either way, it should be a good ol’ time at the virtual ballpark. Get your tickets at SLBoutique.

A few of us from the Brooklyn metaverse crowd went to see Four-Eyed Monsters last night, a very interesting feature film about a young New York couple who end up documenting their every move via videotape and handwritten notes, only because they’ve decided not to actually speak to each other. While the film is not a documentary, it was made by the couple who it’s about, and their real lives and dramatized lives do begin to converge toward the end of the film. While it’s a movie about relationships (you know, the kind where two people “slowly start to meld into one beast that has 2 mouths, 4 eyes and 8 limbs and takes up 2 seats on the subway!!!”), it’s in greater measure a movie about the act of recording itself, and what it means at a moment in history when you can store, play back and share as much of your life as you like, with as many people as are willing to pay attention. In this case, Susan and Arin have created a virtual version of their real life together, and it’s interesting to ask what the differences between the two may be, if any — especially in light of similar trends in things like lifelogging, and in the fictionalization of a life like lonelygirl15’s. And if you stay with this long-winded post all the way to the end, you get to think about how this kind of logging of our lives might help enhance them in some future 3pointD world. (more…)