3pointD.com

Automaker Audi has apparently debuted its latest car commercial in the virtual world of Second Life. The commercial is showing in the screening dome of the »avalon« sim belonging to virtual world branding company Rivers Run Red. My machine seems to be a bit underpowered to make out the clip very well, but Rivers’ Justin Bovington tells me the ad will air on television in coming weeks, throughout the world. Bovington flags the event as another first for SL, calling it “validation of SL as a ‘legit’ channel in the media planning mix.” I’d call it more like a feeler as to whether SL can serve as a viral marketing channel on the level of YouTube, but that’s perhaps no less significant, given the fact that television commercials are probably a dying form.

Glitchy sends along an interesting project from the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University known as News at Seven, which scans news and blog headlines and automatically creates a three-minute newscast which is then delivered via text-to-speech translation by everyone’s favorite female first-person shooter, the Alyx character from the Half-Life games. I’d love to see this in a virtual world, automatically generating a newscast from 3pointD stories and the like. The demo newscast seems to have been tarted up by the app’s creators (”The engine, and our extensions to it, allows us to present believable human-like newscasters as well as more imaginative scenes and sets that are only possible because the show is virtual. We also use techniques to make the generated vocal audio more interesting and believable.”), but there’s no reason why a straight show shouldn’t work. An entertaining addition to the growing number of aggregators out there.

Sun Microsystems will apparently hold a press conference in the virtual world of Second Life next Tuesday, according to an item on Red Herring. “The networked computer vendor will become the first Fortune 500 company to hold a press conference in Second Life Tuesday when Chief Researcher Jon Gage and Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos will open an in-game pavilion and talk about other ways Sun plans to work within the game. Philip Rosedale, chief executive of Linden Labs, the game’s developer, will also appear,” the article says.

3pointD hears the conference was arranged by virtual world services company Millions of Us, but we haven’t been able to confirm that, so it’s just hearsay for now. More interesting is the question of whether SL will soon see an influx of stock analysts and investment bankers. Virtual insider trading, anyone?