3pointD.com

The UK’s enjoyably left-leaning daily newspaper, The Guardian, flags the emerging publishing and literary scene in the virtual world of Second Life in an article on the Guardian Unlimited site this week. The piece mainly revolves around Penguin’s entry into Second Life with the virtual sampler of Snow Crash they published a while back with the help of Rivers Run Red. The article, however, notes that Penguin is “now developing a virtual bookshelf of other Penguin titles for the Second Life resident.” The piece also flags what sounds like a nice build, a replica of the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris. The books on the shelves there apparently provide links to their counterparts on Amazon.com, although there are plans to publish original works by residents. The Grid is down for an update at the moment so I can’t give you a location for it, but I’m looking forward to checking this out and seeing how it matches up with the real thing — especially whether the proprietor will be offering young literary avatars a place to bunk in a threadbare upstairs room, as George Whitman, the real store’s proprietor, has long been known to.

Corey Bridges of Multiverse, the free virtual world development platform now in beta, sends along an article from TCS Daily that argues that 3D online worlds are the “Next Big Thing” and compares their history so far with the early history of Netscape. The Multiverse team, of course, is largely made up of Netscape alums, including Cory and Bill Turpin, who led the start-up company on which Netscape built its browser. (”This article’s a bit dense,” says Cory, “but it’s an interesting read. And not just because it’s favorable to Multiverse.”) From the article: “We are . . . on the cusp of the Next Big Thing and those who are ready for the transition to 3D virtual worlds will be far ahead of the game.” Good food for thought there. Recommended reading.

The Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) are holding an event this Thursday and Friday, October 26-27, that will collect screenshots and text from the virtual world of Second Life for inclusion in the Yahoo! Time Capsule project, which will be sealed on November 8 and re-opened in the year 2020. That’s pretty cool (and Yahoo!’s Web site is cool as well). One thing strikes me, though. Why aren’t there 3D models being included in the time capsule? It’s not a particular failure of vision on Yahoo!’s part; it probably has more to do with the fact that there’s not yet a standard for such objects, nor can you export such information out of Second Life in a way that’s supported by the company and intelligible to other applications. Virtual 3D objects are not yet widely and easily manipulable, as, say, a chunk of html code is, or a jpeg file. The problem runs far deeper than the technological; the absence of a standard or other open system or protocol means that many people don’t think of the virtual world as just another part of the rest of their lives. When an online world can reach out to and communicate easily with many other online platforms, we’ll start to see more constructive attention being paid. It’s almost as if we’re now at 3pointD v1.0. Personally, I’m looking forward to 3pointD 2.0. If that makes any sense at all.