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More EVE fun: My love of the massively multiplayer space opera EVE Online is such that I am a subscriber to the game’s quarterly print magazine, EON, where I recently read that EVE player Syri Dominus has created a simple Connect Four game that’s playable in the in-game browser players can view while playing EVE. The browser, which supports limited html (a dev guide is available from this dmoz page), already has a number of player-developed pages flogging services or giving access to killboards. There’s even an in-game casino. Now, if you launch EVE and navigate over to Syri’s Connect Four site, you can play against a live opponent within the game. No one was waiting for a match when I was on, so the screenshot above only shows the initial set-up (and my handsome Rifter), but it’s a very nice job, and the kind of thing that makes predictions of a World of Warcraft operating system seem not quite so outlandish.

For a great picture of just how involved things can get in the massively multiplayer space opera EVE Online, read this epic forum post, which narrates a three-week long campaign on the part of one of the game’s better known mercenary corporations. Hired to take down a corp called Interstellar Alcohol Conglomerate, the mercs lay their plans under cover of nearby hostilities, spend almost two weeks gathering their forces, and finally launch an assault that takes the enemy by complete surprise. I won’t ruin the ending, I’ll just say it’s well worth a read, chock full of links to screenshots, other forum posts and even some video. A great look at some of the game’s best (and worst) moments, which also really makes you understand just how important the human element is here. Nice writing by Seleene (pictured above), CEO of the Body Count Inc. corporation, a member of the Mercenary Coalition alliance. (more…)

Take a listen to today’s edition of C.C. Chapman’s Managing the Gray podcast for news of a new “uncompany,” composed of podcasters C.C., Joseph Jaffe of Across the Sound, and Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson of For Immediate Release, that’s going to be doing “new marketing,” i.e., marketing primarily through new outlets like virtual worlds, rather than primarily through traditional avenues of print, radio and television. C.C., of course, is a big fan of Second Life and, in fact, part owner of the new Dirty sim, where myself, SecondCast producer John Swords, SLPodcast’s Jeremy Vaught, and SLStats.com’s Mark Barrett have taken up residence. The company will have an SL presence in a different sim, so look for projects coming in-world soon from these guys. The company is running half under the radar and half above: they’re not giving out word of what its name is yet, but everyone’s clearly excited. Good to see more competition coming into the field, but the question now is whether there’s enough business out there to keep everyone in $800 microphones and other podcasting equipment.

Second Life Insider flags a useful new tool for clothing designers in the virtual world of Second Life. Designed by SL resident Johan Durant, the app lets you preview a texture design outside the world on the default SL avatar. Besides making it more convenient to preview clothing designs, it should make the process cheaper as well, since it now entails many texture uploads, at L$10 each, to test designs. Download the app here. Feedback on the SL forums is so far largely positive.

For those that haven’t heard the news: Second Life is under attack! But it’s not W-Hats this time, it’s Martians! Take a listen on the latest episode of SecondCast for more details. Or maybe you want to wait for Halloween.

We’ve blogged before about the possibility that Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, might start letting users buy the rights to their own last names,effectively reserving a name for themselves and their friends. Now CNet’s Daniel Terdiman is reporting that there’s a plan in place to charge users $100 to set up their own last name, and a $50 annual maintenance fee. Corporate names will cost $1,000 to set up, with a $500 annual fee. While it seems that corporate customers can have unlimited accounts on the same last name, the story doesn’t make clear whether the $100 fee for personal last names covers only one instance of the name, or whether it covers exclusive use for any number of avatars. It seems to me this should get ugly fast, since it requires LL to make a great number of arbitrary decisions about what last names they will and won’t sell off. Who gets to own “Smith” and “Miller,” for instance? It’s also another case that could create a tiered service that works against metaverse neutrality. I’m not convinced that making naming conventions uniform across all users wouldn’t be a better way to go — but I’m open to argument.

One of the first stories from the new Reuters bureau in the virtual world of Second Life flags the fact that the U.S. Congress is in the preliminary stages of looking into virtual economies such as Second Life’s and World of Warcraft’s, and the public policy issues surrounding them. The story quotes Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, as saying, “Right now we’re at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise — taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth.” Many SL residents already pay taxes on their virtual earnings, of course, but a Congressional investigation could lead to legislation governing tax and intellectual property issues in virtual worlds. Whether lawmakers will treat such places any differently from other Internet-based commerce sites remains to be seen; it’s not clear that the issues are very different. VW economies, of course, do feature their own currencies, which could make things sticky for Congress and game companies alike. In any case, it will no doubt be a matter of years, not months, before legislation is even contemplated. But it’s heartening to see the issue being taken seriously in Washington. The challenge will be to educate lawmakers in such a way that early steps will not have a chilling effect on activities in the virtual world.

That said, some Congressmen are already educating themselves: “I can almost guarantee that there are some members of Congress spending time in Second Life or World of Warcraft,” Miller tells Reuters.

Venerable wire service Reuters (my alma mater in the news business) has opened a bureau in the virtual world of Second Life, built out by virtual world services firm The Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog). There’s a very nice tower on the Reuters sim, where correspondent Adam Reuters (aka Reuters’ Adam Pasick) will hold regular “office hours,” and you can pick up a free heads-up display or virtual wall-mounted unit that feeds running headlines from both SL and RL that can be clicked through to a Web page for the full stories. This is a very impressive effort on Reuters’ part, with Adam being named SL Bureau Chief. The news agency has also launched a Web page devoted to SL, where his stories can be read and subscribed to. (more…)

Reader Geoff Livingston sends word of an unusually elaborate Google Maps mashup in the works from geospatial developer FortiusOne that allows you to compare two locations as to the density of an arbitrary data set, if I’m understanding things correctly. The mashup uses Fortius’s GeoIQ API, which allows the visualization of a user’s data set in Google Maps, and displays two locations side by side. Clicking spots on the maps gives you a numerical rating of the data at the chosen points. In the image above, a data set representing traffic delays in San Francisco and Los Angeles are compared side by side. Very nice stuff. “In the app you can do this with any data set or mash up multiple data sets to solve a variety of problems surround location decisions,” reads the blog entry describing the mashup. Nice to see someone squeeze another level of usefulness out of Google’s mapping app.

The latest announcement from the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) is that they’re bringing Sony/BMG to the virtual world of Second Life. According to Sheep Giff Constable, the site, on the Sheep’s Media Island, will contain “fan zones for 8 leading SONY BMG artists with video and audio content, and two gorgeous lounge and club presences which will host some exciting future events with big-name acts. One of the really cool things here from my perspective is also that SONY BMG will actually be experimenting with selling music within Second Life directly to residents.” That’s definitely very cool.

The official launch is October 19, with a meet-and-greet andn then Q&A with Epic Records artist Ben Folds. Reserve a spot for the event by emailing frontdesk [AT] virtualaloft.com, which is holding its launch the same day. Slightly confusing, but that seems to be the way to go. [UPDATE: The two events are actually a joint event, which is why you have to RSVP for the one to get to the other.] (more…)

I recently had the opportunity to have a drink with Ian and Roo from the always interesting eightbar blog and learned that there were more than 200 IBM’ers running around in the virtual world of Second Life — not because they’d been sent there or were part of a project, but just because IBM is full of curious technologists and many of them have ended up with SL avatars. One very cool result of this, and of the interest of IBM technical strategist and innovation guru Irving Wladawsky-Berger, has been that Roo and Ian are now officially charged with checking out SL on behalf of IBM, rather than simply stealing a few virtual moments when they’re meant to be working on more important stuff. Another result is that IBM are throwing themselves a “virtual block party” in the virtual world tomorrow, on their Almaden sim. I don’t think it’s open to the public, but it is open to IBM alumni (of which the company has several hundred more as of a few days ago). What will be interesting will be to see exactly what kind of development work these kind of events can galvanize.

For those (like me) who haven’t already checked out Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s new book, The Long Tail, or who just want to know more about it, straight from the author’s mouth, you can see Anderson give a talk about hsi vision of the future of business this Friday at 10:30am SL time, when Wagner James Au will interview him at the new Wired installation being built on the Millions of Us sim. Yes, Wired too is coming to Second Life, and will probably throw themselves a more proper party on Saturday, I hear. The big question: Is there room enough in the sim for both Wired and CNet? Or will Chris Anderson and Daniel Terdiman soon come to virtual blows?

Whew, I just finished uploading several dozen pictures to the 3pointD Flickr pool. Heavy lifting! But you can now browse all 262 photos there, pretty much every image that’s appeared on the blog and then some, since the pool is open for anyone to upload images to. The coolest thing about it is that more than 40 of those images have been contributed by people other than myself. All the pictures I’ve added come complete with a “3pointD link” that takes you to the blog post from which the picture was drawn, so you can have a nice tour of the site just by clicking through the images that interest you. And if you really dig your 3pointD, you can follow this link to build a Flickr badge like the one in the middle column here and slap it on your own Web page. Have fun!

Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, have been having a hell of a time over the last several weeks defending against the metaversal version of denial-of-service attacks: When users add objects to the Grid that are able to replicate themselves, dividing and redividing exponentially, LL’s servers are soon choked by the processing power required to maintain all these objects, and the world grinds to a halt. Now, Linden Lab is contemplating a solution that would create a privileged class of users with access to the full range of SL scripting and object-creation abilities on the Grid, with everyone else limited as to the functions available or the locations in which their scripts and objects will work. I’d suggest that a solution like this will kill Second Life rather quickly, or at least prevent it from becoming what CEO Philip Rosedale and SL’s most optimistic boosters believe it can become: a kind of 3D extension and next generation of the World Wide Web. (more…)

Amil Husain, Global Youth Coordinator for the United Nations’ Millennium Campaign against poverty, sends along news of an October 14-16 event in the virtual world of Second Life being held as part of the UN’s broader effort to improve living conditions in poor countries around the world. Rockers Sugarcult will be playing a concert that day in California, and will have it replicated within Second Life at SL designer Aimee Weber’s »Midnight City« at 1:00pm SL time (4:00pm Eastern). In addition, SL avatars will stand up against poverty over the next two days — and be counted toward a Guinness Book world record that the organization is shooting for. (For more, listen to Aimee’s appearance on the latest episode of SecondCast.)

Will this help? It’s impossible to quantify the effect of such consciousness-raising exercises. But kiosks are being set up around the virtual world that will hand out the white wristbands that have become an international symbol of the fight against poverty. (Contact Aimee if you want one.) Similar (real-world) wristbands have done much to help the fight against cancer. In any case, it doesn’t seem like it can hurt. Stand up and be counted.

Ever wonder what goes into the creation of an elaborate build in the virtual world of Second Life? You can find out starting Thursday morning, when noted SL builder Versu Richelieu will spend 72 hours building in Second Life while living in a store window on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The event is a marketing effort (dare we say “stunt”?) mounted by Intel to promote their Centrino Duo-based laptop line, on which Versu will be working. No matter how much of a stunt it may be, the idea — dreamed up by virtual world services company Millions of Us — is very cool. Building things is, of course, one of the core activities of Second Life, and watching an elaborate castle, neighborhood or post-modern tower come together is a fascinating thing. Now you can witness the action live in New York, in Second Life, or on the Web. (more…)

We’ve been chatting on the blog here about the idea of a 3pointD meetup in the virtual world of Second Life for some time. Now there’s a date: Sunday, October 22, at 5:00pm SL time. (Location TBD.) What will we be meeting up about? Well, that’s a bit of an open question, but the original idea was to discuss virtual world sustainability and related matters. I’m going to put together a format for the meeting over the next week or so (look for updates here on the blog), but if anyone has any ideas for things to discuss or sessions we could hold, please leave them here in the comments thread. One thing I’d like to do is hold a brainstorming session on metaversal technologies we’d like to see come into Second Life. So that’s two tracks/sessions: sustainability, and wish technologies. Got any more?

If you want to attend the meetup, an RSVP is definitely suggested. Log into Second Life and send an IM to Walker Spaight, or leave a comment below with your Second Life name. See you there!

Check out the latest episode of SecondCast to hear us chat to Aimee Weber about the work she’s doing to bring the United Nations’ campaign against poverty into Second Life. We also cover the news, of course, this time in the company of special guest co-host Chance Takashi, high bidder on a Second Life Herald profile to benefit the American Cancer Society. Chance’s appearance in voice settled a bet that had been going on for some time among residents of the Caledon steampunk sims. Read Chance’s profile for more details.

Mobile telecomms company Vodafone plans to open its own Vodafone Island in the virtual world of Second Life later this year or early next, according to virtual world services company Rivers Run Red, which is building out the project for them. The company is being brought in as part of a campaign designed by ad agency BBH, which Rivers brought to Second Life in September. Vodafone content should start appearing on the Grid in coming months. Besides activities like sports, music, film and events that are planned for Vodafone Island, the company will also try to give SL residents new ways to interact with each other and with the real world. Vodafone will apparently be working up applications that allow instant messaging and/or other forms of communication between SL and other online and mobile locations. While these won’t be the first such apps, they will have the weight and marketing power of a real-world telecomms company behind them. It will be interesting to see whether they gain broader adoption as a result. If they add to the functionality available in-world, so much the better.

Second Life Herald correspondent Fiend Ludwig has a great story up today about someone implementing a system to play good old tabletop Dungeons & Dragons in the virtual confines of Second Life. I love the idea of a virtual world version of the original virtual world game, completed with scripted dice that roll themselves. Worth checking out.

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?

For those who haven’t seen it yet, you can now check out the virtual Aloft Hotel that the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) have built out for Starwood Hotels. Just head over to aloft island, which is now open to the public, and check in to the prototype hotel. You can read about the process of creating the model as well at the Virtual Aloft blog. Part of the idea is to get feedback from visitors, so don’t forget to drop a line to frontdesk [AT] virtualaloft.com with your opinion of the build. Let us know how the room service is.

Check out the latest SecondCast, in which most of the ‘casters (I was absent with the flu) do stuff like try on pants from our “Get Philip in Your Pants” contest, and chat with a live audience in Second Life. Special guest Koz Farina talks about his very cool BlogHUD, and the podcasters generally run off at the mouth in what became a marathon after-hours session. Listen in on one of the more hilarious episodes in the SecondCast archives.

3pointD has been making some appearances in print lately. While the travel guide to the virtual world of Second Life we contributed to in the October issue of Wired won’t be available until October 17, we (that is I, Mark Wallace) do have a long piece on “The Future of You” in PC World magazine, as well as on their Web site. “Think the Net has changed your life?” ask the editors, in the article’s subhed. “Wait until it becomes an immersive 3D environment–and it will.” (more…)

SLBoutique’s FlipperPA Peregrine flags a Slashdot post about the fact that World of Warcraft will be featured in tonight’s season premiere of South Park, of all things. Check out the video clip. As Flip points out, this is probably the first mainstream appearance of machinima. Here’s Blizzard’s press release about the episode, which sees Cartman, Kyle, Kenny et al. charged with saving WoW itself from the depredations of “a renegade player.” A very interesting mashup of virtual worlds as well as entertainment media. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ron Howard reportedly has a television show in the works that features a massively multiplayer online game, and James Cameron is said to be making a film that will be shot partly within a virtual world. Look for 3pointD this fall at a theater near you.

Avi Bar-Zeev is one of those guys who quietly works on making stuff happen. As co-founder of Keyhole Inc., he led the development of the software that later became Google Earth. Avi also did work for Linden Lab, developing the 3D rendering engine that runs the virtual world of Second Life. Avi’s latest effort is a thought experiment that seeks to flesh out the concept of Web 3D and how it might be brought about. In a 7-part series, he interviews a couple of Web 3D thinkers and ponders what Web 3D really is and whether we really need it at all. I’ve given it only a light read so far, so I’ll save any specific responses for a future “What is 3pointD?” post, but it’s good stuff, recommended reading for anyone interested in where 3pointD-related technologies may be headed. Nice work, Avi.

Those who’ve been following the 3D printing of my Second Life avatar, Walker Spaight, will be happy to know that Walker has arrived safely in Brooklyn, Capital of the Metaverse, and taken up residence in the offices of 3pointD, as can be seen above. Even cooler than that, though, is the news that Fabjectory, the 3D printing service that was kind enough to fabricate Walker, is now offering to fab other objects designed in Second Life. At the company’s site in Second Life [<-- SL link] you can pick up a virtual model of a basic USB drive housing, customize it within SL, give it back to Fabjectory, and have them 3D print it for $50 - $100. Better yet, 3pointD hears that Fabjectory is working on a model of an iPod dock that will allow you to do the same thing. In any case, you can already ask them to fab any object for you, and they’ll tell you if it can be done and for how much. All very cool. Readers are welcome to submit pics of any objects they’ve had 3D printed to the 3pointD group on Flickr.

Christian of the Electric Sheep Company sends news that Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, will soon allow users to display Web pages in their in-world profiles. According to this blog post from one Linden developer, a new tab will soon be added to users’ profiles (as seen above) that will load from a URL field. “This feature should make it out sometime after this coming release, and to a public preview before then,” according to the post. (more…)

• Baristanet - Montclair, NJ: Mapping Change, History
  a Google Map mashup that tracks “teardown” homes of a place I know all too well, Montclair, NJ…
  (tags: google map mashup montclair change)

• Ifbook-McKenzieWarkInterviewInHaloGameThisSpartanLife473.mov (video/quicktime Object)
  McKenzie Wark (http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/) interviewed inside the “gamespace” of Halo 2 by Chris Burke of “This Spartan Life.”
  (tags: games interviews books)