This is cool. You can visit »a small flipbook museum« in the virtual world of Second Life. There’s not all that much to do there, and lag prevents some of the exhibits from working the way they should, but it’s a nice tribute to an art form that you’ll never be able to keep from picking up. The flipbook pinwheels outside (shown above) are especially neat. Yes, it’s basically a promotional build for Flippies, which will build you a custom flipbook, but how cool is that idea? Send along a series of shots of your av being collared and you’re golden. Anyway, how can you blame someone like Jeffrey Kay, Flippies’ president, when he calls flipbooks “one of the earliest forms of interactive multimedia on record.” Totally! (more…)
Entropia Universe continues to baffle. The massively multiplayer online game turned virtual world now claims half a million users, according to a recent press release. And there are still PR flaks pushing the exploits of Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs, an Entropia member who reportedly purchased a virtual space report for the whopping sum of $100,000. What the flaks don’t tell you is that Jacobs was (is?) a paid Entropia spokesperson, making the purchase more or less meaningless. (more…)
Sam Landman of the Electric Sheep Company (who, as you know, sponsor this blog), just got in touch to let me know that NBC managed to get around 1,000 avatars into the 18 sims they’d mustered for the virtual tree lighting event they put on earlier this evening in Second Life to match the tree lighting in Rockefeller Center. NBC, as well, counted the event a success. Does that make it the largest single event in SL history? It very well might. Though if you know of a larger one, I’d love to hear about it — especially how it was pulled off. The Sheep had a last-minute scramble on their hands to pull off this one, due to unavoidable scheduling conflicts with the Wednesday update of SL’s software, which threatened to close the entire thing down, and the fact that Linden Lab has been unable to meet demand for new regions, forcing the Sheep to go to land baron, “business girl,” and virrtual millionaire (in US dollar terms, note) Anshe Chung to rent a bunch of sims. Look for more such events in future. “We were very impressed with how forward-thinking NBC was in using this medium,” Sam says. “They really get it. It would be great to see them leverage this to further build their digital media brand.” (more…)
Well, the There Film Festival, anyway. Check out “Wild Griefer,” the winning entry, by There.com resident Francis_7. The film is a five-minute music video based on a song by the same name, written by Thereians Banshee_Kate and Stungthumbz. And it’s all about griefing! (Of course, as There.com’s press release points out, “The lyrics and dialogue showcase There’s real-time voice chat feature, which makes it appear as if the avatars are speaking and singing without the need for editing or dubbing.” But that’s obviously secondary to the subject matter, needless to say.) Check out the rest of the winning entries on this long-loading Web page. And don’t forget to congratulate Francis_7, who actually won a hefty prize: a Sony MiniDV Handycam Camcorder, 90,000 Therebucks, and, last but not least (or maybe both) a There sweatshirt. Nice work.
At Tuesday morning’s opening session of Autodesk University 2006, CEO Carl Bass saved his best demo for last to present before a crowd of over 6000 Computer Aided Drafting and 3D modeling enthusiasts at the software maker’s largest annual event. While it had already been posted this past Sunday by corporate blogger Shaan Hurley, Bass’s unveiling of Autodesk Island in the online world of Second Life marks the day in history that the 800 pound gorilla of the CAD market brings its resources and user base to bear in its latest return to cyberspace, a term that reportedly it once attempted to trademark as its own.
The annual installation and lighting of the huge Christmas tree that adorns Rockefeller Center each holiday season is one of the small, cool things about living in New York. This year’s tree, which went up on November 10, is 88 feet tall and weighs nine tons! It gets lit — after being strung with over five miles of lights — tomorrow, November 29, at 9pm 8:55pm Eastern time. This year, for the first time, you’ll be able participate in a virtual tree lighting in Second Life, as well, courtesy of NBC Universal and the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog). The NBC Universal headquarters in Second Life (I’m not sure exactly where this is) will host “A Very Virtual Christmas,” in a distributed event that will take place across 16 19 SL regions. According to a press release from the Sheep, “A total of sixteen regions will contain identical replicas of the NBC Universal headquarters complete with holiday decor, ice skating, live music, and a coffee shop. Elements of the Second Life event will be live in every sim while others will be streamed from a live audio/video feed coming from one of the sims.” SL musicians Jaycatt Nico and Frogg Marlowe will perform. [UPDATE: NBC now says there will be more like 19 sims, named NBC1, NBC2, etc.] (more…)
BLDGBLOG interview w/ the author of Lonely Planet’s Guide to Micronastions. “…basically a guidebook to teeny-tiny nations with self-declared sovereignty, oftentimes established in someone’s backyard.”
“Prevented from using his critical sense by the lure of success, the player faces a double bind : while he still plays the part of the unrelenting lover of justice, he becomes conscious that to play the game is in a way to play against the discourse of th
Linda Zimmer over at Business Communicators of SL flags what sounds like a very cool application: a downloadable 3D browser called 3B that allows you take existing 2D Web content and make an avatarized 3D space out of it that others can visit. From the site: “3B allows you take any web sites or photos and place them in a personalized 3D space, your 3B village. You can use MySpace, Hi5 or Bebo pages or photos you’ve loaded onto Flickr, Photobucket or any other web service.” Cool. I’m really looking forward to checking this out, as a MySpace-to-Second Life importer is one of the things on my personal technology wish list. 3B sounds like not much more than a way to paste flat Web pages onto the walls of a 3D environment, but it raises some interesting possibilities. It also remains to be seen whether this kind of thing has the community-building and self-expressive power of a place like Second Life. But what interests me about it is that it could be an easier way to get Web users into 3D online spaces. And as we know, getting a critical mass of people into such environments often leads to truly fascinating things that the developers hadn’t envisioned. More reports to come.
Adam Pasick (aka Adam Reuters in SL), the Reuters correspondent covering Second Life, sends word that he’ll be conducting two in-world interviews this week with business heavyweights who might be of interest to many SL residents: Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime and Warner Music chief executive Edgar Bronfman. Both will have their own avatars and take questions from residents as well. (more…)
Late word from virtual world services firm Millions of Us is that the company is bringing rapper Jay-Z to the virtual world of Second Life tonight for a performance that will be taped to air later tonight on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, which starts at midnight (eastern). Show up at Motorati Island by 6:30pm Pacific time, when the taping starts, and your avatar could wind up on national television. I have no idea whether spots are still available, but contact Rodica MillionsOfUs well in advance if you really want to rub pixelated elbows with the bad boy of Bed-Stuy. And tune in to Jimmy Kimmel tonight. I’ve seen virtual worlds hit TV airwaves in the recent past, and it’s definitely something to behold. Makes you think this might not be just a passing fancy after all.
Comments are closed. Trackbacks are closed. One response
Here’s one I missed while I was away: It looks like Appliance maker Whirlpool has become the first big company to upload 3D models of its products to the 3D Warehouse of objects for use in SketchUp, which can in turn be imported into Google Earth. I spotted this on Ogle Earth, which notes, “Expect everybody else to follow suit. In a few years, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ll be able to push a “buy” button in SketchUp and have your inventory of virtual home furniture materialize on your doorstep. With a cut to Google, of course.” What Stefan means is that physical versions of the furniture from your virtual home will be delivered to your real-life doorstep. I love this idea (which, it must be noted, is already happening here and there). Here’s the press release, and Whirlpool’s 3D Warehouse page.
A cool new thing floating around the virtual world of Second Life these days is the TourHUD, a generic name for a heads-up display that provides you with a list of destinations and in-world landmarks to allow you to teleport to each in turn. There are two different types of TourHUD available at the moment, as far as I can tell. Both provide a nice way to get around the world and hopefully spot some things you may not have been able to find in SL’s clunky search utility. But it also seems the tour guide business in Second Life is heating up as well. (more…)
Rezzible is a Web site building and hosting service that lets you associate a Web site with your identity in the virtual world of Second Life. This is interesting for reasons described below, but more immediately interesting to me is an associated product that lets you put text on a Second Life message board via a Web interface. (It’s the orange sign in the image at left. Both were built by SL resident Barry Walcher.) Dynamic text in Second Life is still a crude affair, and must be accomplished using objects with letter textures already on them instead of any kind of actual text parser. But I like the idea of a message board with a Web-based input channel, so that you can update public, in-world information on the fly. I don’t think there are many other (any other?) apps that do this. (more…)
Comments are closed. Trackbacks are closed. 7 responses
What a week to be away. While I was busy chatting to fans of the best MMO going, the virtual world of Second Life was getting its knickers in a twist over something called CopyBot, an application that intercepts data flowing between the Second Life servers and client and can be used to re-create objects that would otherwise not be copyable. For a variety of reasons, perhaps chief among them the fact that many people earn not insubstantial incomes selling their creations in Second Life, the episode has roiled the community in some pretty ugly ways. (For reference, here is the del.icio.us page and the Digg page on the topic.) I’m unavoidably late to the blogging game on this, so rather than recap the controversy in depth, I’ll look at something I think the CopyBot episode helps illustrate on a broader scale: the fact that Second Life has now grown to the point at which it’s no longer possible to speak of the “community” I just mentioned in a meaningful way. Second Life is no longer the walled garden that it was perhaps originally intended to be, but now belongs to the billion-plus users of the World Wide Web. Interestingly, though, that kind of community is still possible in SL, it just takes a bit more work. (more…)
Following a discussion of the very public and didactic First Second Life Church of Elvis comes a quiet place of repose and solitude that by comparison lacks any apparent function or purpose. Yet it is this very ambiguity that offers up a portal to the possibilities and provocations inherent in ‘THE DUDE’s Pad’, located in the Second Life region of Stinson (slurl link).
In an effort to foster entrepreneurialism within Second Life, Edelman and The Electric Sheep Company are teaming up to sponsor a Second Life Business Plan competition. . . . Over the next few months, we will be accepting business plan entries, and the winner of the contest can gain sole access to a Second Life private island for 6 months, as well as L$350,000 seed money, and strategic guidance from Edelman and The Electric Sheep Company. Two runners-up can win L$100,000. Your business needs to be focused on the Second Life community, but there are no requirements as to what kind of business.
The companies are holding a panel to discuss entrepreneurship in the virtual world of Second Life this Friday. Deadline for entries to the competition is February December 20th. (more…)
Comments are closed. Trackbacks are closed. 5 responses
3pointD is off for a bit of a Busman’s Holiday over the next two weeks, so expect posting to slow down a bit between now and 21 November. Where am I going? Only to Iceland for the annual fanfest of the coolest massively multiplayer online game out there, EVE Online. Picture it: 600 or so of the deepest MMO geeks in the world, gathered in one cold, dark place to chat to developers, journalists (that’s me) and each other about whether ECM needs to be nerfed, and just what CCP are thinking about with the baffling new gang system. Personally, I can’t wait. Then it’s off to the UK to do some interviews and try to relax. I’ll be posting here occasionally, but it won’t be as often as I normally do, certainly. Hopefully Glitchy and Chip will help fill the empty spaces in the metaverse while I’m gone.
Comments are closed. Trackbacks are closed. 7 responses
Monday night’s launch party for the Toyota Scion presence in the virtual world of Second Life was apparently quite a well attended event. The cool thing about the build, done by Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us, is that the cars available in the »Scion City« sim (for L$300, or about US$1) are fully customizable, right down to the Photoshop files used to make the surface textures (which are available here). If that’s too daunting (as it would be for me), you can also customize your Scion via a heads-up display, or knock out prims and piece them back together in crazy styles. I haven’t seen any of the customizations that have been created yet, but I’m confident SL users will come up with some very cool rides. In fact, send us screenshots of your pimped-out Scions (to walkeringATgmail.com) with a sentence or two on what you did by way of customization and I’ll publish them here once I’ve collected a few. In the meantime, hit the road.
The UK’s Guardian newspaper reports today that among the television channels being brought to Second Life by virtual-world services company Rivers Run Red are the UK’s Channel 4 and, appropriately enough, the Sci-Fi channel. The story also confirms that user-created content will be part of Virtual Life TV, which is due to launch at the end of this month. I’m looking forward to seeing whether a machinima channel could fly in Second Life, I think it’s a great idea. Dust off your Alt-Zoom cameras and get to work.
I haven’t checked this out much yet, but Second Life resident FlipperPA Peregrine (creator of SLBoutique.com), sends words of Microsoft’s new beta release of Virtual Earth 3D, which runs in your Web browser and is available through a link in the left sidebar at the Live Search site. As you can see in the image of the Las Vegas strip above, the level of detail is mighty impressive. And wow, I just checked out the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s very nice. As James Fee points out, “It streams much slower than [Google Earth], but the detail is many times better.” If you haven’t seen this yet, install it now — in IE only, not Firefox, natch.
Comments are closed. Trackbacks are closed. 2 responses
CNet’s Michael Parsons reports that a new version of isometric virtual world Habbo Hotel, to be releaseed this week, will include Web-based social networking functions that will let users interact outside the world, as well as within in. “Habbo users will get their own homepage, which is fully customisable with its own backgrounds, colours, friends list and the ability to send and recieve messages. In other words, Habbo’s going all MySpace,” Parsons writes. Though it looks a bit flat, Habbo is of course hugely popular, with some 7 million people having logged in last month, according to the CNet story. 3pointD is a big believer in Web integration for virtual worlds, so we see this as a good thing, and another indication of a small but growing trend.
Reuters’ Adam Pasick reports that the popular reality-television show Big Brother is launching a Second Life edition starting December 1. While a press release from the producers doesn’t say the “show” will be televised or streamed to the Web, it will be open to all SL residents, and will run for the month of December. You can apply to be part of the show on »Kingdom of Media island«, where SL residents will also be able to watch the goings on. The requirements are pretty stiff, though: 15 participants will need to spend eight hours a day in the house, and complete a set of tasks that sound like they’re slanted toward those with facility in building. SL residents will vote contestants off the island one by one, and the winner goes “home” with a free 16-acre virtual estate. This is an interesting addition to the small universe of virtual television presence, pioneered by MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach. More to come?
I always love coming across new useful applications that can be used in the virtual world of Second Life (especially now that I’m looking for stuff for the 3pedia wiki). Via a recent post on BlogHUD about an in-world RSS reader in development by resident Intolerable Ginsburg, I happened on the PixelTrix calendar, which I’ve set up at the »3pointD Think Tank« in Second Life. Though the process is slightly complex, the calendar can be loaded with notecards that emit event reminders or display what’s going on on a given date when the day is clicked. I haven’t loaded any into the 3pointD calendar, but I’ve set it to be accessible to anyone, so if you have an event upcoming, feel free to load it onto the calendar. You can buy your own at the »PixelTrix store«, run by Cherub Spectre and Nathan Oddfellow, where you can also buy interactive message boards, texture organizers, a customer service bell and answering machine, and various kinds of furniture all fitted out to store and organize inventory items. Nice stuff.
Check out SecondCast, Episode #42, in which Johnny Ming roams the halls of the 2006 Machinima Festival of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences. (I was there too, but would only sit still to be interviewed by Johnny about the New York City “Pay Walker’s Rent” Marathon.) There was some great machinima on display, and some interesting characters on the podcast, as always. Unfortunately, though we were all rooting for Pierce Portocarrero’s excellent Game Over to win one of the several awards for which it was nominated, Pierce will have to wait until next year. That’s understandble, though, in an environment in which a film about restroom etiquette wins the prize for best writing.
Second Life resident Nobody Fugazi sends along the news that a localized client for Second Life is in the works for Japanese-speakers, and possibly for Korea as well, according to this article in Digital Bulletin. It’s long been known that Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world, was interested in client localization, but this is the first public acknowledgment I’ve seen that a client is actually in the works. It sounds like the company is putting significant resources behind its Asia “rollout,” which really amounts to marketing push in the region, since it seems highly unlikely (i.e., practically unthinkable) that a separate service would be launched for Asian customers. By last summer, Second Life users were already running about 50/50 between U.S. customers and those from other countries, but the vast majority have been English speakers. Is the true internationalization of Second Life at hand? Or as Nobody asks, “Will this mean I can buy Yen through LindeX?”
State of Play is one of the most important conferences on virtual worlds held each year, as it generally features not just game and world developers but academics, economists and legal scholars who have devoted a large part of their careers to investigating just what role these places play in our society today and going forward. This year’s event, to be held in Singapore, is intended to knit together the global community of such people in a closer way than they have been before. That in itself is an important undertaking, given the fact that legal and tax regimes in the Asia-Pacific region arguably take a more forward-thinking approach to virtual worlds than we do in the western hemisphere. But the conference is apparently short of funding, according to a recent post on the Terra Nova blog. So if you have some extra cash or know someone who might be interested in being associated with the event, get in touch with Aaron Delwiche, who’s organizing the whole thing and whose details can be found in the Terra Nova post. As he puts it: “When Beth Noveck and I set out to plan this event, we overestimated the readiness of our Western colleagues to embrace this groundbreaking project. Five months down the road, we are still trying to raise enough money. We are rapidly approaching a ‘go or no-go’ decision point.” It would be great if the decision were a “go.” Help make it happen, if you can.
More fabulous fabbing stuff comes our way this morning, this time via KnowProSE, which links to a wiki called Fab@Home. We’ll overlook Fab@Home’s desperate need for a better URL for the moment and instead concentrate on the fact that the site is basically a kind of Anarchist Cookbook for those who want to get their own fabbing operation going. There’s a longer description on the site, but one sentence says it all: “This website provides an open source kit that lets you make your own simple fabber, and use it to print three dimensional objects.” Awesome. Get to work.
Watch the video above. Now. It shows a new combination of technologies put together by the Swedish design group FRONT that lets you sketch objects in thin air, records the sketch via motion capture, and then fabricates the resulting object in 3D. FRONT has been sketching and fabbing furniture, but of course you could sketch anything else you please. I was pretty amazed by this (which I found via eightbar, which links to a slightly different video). I wonder, though, whether you get to see your sketch as you’re doing it, or you just have to rely on your own spatial coordination to remember where the lines are that you’ve previously drawn. Also, is this stuff sturdy enough to sit on? No fannies are shown on the chairs at any point. No matter, though, since if those things are problems, they’re problems easily solved. In any case, this is a great new way to get things out of your brain and into the world. I would love to have a piece of furniture I’d drawn in this air — or even one someone else had drawn. Nice stuff.
I didn’t realize that TheStreet.com had a “virtual reporter” covering Second Life, but it seems it’s so. Robert Holden has a good analysis of recent changes in the Linden dollar exchange rate — although his limited time in Second Life has led him to characterize the change in value of the Linden from around 300 to the US dollar to around 275 as a rise, rather than a recovery to near levels that were the norm until six months ago or so. Still, it’s interesting to see more mainstream media outlets taking notice. For a complete list of Holden’s stories, click here.
I came across a good article on the SL News Network that other day about the increasing number of hooks between the World Wide Web and the virtual world of Second Life and it reminded me of a project I’ve been meaning to start up: a wiki in which to record such things, as well as anything else related to the idea of 3pointD. I poked around a bit expecting to find one already up and running, but nothing appeared, and so I’ve gone ahead and launched 3pedia, which is intended to be “an editable encyclopedia whose articles describe technologies and applications that connect people in space, whether that space be real or virtual, as well as related subjects.” Now all I need to do is get you guys contributing to the thing. (more…)
Comments are closed. Trackbacks are closed. 4 responses
Second Life resident Mark Barrett, who’s been providing community tools and collecting interesting information about the Grid at SLStats.com, SLBuzz.com and SLTags.com, recently cobbled together a nice graph showing the growth of SL’s land area, which I’m happy to present above. While Second Life’s economic statistics page gives some data on how many “private islands” are out there (i.e., regions not part of the mainland), it doesn’t give a total figure for the land masses present in Second Life. Mark’s figures, while not 100 percent accurate, should be close, and give a very good picture of one aspect of Second Life’s growth since he started collecting the data about six weeks ago — in which time the SL land area has grown almost 15 percent, from under 3,600 16-acre sims to over 4,000. (Almost half of these are private islands, according to LL’s economics page.) According to Mark, Linden Lab is adding some 10 to 20 regions every day. It will be interesting to see how this growth curve changes, if at all, given the recent increae in prices for islands not on the mainland. (more…)
This is cool. You can visit »a small flipbook museum« in the virtual world of Second Life. There’s not all that much to do there, and lag prevents some of the exhibits from working the way they should, but it’s a nice tribute to an art form that you’ll never be able to keep from picking up. The flipbook pinwheels outside (shown above) are especially neat. Yes, it’s basically a promotional build for Flippies, which will build you a custom flipbook, but how cool is that idea? Send along a series of shots of your av being collared and you’re golden. Anyway, how can you blame someone like Jeffrey Kay, Flippies’ president, when he calls flipbooks “one of the earliest forms of interactive multimedia on record.” Totally! (more…)
Linda Zimmer over at Business Communicators of SL 
Feeds
Recent Comments: