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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…)