3pointD.com

Well, it’s official. Actually, it’s the official guide to Second Life, out now (or rather, as of this Wednesday) from Wiley. I’ve paged through most of it already and it looks like a pretty good guide for finding your feet in the virtual world. Why do I have a copy already? The same reason it’s kind of hard for me to give it a terribly unbiased review: I wrote two chapters of the thing. So go buy it now! To be honest, though, I’ve already learned a couple of things about inventory management and stuff like that from it. The thing is, Second Life changes so quickly and so much, even the software behind the world, that it remains to be seen how useful the book will be over time. All part of a nefarious plan to sell multiple editions, I imagine. One thing valuable about grabbing this edition: There’s a lot of good history in there, and a record of current builds and communities that are archived on no other pages (except here and there around the Web). In any case, I recommend a purchase, not least because some very small portion of it will go to support 3pointD.

The Great Games Experiment is “a social networking community for gamers, developers and publishers to play, show off, promote and ultimately enjoy games.” Sounds good to me. Raph Koster blogged this recently, along with two other sites that fall under what he’s calling “YouTube for games.” I think the Experiment sounds most cool to me. (The others seem more narrowly focused.) I haven’t got a beta invite yet, but it seems to be a kind of Friendster or LinkedIn for those interested in games. Will this be any more useful than any other games-related forum? Who knows. But the ability to form connections to other people in the community suggests it might. More information if I can actually get in.

Rivers Run Red’s latest project is to bring Philips Design to the virtual world of Second Life, where they will seek to “gain feedback on innovation concepts, engage residents in cocreation and gain a deeper understanding of potential opportunities in this virtual environment.” Sounds like a nice way to enter the virtual world. (more…)

The device sounds cooler than the headline, trust me. It’s the TrackClip PRO from a company called NaturalPoint, and it turns your headset into a mouselook controller. Clip it onto your headset, and the motion of your head controls the direction of your view on screen, freeing up your mouse hand for more important matters, presumably. Check out this Flash animation to see how it works (though be sure to mute the annoing music). I can’t tell from the site whether you need to mod your games to use it, but there’s a longish list of TrackIR enhanced games that apparently already support the peripheral — including Flight Simulator X, GTR and GTR2, and even EVE Online. In any case, modding it in shouldn’t be all that hard, considering how easy it was to convert Half-Life 2 for the cool 3D haptic mouse from Novint. And the price? Only $39.95 Around $200. Of course, I can’t tell you whether it actually works or not, since I haven’t actually tried it out (and actually, there’s the potential for it to be highly annoying), but I like the idea.