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It’s no Snakes on a Plane, but it’ll do. Since I can’t be bothered with pre-ordering things, I suffered through the holidays with an Xbox360, but I’m feeling more and more like I need a Nintendo Wii. Not because I’m such a hot gamer (I suck at Gears of War worse than Matt Mihaly), but because of the possibilities presented by the Wii’s Web browsing capability, which people are already starting to make use of. Besides the invaluable ability to read 3pointD (thanks to Glitchy for the pic), Slashdot reports on a tabbed browsing interface that’s been developed, “which makes browsing on the Wii more efficient until the fully realized Opera build hits later next year,” and also revives the robot Roomba trend we (at the Second Life Herald) reported on from South by Southwest last year. The WiiRoomba “is entirely controlled by the Wii remote accelerometers,” and looks totally DIY-able. That’s the best thing about the new generation of game consoles; they’re not just all about the games anymore.

It took place this week on Monday afternoon, apparently because of the Christmas schedule, but it looks like NBC, which has already held a couple of events in the virtual world of Second Life, is now trying out Sunday Night Football in the virtual world. The Christmas game between the Cowboys and the Eagles was not simulcast in SL but instead accompanied by a “guess the play” game (run from a heads-up display) that rewarded virtual armchair quarterbacks with prizes of Linden dollars at halftime and at the end of the game. The event, a beta test, according to the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), was held at NBC’s virtual sports bar in the »Second City 3« sim, and was attended by about a dozen people, I’m told by one sports fan, who didn’t seem to mind watching the game on TV while they carried on in high Second Life style within the virtual world. No word yet on whether the event constituted a success for NBC, but I’m betting it worked well enough that we can look forward to more such Sunday night games in SL — which clearly has greater potential than the lame offerings that used to be known as “interactive television.”

The All Points Blog links to a report in PC Advisor about a new program to outfit Tokyo’s high-end shopping district, the Ginza, with 10,000 RFID tags and other digital beacons. The project, led by Ken Sakamura, a professor at the University of Tokyo, will bring location-based information to people carrying prototype readers developed for the trial. From the article: “Bringing the terminal close to an RFID tag on a street lamp will pinpoint the user’s location and the system will be able to guide them to the nearest railway station, while walking past a radio beacon in front of a shop might bring up details of current special offers or a menu for a restaurant.” This is more of the kind of thing we were jawboning about at the Metaverse Roadmap summit. This is the metaverse all around us, the physical-world extension of the metaversal computing power we think of as residing mostly on our desktops or laptops. The Ginza project should be an interesting test of just how useful such technology can be at the moment.

As Ogle Earth points out, the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth is taking place June 5-9 in San Francisco. This sounds like a very cool event, devoted to an “international vision” that “encompasses the virtual and 3-D representation of the Earth with vast amounts of scientific, natural, and cultural information that is spatially referenced and interconnected with digital knowledge archives from around the planet to describe and understand the Earth, its systems, and human activities.” This is one of the things we were kicking around earlier this year at the Metaverse Roadmap summit that looked at how various technologies might develop not just to create richer and more extensive virtual worlds but to replicate the real world in a digital medium as well, and how that might become useful in various ways. While the program for the symposium isn’t set, speakers will include Al Gore and Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers of computing as we know it today. (A call for presentations at the symposium is open until January 15.) Attendance is a bit expensive, at $650 for the whole shot, but if you can swing I imagine it will be a very interesting place to be.