3pointD.com

Entropia Universe continues to baffle. The virtual world just closed an auction of three “prestigious” shopping malls, which brought a total of US$179,666 in PED, their virtual currency, which is fixed at 10 to the US dollar. Bids had started at PED1 just a few days ago, if I understand the situation correctly. They were won by two Entropia players: Onkel RobRoy Bob took the Twin Peaks and Emerald Lakes malls for PED350,004 and PED746,007 respectively, while the Port Atlantis mall went to Epsilon Eps Vaz for PED700,667. I’d be interested to know whether this was money these players earned in Entropia or bought with real-world currency. Can a virtual shopping mall really make back that kind of investment? Well, they do each come with space for 36 shops and three Trade Centers, as well as rooftop spacecraft landing pads (pictured) “for future use.” More details on how all this works would be welcome, if any Entropians are reading this.

Very worth noting: The intensely creative Ordinal Malaprop, one of Second Life’s most prominent Steampunk figures, is in the process of putting together “a triple-barrelled Snowball Cannon, as well as an attachment which makes one vulnerable to the excessive chills of snowball assault.” A Snowball Rifle (pictured) and a free handheld Thrower of Snowballs will also be available. Bless her clanking, contraptionary heart.

Second Life resident Max Case, inventor of the free Babbler heads-up display that allows translation between various languages in text chat within SL, has now come up with a standalone object called the De-Babbler that translates other people’s chat for you. The Babbler required the speaker to choose a native language and a language for their chat to be translated to. The De-Babbler (which is still in testing) allows the listener to choose a person in the vicinity and receive a translated version of their chat. This seems like a nice advance, since it means you no longer have to give someone a HUD and teach them how to use it — in a foreign language — before you can converse. Nice job. Available free at this »Second Life location« from the object pictured above.

Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company (3pointD’s sponsors) has an incredibly thorough year in review on his blog, giving a month-by-month recounting of what he sees as the most important events of 2006 for the virtual world of Second Life. Now, I’m not a terribly big fan of year-in-review posts, nor of prediction posts, but Giff’s is just so highly detailed I thought I’d link it here. What was your most important Second Life moment of 2006? For me, it was probably either Reuters coming into Second Life (for a variety of reasons, including the personal), or the NBC Christmas tree lighting. Both were watersheds in media discovering SL, if you ask me, which is going to be one of the most important uses for the “platform” going forward.

Check out the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies, which says it’s building something called a NeuroNet (announced in a press release today), that’s to be “a first generation network created specifically for the transmission of real-time, virtual reality (VR) and gaming data.” There doesn’t yet seem to be much to the organization, which bills itself as a kind of ICANN of virtual worlds, just a well made Web site, a few email addresses, a fax number and a mailing address in Vancouver. They don’t even provide a name of someone who’s heading the initiaitive. They’re holding a conference at the end of September (details to be announced in February) and they’re seeking advisory board members, but other than that, details are slim. The idea is well fleshed out on the site, however, and it’s an interesting one: to create a separate Internet-like network devoted to virtual worlds, virtual reality and gaming. But is this really something we need? (more…)

Gamasutra is running a nice feature in which a team from Intel that’s “focused on pushing the limits of PC gaming” describes the experience of creating a game for Google Earth. Called Mars Sucks, the game really just involves navigating to specific locations based on a series of clues, whereupon your spaceship starts blowing up the invading Martian craft you’ve found. Intel’s account of making the game is interesting, though. They used the Google Earth client and server, the Keyhole Markup Language (KML), a Web server and PHP5. They’ve made the source code freely available (via this zip file), and have described what went into the game in some detail. Their conclusion? “We learned that very simple games and casual games are possible now on Google Earth. We also learned that Google Earth is not yet ready to be the foundation of a serious action game. While we think the prototype [of Mars Sucks] is fun to play, it is just an early prototype. Further enhancements—some by Google and some by game developers—would go a long way to improving the game and making bigger and better games available.” (more…)