3pointD.com

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!

What this put me in mind of, too, was virtual pop-up books. Now how cool would that be? Are these out there? Instead of the more or less universally lame in-world books Second Life now features, why not publish some that take better advantage of the platform? Think of it: You click the cover of the book and it flips open, it speaks the first couple of lines of the text (just a couple of lines per spread, like a kids book), and out pops a clanking robot that acts out that moment of the story. Click the book again and the robot dies, the page flips, the next couple of lines of text are spoken and the next 3D model is rezzed, etc. I want one! And I’ll pay. L$5,000 for whoever drops me the best pop-up book built to the specs above by the end of Sunday, December 17. (Drop them on Walker Spaight in Second Life.) What do I mean by best? The one I think is coolest. Results will be published on 3pointD.com and the best entries will be displayed in the Dirty sim. Get to work.