3pointD.com

Wells Fargo, which launched a 3D online financial education site for young people on the ActiveWorlds platform about a year ago (after a failed attempt to do so in the virtual world of Second Life), is now expanding their offerings there, according to a press release. This could be a sign that Wells Fargo is trying to fix something that’s broke, but my sense of it is that it means the project has been a success for the bank; I imagine they would simply have pulled the plug on such an experiment if it wasn’t working. The Web site for the project, known as Stagecoach Island, indicates there are 85 Stagecoach Island “millionaires,” and that $168 million in “interest” has been earned in the last 24 hours, so there’s something going on there. The news is a nice shot in the arm for ActiveWorlds, which has a number of devoted communities, but which doesn’t seem to have the reach of Second Life. That said, ActiveWorlds seems easier to customize than SL (see, for instance, the dedicated Wells Fargo client, which you can download for free. This may soon change, however, with the recent open-sourcing of the SL client. (more…)

I blogged the DIY fabrication kit made available by Fab@Home back in November, but it’s getting a new round of press, so it seems a good thing to flag again. The New Scientist has an article [spotted via Virtual Worldlets] about the do-it-yourself kit, which drops the price of a fabber from the $20,000 to $1.5 million range, down to about $2,400. “Full documentation on how to build and operate the machine, along with all the software required, are available on the Fab@Home website, and all designs, documents and software have been released for free,” as the New Scientist notes. The Fab@Home site has also been updated with some cool movies and galleries, and a small community of DIY fabbers is beginning to develop via the site’s guest book. As I urged in November: get to work. Also: Is anyone using one of these things to fab items they’ve designed in a virtual world? Let us know.

If you’ve visited the Virtual Laguna Beach Web site recently, as I just did as I was composing the last post, you might have noticed a new link there (as I just did), to a trailer for something called Virtual Hills. The trailer, which is very slow to load so I haven’t actually watched the whole thing, appears to be not for anything virtual but for the second season of Laguna Beach spinoff show The Hills. But the site itself seems to advertise a virtual version of The Hills featuring “Hot Hollywood locations,” “Fashion shows with Lauren and Whitney,” and “Partying with Heidi.” I’d heard vague plans to expand VLB into The Hills, but this is the first I’ve seen that it’s actually imminent. Look for MTV to add Hollywood locations from the show not as a separate world but as an extension of VLB. And because it’s about an aspiring fashion designer, there are huge opportunities here to incorporate user-generated content and perhaps even skill ladders for popular designers and similar game mechanics. It’s a good indication, too, that MTV is still serious about its experiment and is only pushing forward with expanding its offerings. That implies that they consider VLB a success so far, and lends yet more credence to the assertion that 3D online worlds could well be the next phase of social networking and media convergence.

Reuters has a story today about Disney moving further toward massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds, an announcement made by CEO Bob Iger at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Iger says the company will make MMOs and virtual worlds “based on a broad range of our properties” into a bigger priority going forward. Disney’s Pirate of the Caribbean Online is only the first such offering in the works, apparently. “You can imagine living in Buzz and Woody’s toy universe,” Iger added. Whether this means more games only, or includes virtual worlds along the lines of MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach remains to be seen. But this speech, along with a similar announcement from CBS chief exec Les Moonves, is a good indication that more and more media companies are seeing virtual worlds as an important part of their offerings. This is the new trend in media convergence, as far as I’m concerned. Look for much more of this ahead.