3pointD.com

• YouTube - “We Are the Strange” Trailer
  Hey sundance people, bring M dot Strange’s movie, We are the Strange, to SL!
  (tags: art film funny movie music video youtube)

Just a quick one to note that Reuters’ Second Life correspondent Adam Pasick has roped some big guns into the virtual world. Starting Wednesday afternoon (24 January), SL time, he’ll be conducting a series of interviews with attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, one of the heaviest of heavyweight gatherings of movers and shakers anywhere in the world. While Davos can be interesting, it’s influence has actually waned in recent years. Perhaps more significant than the messages coming out of the forum, at least as far as the 3pointD world is concerned, is the message that Pasick’s interviews will be sending into it: By lining up eight influential personages to make appearances in Second Life during Davos, Reuters is spreading the word on virtual worlds to hundreds more such figures. That’s the kind of thing that can help lend momentum to 3D online technologies being adopted on a more widespread basis on down the line. For the full schedule of interviews, check the Reuters SL site. The event is being produced by the Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog.

Second Life resident FlipperPA Peregrine sends news that the BBC’s kids’ channel, CBBC, will launch a virtual world for children that’s due to go live as soon as this summer. Details are few at the moment, but for safety’s sake the world will not feature an SL-like economy, nor “facilities for building new parts of the virtual world.” The BBC story does say, however, that users will “have an opportunity to make that world a more fascinating place with their own imaginations.” Just how they’ll split that difference and make the world more than a simple 3D chat room remains to be seen. Successful social networking sites fly not merely on the strength of social networking, but because they incorporate tools for self-expression. There’s no reason to think a 3D social space wouldn’t need to offer similar functionality.

Raph Koster flags a report from Korea’s ETNews (subscription only) that describes a new trade association that’s been formed by Korean gold farmers and real-money trade sites to lobby the Korean government, which has been considering regulation of the sector. This is just the kind of issue we’re often concerned with over at the Second Life Herald, and which Herald founder Urizenus Sklar (aka Peter Ludlow) and I address quite a bit in the book we recently wrote (which should perhaps appear between covers by the end of this year). While it may be quite apparent to most readers of this blog, a lot of the general public has little notion that there’s so much more going on in virtual worlds than simply games. Real-world issues like this and related issues of taxation, law and contractual obligations are only just now beginning to be examined and worked out by the courts in various countries. Call it a first step in the rationalization of the metaverse. In the best case scenario, it should lead to the online portion of our lives becoming more secure and more grounded, and less of the wild-west scenario it’s still often portrayed as.

Just a quick post to revisit an older entry about getting SketchUp models into Second Life. There are some recent comments there asking for help with similar projects, so I thought I’d just give it a bump. IBM’s Roo Reynolds had a SketchUp to SL importer going last summer, but it would be great to know if anyone has been using this kind of thing very much, or has done any more development work. And if you can help out Richard in the comments thread, so much the better.

News that Irish comedian Jimmy Carr would do a stand-up gig in the virtual world of Second Life apparently didn’t raise enough eyebrows for virtual-world services firm Fusion Unity Ltd., which has just issued another press release for the February 3 event. But checking in at the company’s Web site (from which the image above was lifted), reveals something strange: almost nowhere on the site is Second Life referred to as Second Life; instead, it’s re-branded as The Metaverse throughout, except in a couple of press releases on the news page.

The site almost makes it sound like Fusion Unity built the virtual world itself — though it avoids actually making that claim (a move that seems better thought out than the spelling on the site). The page describing real-world simulations also seems slightly misleading, featuring Linden Lab’s prim oil rig in SL’s ANWR region as an example of a simulation of a hazardous real-world location.

Fusion Unity’s merits as a design team — which may be formidable, for all I know — are difficult to untangle from its obfuscation of the virtual world’s origins. (Do I smell a debate between Virtual Creationists and Virtual Darwinists brewing?) But one thing that’s interesting to note is that Linden Lab founder and CEO Philip Rosedale has never had any problem with co-opting his customers’ creations as part of his PR efforts, often speaking about the fact that his company has the largest content-creation team in the world working for it. Is this kind of turnabout fair play? Or is it a matter for the DMCA?