3pointD.com

The Google Earth Blog carries the news that Jeff Han, who developed a truly amazing multi-touch screen interface at NYU, is now commercializing the product through his new company, Perceptive Pixel. Fast Company has a great piece on Han, and there’s a bandwidth-intensive video to watch, which shows some pretty mind-blowing stuff. When I first started hearing about these things last spring I was drooling over them, and they only seem to have gotten cooler since then. Little word yet on pricing, though Fast Company notes that there are already competitors out there. These include Microsoft (at around $50,000) and perhaps even Apple. Han has already sold a screen to the military for six figures, however. Now all I need is a little extra cash.

Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red passes on a link to the renewed rumor that Google is working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world that would work similarly to Second Life. We’ve heard mutterings of this kind of thing before. This one comes from “an academic who heard through the Ph.D. grapevine,” which doesn’t lend it any more credence, in my book. That said, it would make an awful lot of sense. Whether it’s going on or not probably depends on whether Google’s muckety-mucks believe there’s much of a future in virtual worlds. I know that a few significant people there are at least partial believers, but I’m not sure if there’s a great deal of buy-in at high levels or not. Would be ace, if so.

Turns out that the BBC’s virtual world for children is not in fact a virtual world, 3pointD hears, as was widely mis-reported (including by me) this week. Seems the service will be strictly single-player, with no direct interactions between users, although it may have some limited interaction with the Web in some form. So not as 3pointD as it might have been. Sorry, kids.

SL resident Williem Leandros sends news that he and a friend have built an interesting real-world control panel that can both control objects in the virtual world of Second Life and in turn be controlled by them. The real and virtual controllers are “entangled together through a Python web server” so that turning a knob on the physical controller affects the same knob on the virtual one. Pushing buttons on the virtual controller can light LEDs on the physical one. The project is just a proof of concept, but of course “the same techniques can connect other real world objects to other SL objects,” which is the kind of thing that someone somewhere will eventually find a productive use for. “We’ll probably be connecting the panel to trains and fireworks,” writes one of the pair (from whom I’ve lifted the screenshot above). Very cool. See the virtual controller for yourself »in the Pi region« of SL.