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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?

Something else that cropped up while I was away: the news that AOL is launching services in the virtual world of Second Life, described in a Friday article on InfoWorld. Details are few at the moment, but it looks like AOL’s AOL Pointe area within SL will feature “an amphitheater and an extreme sports park, in which the company plans to highlight AOL content and services like AOL Music, Moviefone, TMZ, and Lat34.com.” Given AOL’s enormous audience (AOL.com is at #48 on Alexa’s global top 500) will this mean a flood of new users to Second Life? The company is taking an interesting approach, launching a beta test of its SL site within the next week or so. I haven’t seen this done before; it could be a sensible way for AOL to get its feet wet before they decide whether they want to dive into the virtual world. If they do jump in, look for a big splash. Would Linden Lab’s already over-taxed servers be able to handle it? We’ll see.

No, none of the names in that headline are misspelled. That’s virtual worlds researcher and journalist Aleks Krotoski, who has a nice interview with veteran games designer Raph Koster about the idea behind his new start-up, Areae, Inc. (from which I’ve stolen the image at left), on Friday’s Guardian GamesBlog. Don’t expect to read about just what Areae will be, though. Raph is remaining mum until he appears at GDC in early March. (Speculation is that it will either be a Second Life-like world with a better new-user experience or a tool to allow the creation of one’s own 3D space — both are things Raph has wished for in the past — or something similar or else completely different.) Instead, Raph talks about what virtual worlds can learn from Web 2.0 apps, and vice versa. And see below for another argument for interoperable virtual worlds. (more…)

As noted here, MTV is expanding its virtual world, Virtual Laguna Beach, to incorporate Laguna Beach spinoff show The Hills. (Read more about MTV’s virtual world initiative and how it came together in my piece in the February issue of Wired, which has just come out.) MTV’s vHills apparently launched last Monday, while I was away, but it’s now kicking off what could be a nice experiment in user-generated content: a fashion challenge (to be announced in vHills on Tuesday, 23 January, at 8pm EST) that looks like it will allow users to become either models or fashion designers. It’s also something that could help push adoption of virtual worlds as 3D social networking sites, if you ask me. (more…)

Virtual world services company Rivers Run Red forwards a press release from Talpa Digital about the DropZone project the two are producing in the virtual world of Second Life. Covering four SL regions, DropZone will host a festival stage, virtual skydiving, an area for viewing television programs piped into the virtual world, and a nightclub called Mundo, which will be the virtual arm of the Dutch dating site of the same name. In addition, “Talpa Digital is currently developing a unique technology for a virtual world version of Skoeps, the new citizen journalism site in the Netherlands. Offering the residents a chance to send in their Second Life skoep to huge billboards throughout this virtual world.” (Or at least, throughout the DropZone sims.) Perhaps more significantly, energy drink Red Bull will use the DropZone “to introduce their athletes in a live chat with their fans and to stream extreme sport events.” (more…)

• KOYAANISQATSI - Godfrey Reggio - making off - Google Video
  making of KOYAANISQATSI - trt: 24 minutes
  (tags: koyaanisqatsi movie glass reggio documentary video)

A last-minute trip sees 3pointD out of the country this week. Given the limited Internet access I have here in Amman, Jordan, posting looks like it will drop down to anywhere from slow to non-existent until at least the weekend, when I fly back. Since slow posting always earns me inquiries from kindly readers concerned that I may have broken my posting finger, I thought I’d drop a line here to let you know I’m on an unexpected hiatus. What am I doing here in Jordan? Well, it’s nothing very 3pointD, in fact, but I’ll give you the short version of what’s a much longer story after the jump in case you’re curious. (more…)

Stephen Hutcheon of the Syndney Morning Herald has a nice piece about a new build by some of the IBMers in the virtual world of Second Life, which does for the Australian Open tennis tournament what IBM did for Wimbledon on a smaller scale last summer. The virtual stadium re-creates the tournament in real time, shot-for-shot, based on real-time tracking data fed into the world. The Herald also mentions that spectators can choose to watch the matches “from a player’s perspective,” though I’m not entirely sure how that works. To see more, watch the YouTube video. (more…)

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.

IBM’s Ian Hughes (aka Second Life’s epredator Potato) flags a segment of the BBC Newsnight’s Geek Week 2.0 that examines the nature of the self in cyberspace. The 11-minute segment (click the virtual death link) is a really interesting examination of what it means to inhabit a metaversal presence, and well worth watching. (Second Life appears after about 7 minutes, for the fanbois out there who don’t want to watch the whole thing.) (more…)

Tony Walsh flags a couple of interesting stories from the world of virtual finance today. The virtual world of Entropia Universe is apparently auctioning off five virtual banking licenses, each with a two-year term, for vendors who will provide real-world banking services to players of the game. Meanwhile, over in Second Life, Kyle Polulak’s Crystal Studio (here’s their blog) is already experimenting with automated teller machines that would allow you to deposit L$ to a real-life bank account, with the transactions presumably being reflected in real-world denominations, according to an SLNN article. (Polulak, aka SL resident Fox Diller, is based in Canada.) (more…)

A press release from new-media marketers the Virtual Interactive Agency flags a new project they’re putting up in the virtual world of Second Life, in cooperation with something called the Ohio University Virtual Campus, which seems to have a few sims in SL. The new project is a “virtual security pavilion” that will house displays and demos by information security companies during a “virtual business fair” to be held February 5-14. The site mentions a conference fee of a whopping US$3,700, but that seems to include the Virtual Interactive Agency building out your booth for you. A limited number of billboards will also be available at US$425 each. In any case, it’s an interesting project. One wonders whether the firms represented there will address information security on the Web, in Second Life, or in some combination of the two. It will also be interesting to see whether a compelling event can be organized in this way, by presenting a conference center and then asking people to show up, rather than the other way round.

Les Moonves, president and CEO of CBS (yes, the television network), spoke about media convergence in his keynote speech yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show, and in the same breath mentioned a number of projects the network has going — including a planned Star Trek build in the virtual world of Second Life, which will be handled by the Electric Sheep Company (3pointD’s sponsors). Moonves also mentioned projects in the works with other partners, such as Sling Media and YouTube. Linden Lab founder and CEO Philip Rosedale took the stage with Moonves to demo Second Life and show a Sheep-produced machinima apparently featuring an early version of the Star Trek build. Nice for the Sheep and Linden Lab to be involved in such a partnership — and to be mentioned in the company of a site that was bought for $1.65 billion. This is also part of the growing trend of media convergence with virtual worlds that I’ve been so interested in lately. And Moonves says there’s more to come. “Anything is possible,” Moonves said. “Audiences know that, content people know that, and innovators in the digital space know that. In the weeks and months to come, we’ll have a lot more news on how we’ll be working with the interactive community in ways both big and small.”

• LJ Images - The latest 40 images posted to Live Journal
  found my fave site on the internet again.
  (tags: art blog content culture entertainment free fun images)

Filmmaker James Cameron of Titanic fame (and, probably more importantly to readers of this blog, The Terminator), has just gotten the go-ahead on his next film. What interests 3pointD about this is the fact that it will be filmed in a moviemaking version of a virtual world, and new details of the process have emerged in a story in today’s New York Times. Cameron is using the latest “performance-capture” technology to record the movements of actors’ bodies, as well as their facial expressions. But such recordings are usually made against a blank background that’s later filled with a digitally produced environment. In the case of Avatar, Cameron’s next film, “The most important innovation thus far has been a camera, designed by Mr. Cameron and his computer experts, that allows the director to observe the performances of the actors-as-aliens, in the film’s virtual environment, as it happens,” the Times writes. The key phrase here is “as it happens.” Cameron and his team have essentially created a virtual world that they view live as the performances are recorded. What they see on their screen is the motion-capture already composited into the digital environment, rather than having to wait until later to see the combination of the two streams of content. In addition, Cameron can pan and zoom around on the fly: “If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale. It’s pretty exciting,” he says. That’s exciting technology indeed. Though it bears little direct impact on current multiuser virtual worlds, it’s the kind of technology that will gradually filter down to broader levels, and the kind of filmmaking that could help promote Internet-based 3D spaces. Will the movie be any good? Who knows. The filmmaking techniques, however (which almost resemble the ultimate in machinima), are fascinating. And don’t forget that Cameron sits on the Multiverse advisory board.

Fans of Showtime’s long-running series “The L Word,” which is a kind of San Francisco lesbian version of Sex and the City (and a pretty entertaining show, actually), now have a place to hang out in the virtual world of Second Life. Built out by the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), »The L Word« sim in Second Life is a hangout for fans akin to MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach, a re-creation of portions of the show that fans can occupy themselves. There’s a special L Word in Second Life page on Showtime’s site, and the Sheep have even taken advantage of Linden Lab’s registration API to create a Showtime-branded SL signup page. This is the first such page I’ve seen and is an especially cool development, as it starts to push SL more toward being a service and away from being a hermetically sealed world. The project also has its own orientation island. (more…)

We knew it was too good to be true. Remember the extra-cool “Falcon” 3D haptic mouse from Novint Technologies that we blogged about way back last spring at E3? Well, it’s being made available later this year, just as Novint promised, but not at the $100 price point that was predicted at E3, at least, not yet. A Novint press release from the Consumer Electronics Show now on in Vegas flags a “Limited Edition Falcon Bundle” that will be available for $239, or $189 on pre-order, and that will ship on June 18. If you haven’t heard of the Falcon before, do read the blog post, because it’s an impressive piece of work (or if you’re at CES, stop by the Sands Expo and Convention Center, booth #72924 in the Gaming TechZone). (more…)

Four Eyed Monsters, the movie I’ve been blogging about periodically here, is finally getting its screening in the virtual world of Second Life, tomorrow at 5pm SL time (8pm Eastern). The screening will take place at the Sundance Channel’s Second Life »screening room«, as part of Sundance’s entry into SL. (Sundance is a client of the Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog.) The movie is a hugely interesting take on life and love both online and off, and addresses along the way questions of identity and how that’s changing in our increasingly virtual world. Check out the machinima invite that filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley have made for the film. They’ve really taken to SL since being introduced to it by me and Jerry Paffendorf a while back. Both filmmakers will be at the screening to chat with audience members. This is highly recommended viewing. [Oops: Forgot to mention that the film will simultanously be shown at a handful of other locations around SL, and you can even host your own. See the Sundance Channel’s Second Life page for more details.]

Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life has made an open-source version of its client software available for download, and sooner than most people expected. “Releasing the source now is our next invitation to the world to help build this global space for communication, business, and entertainment,” the company said early this morning on its official blog. An open-source client has long been talked about for Second Life, but many people thought it would take more time to get there because of the intricacy — and disorganization — of Linden Lab’s code. “Though Second Life makes abundant use of non-standard technologies, our basic UDP protocol message system for example, we rely on open standards and open source implementations when appropriate and available. Since many of the components that will make up this network are not yet done, we are not publishing long white papers or RFCs at this time — instead, we are giving everyone what we have along with a goal of producing those open standards with the input and assistance of the community that has brought Second Life to where it is now,” the company said.

Just the news for now, more analysis later. Do read David Kirkpatrick’s take. He seems to have been given the news early after a recent article in which he defended Linden Lab and Second Life against the depredations of some skeptics. His current piece is a good one, and includes some further skepticism about whether SL really is the Web of the future. In any case, the release of the client code marks the beginning of a new era in virtual worlds; there are other open-source corners of the metaverse, but none that have been seeded with hundreds of thousands of active users.

Your Sears kitchen in Second Life

IBM, which recently set up a business group to explore possibilities in virtual worlds — and earmarked millions of dollars for the effort — is now bringing mega-retailer Sears to the virtual world of Second Life in a project to be announced today, 8 January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. SL resident Ultravox Freeman, aka Mike Rowe, a senior project manager on IBM’s digital convergence team, was kind enough to give me a tour of the Sears build over the weekend.

Though the build is still a work in progress, Rowe said, each of the floors will present different possibilities for taking advantage of a 3D online world like Second Life for showing off Sears products and giving consumers more functionality than they could get from a flat Web page. Furthest along seemed to be the Kitchen and Appliances floor (pictured above), which currently allows visitors to re-color and re-texture the various appliances and surfaces of the virtual kitchen on display. The plan is to allow a customer to import their own kitchen design to the virtual space, fit it out with Sears products, and be able to move around in it as they would a real kitchen in order to get a feel for how the products would work in their kitchen at home. (more…)

• CrimeCraft Announced - Xbox
  urban MMOG annouced for XBOX 360 (via wonderland)
  (tags: game xbox mmog)

Graphic novelist (now there’s a double entendre) Warren Ellis launched his column for Reuters’ Second Life bureau today. Ellis’s take on the recent griefing of Second Life land baron Anshe Chung is refreshingly honest. Ellis writes of Anshe’s “desperation to drop the incident down an Orwellian memory hole” with the DMCA-like notices Anshe’s typists have been sending around. This is exactly correct; there’s no rights violation in a media outlet publishing a shot of an incident that took place in public, even if copyrighted material is contained in the image. Of course, most of the media outlets that did publish those shots (of Anshe being assaulted by a flock of flying penises during an interview with CNet) are hardly concerned. (more…)

The screenshot at left is lifted from a BlogHUD post by Second Life user CDB Barkley, which flags a shared markerboard created by user Cubist Scarborough, which you can see in the Cottonwood sim. It’s a pretty nice piece of work. You sit on one of a handful of chairs and click through to a Web page, where you can draw in various colors, as well as erase. Everyone’s contributions show up on the same board, which refreshes itself in SL every five seconds or so. (more…)

The MobVend vendor for the virtual world of Second Life has been around for about six weeks or so, but it’s interesting enough that I wanted to flag it here. A product of SL user Shep Korvin, the vendor sets prices on its items according to how many people are standing around it at a given moment. The bigger the crowd, the lower the price. You can buy at any time, but once the item hits its lowest price, the vendor sends a chat message to the crowd: you have only one minute to buy at that price before the price pops up to the top again and the process starts all over. (more…)

• The Sublet Experiment: A romantic comedy about mis-taken identity
  “This romantic comedy is performed for an audience of twelve in rotating venues of real people’s apartments. So not only do you get to watch a play, you can see how the other half lives.”
  (tags: traveling theater nyc)

I’m a big fan of the idea of user-created trust and ratings networks, although most of them seem to not work very well. I recently came across two interesting examples in the virtual world of Second Life, though, which are worth pointing out here. The first is Dale Glass’s TrustNet, a fee-based subscription system with a slightly confusing Web site (here’s the basic product description). The second is known as BanLink, created by Travis Lambert of »The Shelter« and Mera Pixel. Both systems seem to have their good and bad points. I present them here merely as example of ways to address issues of trust, ratings, conflict resolution and land bans in a virtual world like Second Life, not necessarily as product endorsements. I came across BanLink in a blog post by Mera, and TrustNet through a BlogHUD post I’ve since lost the link for, apologies.

TrustNet is the ratings system; BanLink provides a ban list. Both systems work by applying the ratings or bans of your first-order associates, as well as your own. TrustNet also applies the ratings of your closest associates’ closest associates (i.e., those who are two links away from you in your network). More detailed descriptions below the fold: (more…)

Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) has cooked up some nice graphs of the L$ currency used in the virtual world of Second Life, based on a new release of data from Linden Lab. The graphs clearly show things like the dip in value in May of last year, around the time Anshe hit the cover of Business Week, which kicked off a flood of press and new users. Around the same time, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale was also speaking about SL’s economy, and the lab was hit by a lawsuit that got a lot of press. The Lab also went live with SL economic data on May 9. I think there were also a few Grid attacks and perhaps a change to stipends around the same time. What’s more interesting about the graphs, though, is that they clearly show the exchange rate having been more or less stable through heavily rising trading volumes and the increase in sign-ups over the last year. Interesting stuff. Next up: someone start the SL Bureau of Economic Statistics I’ve wanted to see since I got to SL more than two years ago.

It still hasn’t snowed here in Brooklyn (Capital of the Metaverse), but you can now make it snow in the virtual world of Second Life — or at least, you can make it snow somewhere near your intended target, by using Ordinal Malaprop’s new snowball launchers, which I blogged a few days ago but which are now available for sale. There’s a free snowball rifle and two premium products available at Ordinal’s Steampunk shop »in the Caledon sim«, as well as a video on Ordinal’s blog. Happy new year!