3pointD.com

• Hunter S. Thompson: 1978 BBC Documentary ‘Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision’ - Google Video
  the vbs guys kinda remind me of HST. then again so does 3 point dizzle
  (tags: bbc documentary drugs history media politics video)
• Pruned: Super-Versailles
  my living room is starting to look more and more like these mega-control centers everyday. yipee!
  (tags: architecture information surveillance technology video visualization)
• Helvetica
  Helvetica: A Documentary Film; screening @ SXSW
  (tags: design documentary film movie videogames)

Finally! I’ve long thought the Rocky Horror Picture Show would be the perfect film to screen in the virtual world of Second Life. After all, it’s the original weird costumed participatory media experience, filled with sex, mad scientists and terrorized newbies — just like SL! Well, start working on your Frank N. Furter avatars, because the Pirate Cinema in Stockholm, Sweden (I think this is the link), is holding a Rocky Horror Picture Show Second Life-a-long that will pair a real-world screening with one in the virtual world.

The event is being held in collaboration with architecture students at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, who are billing it as “a night in the spirit of Piracy and architecture, an attempt to destroy the firewall between the physical and virtual, to create a fellowship without limits.” The film starts Thursday, March 1, at noon SL time, in »The Office region« of SL.

The great thing about it is that the real-life screening will be streamed into the virtual world. (The SL screening will apparently be streamed to the RL theater as well.) If you’re not a virgin, you know that this means that the SL audience will get to see not only the film itself, but the antics of Sweden’s costumed Rocky Horror fans as they prance and dance onstage, and ask questions and give directions to the actors (which the actors, of course, answer and follow slavishly). One can only imagine what the experience will be like in Second Life. (It would be great to get a regular screening going there to see how the Rocky Horror cult manifests itself in the virtual world.)

Excellent fun.

Media Machines, which makes the browser-based 3D Flux Player (Windows only) and Flux Studio (both free), has an interesting mashup on its site that combines a Flux window with Google Maps. Click on the map marker and a 3D model of the buildings there pops up in a Flux Player window. The new Flux Studio 2.0 can now natively import the KML files that are used in Google Earth (but not yet export), allowing Flux users to get models created in SketchUp or listed on SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse into their browser-based 3D scenes. (more…)

[UPDATE: Well, that’ll teach me. The Sheep’s appearance on the Today show has not been put off again. Sibley is now scheduled to appear Friday morning. Maybe. I think the next time I blog about this it’ll be after the fact.] The appearance of Sibley Verbeck, CEO of the Electric Sheep Company, on NBC’s Today Show, originally scheduled for last week, has now been rescheduled to this Thursday, March 1. Tune in between 8:00am and 10:00am Eastern (5:00am - 7:00am SL Time) to check him out.

I’m not saying Kaneva is the future; I’m just saying it could well capture a lot of little clicking fingers. [Now with further details.] I met with Kaneva CEO Christopher Klaus, COO Rob Frasca and marketing director Michelle Norwood yesterday at a Starbucks on the Upper West Side to hear what they’re up to, and I was surprised to find a lot of it dovetailed with some of the things I like to blah on about here on 3pointD. They won’t let me into the beta until next week because they’re moving some servers around at the moment — as well as barnstorming various bloggers and media outlets — but the demo reel I saw showed a system that seemed to combine the expressive power of MySpace with the social power of There.com, and which was a nice way to bridge the 2D and 3D online worlds without worrying too much about things like “immersion.” If it turns out people are starting to push the limits of what they can do on MySpace, this could be the natural next step for a lot of them. What it allows you to do, which MySpace doesn’t, is to engage in the kind of “social media consumption” (I just made that term up — I think) that has been one of the more powerful features of existing 3D social worlds, and which will increasingly come to mark our media habits in the future, if you ask me. (more…)