3pointD.com

• Maps drawn from memory (kottke.org)
  Lots of great links from kottke re: maps drawn from memory
  (tags: art education map)

MovieTickets.com has launched an experimental island in the virtual world of Second Life, according to a press release. They’ve built »a huge theater« on their MovieTickets island in Second Life, where you can go to watch trailers of the latest films and click through to the MovieTickets.com page where you can find local showtimes and purchase tickets. The theater build is actually pretty cool, with a spacious lobby and tall screening rooms that make a lot more sense than most of the screening locations I’ve seen in Second Life. I’m not sure there’s huge advantage in going 3D with this service, but MovieTickets apparently has further plans. (more…)

HBO’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival will be coming to the virtual world of Second Life on Thursday, March 1, according to Reuben Steiger over at Millions of Us. Thursday’s event, which will kick off at 2:00pm SL time (5:00pm Eastern), will feature some live streaming audio standup and MCing from emerging talent Hyla Matthews, followed by a streaming video roundup of talent from the festival. The event takes place at HBO’s »Virtual Comedy House« in the Playground region of SL. IM Baccara Millionsofus to RSVP for the event, or email baccararhodes AT gmail.com. Sounds like good fun.

Episode #53 of SecondCast is up on the SecondCast site (or can be listened to in the sidebar here, or downloaded from iTunes), and it’s fairly hilarious right off the bat. Like really hilarious, as in the first three minutes will have you on the floor. And the bleeps! Hear Lordfly file an abuse report against Johnny’s face. Pretty excellent stuff.

When you’re done with that, go check out Episode #1 of the relaunched Grid Review, the machinima news project being produced by Edelman and the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog). Now benefitting from the Sheep’s absorption of master machinimators the Ill Clan, as well as expert narration from SecondCast’s own Johnny Ming, the Grid Review is suddenly totally entertaining (whereas the old format was only somewhat entertaining in its own format, if you ask me, despite the presence of some great machinimators). Let’s hope they can keep it up.

Murat Aktihanoglu, who I met at the recent metaverse meetup, sends words of a mashup he’s developing that will make Google Earth into a multi-user application with the help of Skype. Needless to say, this is the kind of thing that excites 3pointD, and is in fact something we’ve been looking for for some time. You can download an early version at the somewhat oddly named Unype site. Unype lives between my Skype and yours, and between Google Earth and Skype on both machines. Fire up Skype and GE, click to connect your instance of Unype to them, click to connect to a friend within Unype, and then have your friend click Unype’s “follow” button. Then, when you navigate in your Google Earth, Unype automatically navigates your friend’s Google Earth to the same place. That’s cool as far as it goes, but there’s more coming, Murat says. (more…)