Architecture Island, from SL resident Keystone Bouchard’s Flickr stream
Regular readers are aware that I often pine for a 3D wiki for the virtual world of Second Life, something akin to the one Hiro Pendragon made some time ago. I’d love to see an object that many people could modify in some way, which could be rolled back to earlier versions or have individual modifications ratified somehow by the group. Turns out I’m not the only one. I recently noticed an interesting discussion on The ARCH, an excellent blog on virtual architecture, about the possibilities for collaborative design mechanisms in Second Life (complete with transcript). Keystone Bouchard, who runs The ARCH, puts the problem nicely: “Is true Wikitecture and collaborative asynchronous design possible in Second Life? If so, what kinds of tools, scripts and rules might be necessary? Some exciting ideas are already beginning to surface.”
The transcript is a bit too long for me to read all the way through at the moment, but some interesting ideas appear there. A couple of my favorite come from a resident named Theory Shaw: (more…)
From the Metaverse in Real-World Governance department: the BBC ran an interesting story recently about the possibility that Iraqis might be able to use Google Earth to plan escape routes and make themselves safer from terrorist and milita attacks. [Spotted via Clipmarks.] “As the communal bloodshed has worsened, some Iraqis have set up advice websites to help others avoid the death squads. One tip — on the Iraq League site, one of the best known — is for people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth’s detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block,” writes the Beeb. (more…)
The »IBM CODESTATION« island I blogged about just now does indeed include a library of open-source objects and LSL code — though not quite in the way I’d hoped. What IBM has done is create a repository of scripted objects and scripts themselves — things like a clock, a teleporter, a mailbox, an object that rescales on click, a door, radar, poseball, etc. — very much akin to what’s available on the LSL wiki (wherever that resides these days). (more…)
Boy am I glad I stumbled on Aleister Kronos’s Ambling in Second Life blog today, since Aleister himself stumbled on IBM CODESTATION island in the virtual world of Second Life a couple of weeks ago. I just had a visit, and I’m happy to say it includes one of the coolest projects I’ve seen in a while: an »open-API mazebot« that users are invited to take and modify in various ways. This is something I’ve wanted to see in Second Life for a while (and was hoping for in the Lego Mindstorms project), and while any full-perm item you get in SL is of course modifiable, IBM has done a nice thing here by defining some parameters and setting out a task for users to work on. (more…)
This is not exactly 3pointD, but it’s definitely worthy of note: Amil Husain at the United Nations’ Millennium Campaign against poverty is looking for help in developing educational games to run on the $100 laptop in development by One Laptop Per Child, a group founded by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte that wants to put a laptop in the hands of children in poorer nations around the world. Husain wants to produce “entertaining game modules” that cover the eight Millennium Development Goals, and is looking for assistance finding “game developers who have experience translating difficult development issues into entertaining games.” If you think you can help, or you know someone who can, get in touch with Amil at amilhusain [AT] gmail.com.
CNet’s Dan Terdiman has a nice story on the winners of the business plan contest in Second Life that just wrapped up, which was put on by Edelman and the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog). Top prize was taken by Market Truths, which plans “a market research and analysis system to help real-world companies figure out what works and what doesn’t in the burgeoning virtual world.” They walk away with six months of free access to a private island, plus L$350,000 in prize money (a little over US$1,000). I’ve been a big fan of this contest for some time, so I’ll be interested to see what Market Truths can do with their new venture. I’d also love to see a small VC fund that backed virtual business ideas. A few thousand bucks tossed in that direction could go a long way, I think. [UPDATE: The Business Communicators of SL blog has a good interview up with Pebble Hannya of Market Truths.]
It’s been a while since I checked in with Tech Geek Blogger Robert Scoble, but reader Sean FitzGerald sent me a Scobleizer link last night that couldn’t be more 3pointD. An Australian company called Outback Online has a new social 3D virtual world in the works, one that is designed more or less as a competitor to Second Life. The site is advertising “user-generated places,” which of course will be “infinitely scalable.” While the project isn’t very far along yet, Scoble does note, “I saw some brilliant things here that are worth watching.”
In his chat with Outback, the company outlined some of the advantages their platform is designed to have over a service like SL:
• Outback wants to have better graphics than Second Life.
• The company claims it can get up to 10,000 avatars on a single “island.”
• More granualar age controls will make it easier for kids and adults to safely co-exist and interact.
• Developing simultaneously for the Mac only slows things down, they say. But they are also working on an Xbox version!
• “Instead of hosting everything on centrally-located servers they are using P2P to get more people onto islands and bring better graphical performance.”
It’s official: The third annual Second Life Community Convention is set to take place in the windy city, Chicago, on August 24-26 at the Hilton Chicago, according to an announcement on the official SLCC blog. Tentatively planned for October, it seems the city was already packed with events, and August was determined to be the next best time. 3pointD hopes to be there, although I have no idea whether I’ll have drained my conference-going budget by then. Last year’s event was a hoot, with 500 flesh-and-blood avatars selling out the joint in San Francisco. No word yet on what capacity will be this year, but count on it being a bigger party than ever. See you there (I hope).
Jerry Paffendorf, Rik Riel, my friend Micah and I dropped in Saturday night at the 13 Most Beautiful Avatars show at the Postmasters gallery in New York. The prints on display were beautiful 36″x 48″ prints of avatars taken from the virtual world of Second Life by a pair of artists named Eva and Franco Mattes, who together constitute 0100101110101101.ORG. I don’t know where that number came from, but it spells 19,373 in binary (unless my calculator is broken). I spoke to Franco at the show and he told me a little but about their work and the process of putting the show together, but what I didn’t realize at the time is that he and Eva and a pair of hacktivistpranksters (or “restless European con-artists,” as they describe themselves) who have engaged in some pretty formidable and in some ways very 3pointD works of art in years past. (more…)
I received a nice note from Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, in response to my looong post of Saturday entitled “Linden Lab Approaches A Crossroads.” I won’t quote from it, as it’s not an official LL response, but I’ll raise a couple of the points Cory mentions in order to give a differing viewpoint on a couple of things. (more…)
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There comes a time in the life all good blogs when they must spruce things up a bit, and such a moment has now been reached by 3pointD. I need a logo, to fill the space in the upper left that’s now occupied by the title and description. Let’s say it has to be 468×60 pixels, so that I can use it for an advertisement, and also has to come in a 125×125 version. It doesn’t have to include the description line, just the word “3pointD.” And it has to better than the crude 3pedia logo that I pasted together a while back, which you can see above.
What do you get if you do me this favor? Well, you get paid, for one thing. (more…)
In the space of two days, Linden Lab, maker of the virtual world of Second Life, has made three separate announcements that indicate trouble may be on the horizon for the company — if it hasn’t already arrived. Two of them have raised renewed alarms about the platform’s scalability. Though CEO Philip Rosedale blithely assured the world last summer that Second Life could “scale to inifinity,” he seemed to be the only one who believed such an absurd claim. The skeptics are now being proven correct. And instead of concentrating all of its firepower on solving the current problem, the Lab is also casting about for ideas on how to beef up its 2D Web interface — despite the fact that any number of developers large and small are already working on the same thing. Is trouble ahead? It sure smells like it. Read on for our conclusions as to why. Though this post may be overly alarmist, to a certain extent, we’re looking at serious issues here. Take it with a grain of salt, but not too big a grain. (more…)
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Readers might remember the business plan contest that was announced last November by Edelman and the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog). You’ll be able to find out who had the best get-rich-quick (or -slow) scheme on Monday, February 19, when the winners are announced on »Edelman Island«, according to Sheep Giff Constable. The four finalists:
* Anthony Reisman, Navillus Batra, Trilobye Pugilist, and Woodrow Seelowe: Metaverse Tech
* Frank Koolhaas and Zoe Visconti: SL Search
* Ozgur Ariel, Cihan Ariel, and Muammer Ariel: SL Music Network
* Pebbles Hannya: Market Truths
The Sundance Channel in Second Life will be holding weekly screenings of films from the festival and elsewhere, beginning tonight at 5:00pm SL time (8:00pm Eastern), according to the site. Tonight’s screening will feature the “Best of the Fest” wrap-up episode of Sundance’s “Festival Dailies” coverage from the 2007 Festival, followed next week by six “Greenimation” eco-friendly animated shorts, and on March 2 by the nine films in the “Art of Seduction” series.
The open screenings will take place at the Sundance’s main Second Life »screening room«. You can also find video on demand at several media lounges at the Sundance build, featuring more short films and promos for Sundance Channel shoes. Check it out.
Progress Bar flags a post from Pink Tentacle (which is itself a translation of a Japanese news story) about a new micro-miniaturized radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that’s been developed by Hitachi. The new chip is 0.05 x 0.05 millimeters — that’s 1/20th of a millimeter on either side, or small enough to exist as a powder or dust, and possibly even as a floating cloud. Each can store a 38-digit number, which means you could actually get quite a bit of information into a cloud or dusting of such chips. The pic above (borrowed from Pink Tentacle) shows an older chip on the left, and the new chips on the right, next to a human hair. While Pink Tentacle mentions them in connection with embedding them in sheets of paper, that doesn’t even begin to touch the potential for this kind of thing. I’m much more interested in more 3D-focused applications that these could be used for. (more…)
Let’s dispense with the news straight off: The metaverse meetup that’s slated for 23 February now has a location: Planet Thailand in Williamsburg, which is letting us take over their back room for the event, so you’ll be able to munch Pad Thai and eggplant and wander around and chat to whoever you want to. More importantly, though, a bunch of us checked out Uffie at the Hiro Ballroom last night, and she was awesome — at least, in her way. And in fact, the show was a really interesting look at how deeply the idea of lifelogging and recording one’s raw experience has infected the choices entertainers are making and how that’s affecting the kinds of media that are being created these days. (Pics at the end of it all as well.) (more…)
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Kitten Fluff has noticed a plugin for Firefox running on your Windows machine that gives you a Second Life-related browser toolbar. While the download page itself gives precious few clues as to why you’d want to use something like this, the toolbar seems to have a ZDNet download page that gives more information. The toolbar apparently comes pre-loaded with interfaces to a number of SL search sites and other SL-related resources. (Description after the jump.) That page only went up five days ago, but I haven’t heard anything about this tool before, which leads me to ask, Is this legit? The keylogging possibilities are too great to get me to download it without more information, which is hard to find — at least in English. (more…)
The Virtual Worlds, Real Profits blogs has the news (which I spotted via Raph) about a new player-to-player real-money-trade service called Sparter that has fortuitously launched just after eBay started pulling all game-related RMT from its auctions. The new service is notable for two reasons, and could spell the beginning of the end of the wild-west atmosphere that currently holds around virtual item sales — though conditions will probably get more messy before they get neater. (more…)
SLInsider reports that the Postmasters Gallery in New York City will be mounting a show of portraits of Second Life avatars on February 17. The portraits were shot by Eva and Franco Mattes, as far as I can tell, and have been digitally printed on canvas at 36″ x 48″, all of which sounds like it makes for a pretty formidable show. I’m planning to drop by for the opening, this Saturday, 17 February at 6:00pm Eastern, but the show will be up for a month, so if you’re in the area, don’t miss it. Great way to spread the virtual word to a broader audience, if you ask me.
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Trevor Smith, who’s been hard at work on his open-source 3D platform, Ogoglio, has begun a SourceForge project, where he’ll eventually make the code available. While there aren’t any file packages yet, you can browse the repository if you want to get a look at the bits of code Trevor has made available so far. You can also take a look at this YouTube clip, which is Trevor’s fifth screencast in which he describes the state of Ogoglio affairs. As you’ll see, the world is working — if crudely, at the moment. But you can already import .obj files and see them in one of the browser-based worldlets that Ogoglio creates. That’s an apartment building in the pic here that was imported from 3D marketplace TurboSquid into Blender, and then on into Ogoglio (where the default red robot avatar is looking on). This is basically still early-alpha technology that’s more 3D Web than virtual worldy, but it’s one to watch. [Via Hugo Junot.]
Click image for JimmyJet Fossett’s Flickr set from the event
No, not the official guide to promoting Second Life. Second Life resident JimmyJet Fossett snapped a bunch of good pictures of last night’s in-world author appearance promoting the book Second Life: The Official Guide, which I wrote two chapters of, and he was kind enough to send along a link to the Flickr set where they’re posted. There were a few great avatars in attendance, so they’re worth checking out. No good griefers, unfortunately. (more…)
I can’t believe the YouTube clip above has been up there for six months and I’ve only just found it now. I no longer want a touchscreen, now I want a BumpTop interface (which got Dugg a couple of weeks ago and is now all over the Internet, of course). Watch the video above. It contains some of the only truly new GUI techniques I’ve seen in a long time. Touchscreens are extra cool, but they really only give you new ways to do what you’re already doing with a mouse and keyboard. The BumpTop actually gives you useful new ways to easily organize information visually and in three dimensions. Very, very exciting.
There’s an excellent piece in the Hollywood Reporter at the moment by Andrew Wallenstein that looks at media companies’ growing interest in Second Life and other virtual worlds. Wallenstein has done a great job gathering a range of perspectives and dispenses with the usual lurid descriptions of what’s going on in SL. In fact, his description of the service is one of the best I’ve ever read: “Imagine the premise of 1999’s “The Matrix,” which presented a computer-generated 3-D alternate universe where humans could interact, filtered through the bizarre sensibility of “Alice in Wonderland” and rendered with the graphics of “Grand Theft Auto,” and you’ll end up with something like Second Life.” Spot on. More importantly, Wallenstein talks to a couple of analysts who have very balanced and sensible things to say about the potential of Second Life for media companies and others. We’ve talked on SecondCast before about the fact that much of the value of launching in Second Life is in the print headlines you garner, not the in-world eyeballs you reach. JupiterResearch vp and senior analyst David Card feels similarly: “There’s definitely buzz and quite a bit of growth, but it’s still a relatively small platform,” he tells Wallenstein. “So many companies are getting in now, but at some point the PR value will wear off, and these things will have to pay off on how many people are being reached.” Any way you slice these things, this is recommended reading.
From what 3pointD hears, Linden Lab is very close to integrating native voice support for the virtual world of Second Life. Of course, things they’ve claimed are “very close” in the past have taken months or years to implement (or were in fact not being worked on at all), and the Lab has been having some pretty severe problems of late. But a number of other companies are working on or alreadyproviding stand-alone voice services that are integrated with Second Life. Now comes a press release from Internet telephonists Woize International (that’s their cool little logo above) flagging a new “voice-to-voice” product as an “interactive advertising service.” Are avatars soon going to start getting cold calls from marketers? (more…)
Yup, we’ll be in the virtual world of Second Life this evening for a meet-the-authors event to promote the official guide to Second Life, which came out a couple of months ago and has been selling like hotcakes since then, I hear. The event starts at 6:00pm SL time (9:00pm Eastern), and will take place at the amphitheatre in one of Joi Ito’s sims, »in Kula 1«. The Wiley store can be found »in Furu«, though I’m not exactly sure what’s going on there. Show up early for your seat, it should be a fun evening — depending on the quality of griefers we get, of course.
Well, Jerry’s at it again. This time he’s roped me in to give some kind of presentation at this month’s Metaverse Meetup in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Brooklyn is, of course, the capital of the metaverse, for those who didn’t already know.) In fact, it’ll be a fun evening. The metaverse meetups regularly draw a great crowd of people doing fascinating things with virtual worlds, geospatial technologies and lifelogging, and there’s ample opportunity to drink in a rich stew of ideas, socialize and just generally goof off from 6:00pm into the wee hours of the morning, if you last that long. [UPDATE: There’s now a location for this event. It’ll start off in the back room at Planet Thailand in Williamsburg, and move on from there.] (more…)
Second Life resident Forseti Svarog (aka Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company) has begun a search for the greatest architectural wonders of the virtual world of Second Life, which he plans to collect in Volume 2 of Great Builds of SL, a virtual book you can pick up in the »Bisque region« of Second Life. So if you have one in mind, drop him an IM in-world, or email him at forseti.svarog[AT]gmail.com.
I love the idea of a virtual picture book on Second Life (such as this one). The only way I’d love it more were if it were real. (Who knows, maybe that’s on the way as well.) I actually think it’s important to keep these kind of documents updated, since SL is so mercurial, and great builds rise and fall practically overnight. I’d love to be able to look back on the best, rather than have to lament that they’ve been lost to the pixelated mists of time.
Well, it’s official: celebrity scents are over. As of tonight, you’re nobody if you don’t have your own 3D virtual world. Just ask supermodel-cum-talk show host Tyra Banks, who opened Tyra’s Virtual Studio this evening with a grammy party. “The studio is a free virtual world where you can listen to music, chat with your friends, get insider info about what’s happening at the Tyra Banks Show and just hang out,” according to the site. But you knew that already. In Tyra’s Virtual Studio, however (which is available for both Windows and Mac), “Your avatar can drop it like it’s hot.” Whew. We knew there was some added value here. (more…)
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Vice Magazine launches pretty online video site. Lots of good stuff from the leading purveyors of wonderfully controversial hipster irony. Based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Powered by Brightcove.
This is not exactly 3pointD, but it’s definitely worthy of note: Amil Husain at the United Nations’ 
There comes a time in the life all good blogs when they must spruce things up a bit, and such a moment has now been reached by 3pointD. I need a logo, to fill the space in the upper left that’s now occupied by the title and description. Let’s say it has to be 468×60 pixels, so that I can use it for an advertisement, and also has to come in a 125×125 version. It doesn’t have to include the description line, just the word “3pointD.” And it has to better than the crude 
Let’s dispense with the news straight off: The 
SLInsider 
From what 3pointD hears, 
Yup, we’ll be in the virtual world of 
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