3pointD.com

Without an announcement on its official blog, Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, seems to have introduced a new capability for its in-world building tools that will allow them to better support established formats, something that SL builders have long found sorely lacking. The new feature should change the landscape for the SL building community by inviting in modelers whose skills have not been applicable before.

The new addition is known as a “sculpted prim” (short for primitive, the word used to denote the basic building block of SL objects), and should make it possible for 3D artists who are used to working in more standard formats to work more easily in Second Life. The scultped prim takes its shape from information encoded into the color channels of a texture. For reasons beyond my technical expertise, this makes it possible to create a more complex, more natural shape than is possible with the current set of SL build tools.

More importantly, it means that SL objects are suddenly a lot more interoperable with objects and shapes from other worlds and modelling programs. According to the Second Life wiki, “We provide an exporter for Maya, and hopefully exporters for 3ds Max, Blender, and ZBrush will be available soon. We also have plans to provide a sculpt editor within the Second Life viewer.” The wiki doesn’t say where this Maya exporter is available, but according to Tao Takashi, it may be in the next preview build of the client, due shortly. (more…)

A group of students from Brown University have launched an open-source museum in the virtual world of Second Life. Known as OSMOSA, the Open-Source Museum of Open-Source Art, the museum is located »in Second Life’s Eson region« and features a mess of artworks that anyone can copy, modify, alter or otherwise contribute to. The museum itself is open to alteration as well, which is a fantastic idea. The modding got under way at the opening party Tuesday night: an already-altered image of Manet’s Olympia (with space helmets added to make it more excellent) came out the other end of the night with some interesting additions and adjustments, as seen below:

(more…)

Kaneva, the social media virtual world, will be “launching” its economy in May, according to a press release. Members can already use Credits to purchase things like furniture, but a slightly more complex system seems to be going into place, one that attempts to guard against “real-money trade” — the out-of-game cash economy that parallels most virtual economies. Unfortunately, Kaneva seems to be missing an opportunity to make their world a more engaging place.

Kaneva members can already user “credits” to purchase things like furniture within the world, but an upcoming feature will let them purchase credits with real-world cash. No word yet on what the exchange rate will be, or whether it will be fixed or floating.

Members will also receive something called “reward credits.” It’s not entirely clear from the press release whether there are normal credits that are awarded for things like participating in “Stress Tests, special events, and contests,” or whether they’re a separate currency altogether. Their features are interesting: (more…)