3pointD.com

• Millsberry - Main
  Millsberry - General Mills’, I believe, very own virtual world (another one with 2M+ uniques or something like that)
  (tags: branding browser community free fun game games marekting online virtual world)

Rik Riel has a good post on a project that opened last week and launched on Friday, built out by the Electric Sheep Company (3pointD’s sponsors). It’s STA Travel in Second Life, which seeks to do in SL more or less what it does for college students in the real world: point out the most interesting places, and provide a way to get there and an instant community when they arrive. With no lodging requirements at SL destinations, however, STA is instead providing free dorm rooms for people to hang out in — but the really interesting aspect of these is that they’re provided on a shared basis: you can claim and customize a room, furnish it from an in-world menu, and even drop some of your own items there, then save your settings. If you leave, the room reverts to a blank space ready for the next occupant. Come back to any of the many other dorm rooms and you can load your old settings from the service’s memory. The dorm service is in closed beta at the moment, though »STA’s sim nearby« is open for business. The shared room model is an interesting approach to scaling in Second Life, and could be a good way to reduce the resource needed to service a global audience (i.e., one that’s not all online at the same time). It’s hard to see that this scaling solution will scale significantly itself, but it feels like a technique that will have its uses from time to time. No doubt there’s some more technical version of this that’s in common use elsewhere; if so, please enlighten us in the comments thread.

Check out this video of a game called Metazoa Ludens that you and your hamster can play together. The hamsters apparently dig it. (There’s also a PC World story with more details.) It’s a bit like Mice Arena, only perhaps not quite as much fun, since in Metazoa Ludens your avatar isn’t being chased by a giant rodent, as in Mice Arena. Still, it’s an interesting use of 3pointD-related technologies, and it comes from the cool Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, who also brought us Human Pacman, which is possibly even cooler, and features full-on Rainbows End style “Head Mounted Displays” that show you the playing field in front of you, as below: