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According to a court brief I’ve just been emailed, a Pennsylvania court has allowed a lawsuit filed against Philip Rosedale and Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, to move forward despite Rosedale’s motion to dismiss the suit or have it arbitrated. The decision is significant in that the court has judged the SL Terms of Service to be insufficient to the job of adjudicating this particular dispute, and the judge in the case went so far as to characterize the ToS as a contract of adhesion — a contract that isn’t necessarily enforceable because it has more or less been forced on a party with weaker bargaining powers (i.e., the SL user) on a “take it or leave it” basis. The brief itself is linked from this Web page. The decision could have important ramifications for the way in which many virtual worlds come to be governed, possibly giving more rights to their residents than they have enjoyed before. (more…)

Multiverse, the open virtual-world building platform complete with universal browser being developed by some early Netscape employees, has just won $4.175 million in funding, according to a press release I’ve just been emailed. Congrats to Corey and the rest of the gang, who have been looking for this money for some time. The cash comes from Sterling Stamos Capital Management, and Multiverse says it will use the money to staff up and head for a launch of their product later this year or early next. (It’s already in beta.) Joanna Strober, director of Private Equity at Sterling Stamos, will join the Multiverse board.

Multiverse have to feel relieved by this development, as it was beginning to look like it was taking longer than it should for them to find this round. It’s good news for those of us interested to see what the Multiverse network of virtual worlds will look like. Perhaps more important than the launch of the platform itself is the launch of some games and virtual worlds for it, since it’s those that will draw people in. Tons of people are developing for it; we look forward to a release.

Full text of press release after the jump. (more…)

The virtual world of Second Life got a little bit stranger for me this week. I went over to see Destroy Television the other day at the gallery where she’s hanging out at the moment, and my avatar, Walker Spaight, ended up marrying her! (That’s Destroy’s rock at left.) Now, if you know me and you know my Second Life, this is slightly unusual, since for me there’s very little space between myself and my avatar(s) in the virtual world. I use Second Life as simply an extension of my first life; there’s nothing virtual about it. But here I was role-playing the lovestruck journalist to Destroy’s hard-to-get videographizing vixen. Walker even started a Tumblog about his romance. The formal ceremony was yesterday afternoon (Walker was all nerves — though he didn’t show it), and you can view images of the happy couple together on Destroy’s Flickr stream.

It struck me at some point that what I was doing — along with Annie Ok, who was driving Destroy at the time, and Jerry Paffendorf and Christian Westbrook, who conceived Destroy and brought her to life — was creating a little Alternative Virtual Reality Game, in a way. I don’t write a lot about alternate reality games (ARGs) — i.e., narratives that involve audience participation, which usually have some real-world component, and which often feature a prize or reward at the end — mostly because I don’t really roll with them as a genre. Things like Perplex City and World Without Oil are very cool, to be sure, and I’ve been fascinated to see how this stuff is developing, but I’ve always found myself rubbed the wrong way by this “alternate reality” moniker. But it wasn’t until I started getting my alternate reality on, via Walker, that I realized why. What’s going on in all these cases looks to me less like “alternate reality” than it does like fiction, and fiction being formulated on the same level as broadcast media like television — i.e., it’s just the same kind of fiction that’s happening in a TV show like Law & Order, for instance, only with the audience involved in writing the story as it goes along. From some angles, it looks like there isn’t any such thing as an alternate reality game at all — there’s only the fiction / narrative / media of the future. (more…)

Two stories out of Sweden in today’s D-Briefs, plus a charity in Africa, a party for a book of watercolors and one for Second Lifers in Europe, and eight job openings — all happening in or around virtual worlds.

• SL.UK07, Europe’s annual meetup for Second Lifers, now has a date: it’ll take place 23 June, starting midday (that’s noon if you’re American) till “rather late,” at a place called the T-Bar, located in the Tea Building, Shoreditch High Street, London E1. RSVP to Nick [at] riversrunred.com. Machinima or video submissions can be sent to Eddie Escher in SL, music submissions to Neil [at] riversrunred.com, and art gallery submissions / video projections to Rosie [at] riversrunred.com, all of which must be received by 16 June. Places are limited, RSVP early.

(more…)

Artur Bergman, writing on O’Reilly Radar, has a good wrap of the location-based services that were trotted out last night at Where 2.0. We posted yesterday about UpNext, about which there’s now more detail, and Artur has good insights into other services as well.

UpNext sounds pretty cool, featuring “a 3D cityscape of New York” where you can zoom around, select different data sets and mash up things like your Upcoming.org events. Plus, “You can click on any building to find out what is in it, as well as tag buildings.” It’s not avatarized nor multi-user, but otherwise sounds quite nice. Of course, it sounds like you could build similar functions for Google Earth with a little bit of effort, and the new Google Maps Street View gives you a crude approximation of the scene at street level (it actually took me a minute to recognize the facade of the building I live in when I looked it up). But UpNext sounds like — sorry about all the “sounds like,” there’s still very littile information on just how it works and what it does — it sounds like it comes ready to load up with events and people and all the rest, which means it could catch on if people dig the interface. (more…)

I had a brief visit with Second Life resident epredator Potato today (that’s him in the audience with me above) at what is currently »the main court« of the French Open tennis tournament in Second Life. epred, of course, is the SL avatar of IBM metaverse evangelist Ian Hughes, whose virtual Wimbledon of about a year ago was more or less responsible for galvanizing IBM’s attention to virtual worlds and 3D technologies. The Roland Garros version of the build does the same shot-for-shot replication of live matches as epredator’s original Wimbledon, but uses SL’s physics engine to pitch the ball back and forth across the net. You can also “play” the points, or at least view them from the player’s-eye-view, which is a nice touch. Walker took to the court with his golf club, which you can see after the jump. (more…)

Eva and Franco Mattes, the Italian artists and pranksters who put on the 13 Most Beautiful Avatars show in February, have another series of portraits on display, starting June 2. This time it’s Annoying Japanese Child Dinosaur, a portrait series featuring avatars constructed in the virtual world of Second Life to resemble Japanese children. (I.e., residents’ avatars, not avatars constructed specially for the show.) The title of the show is apparently taken from a James Patrick Kelly novella titled Mr. Boy, which is “the tale of a genetically stunted 12-year-old who literally lives inside his mother, who has turned herself into a three-quarter-scale model of the Statue of Liberty. And his best friend, Stennie, is a child-dinosaur,” according to Franco. Very Second Life. The February show in New York was fairly gorgeous. This show, at Dockswiss in Luzern, Switzerland, is not to be missed if you’re anywhere nearby. There’s an opening reception for the artists on Friday, June 1, from 6-8pm. If you miss them there, you may be able to catch them on »Cosmos Island«, where they’re reenacting Joseph Beuys 7,000 Oaks as part of a series of Synthetic Performances, or reenactments of historical performances by artists like Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Valie Export inside synthetic worlds such as Second Life. Definitely worth checking out. Be grateful that two such creative minds as Eva and Franco are working in SL. They push the boundaries of art and performance in the real world; it’s interesting to see how they approach the same task in Second Life.

UpNext is in closed beta, but it sounds like it could be very cool. According to Mashable, it provides “a 3D virtual cityscape, providing users a way to explore cities. UpNext will offer ways to search visually online to find out what’s going on in their city, or cities, on a local level.” Very cool, very metaversal, very 3pointD. The team (seen above), which has just started a blog, is launching the service tonight at Where 2.0. If this works, it could be close to the virtual Williamsburg that the Electric Sheep Company’s Jerry Paffendorf is always on about. It doesn’t sound like it’s avatarized, though we won’t know until tonight. To tell you the truth, I’m a bit surprised that no one has combined these ideas yet: a 3D representation of my neighborhood, links to the Web, and all in an avatarized, multiuser space. Coming soon, I imagine. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing what’s up next for UpNext.

• Pictogame.com - Create free games for MySpace and your blog
  love the idea of widgetizable games (connect em all on the backend?)
  (tags: games widgets myspace flash)

• Pirates of the Caribbean Fans with a Nintendo DS(TM) Can Search for Hidden Treasure at Disney Parks: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
  via gamesetwatch
  (tags: disney games virtual themeparks caribbean treasure)
• quakr
  Quakr is a project to build a 3-dimensional world from user contributed photos - found via where20 twitter feed (3 days away)
  (tags: maps ugc photos 3d where20)
• Variety.com - Fox brings ‘SIMS’ to bigscreen
  live action SIMS coming to a cinema near you - (via bbc gameblog)
  (tags: sims games movies ea fox)
• Feature Presentation: Financial Page: The New Yorker
  we generally do a poor job of evaluating our skills, and so get stuck with unsuitable products.
  (tags: product design newyorker gadgets features functionality form)

• Whyville.com Kids Eat Healthy or Get Scurvy
  who says avatars don’t eat
  (tags: whyville marketing edutainment virtual avatars)

Consultants McKinsey & Co. have launched a Virtual Venture Competition in the virtual world of Second Life. [Via Sebastian Kupers, who also provided the image above.] The competition is open to students and young professionals no more than 32 years old, and first prize is US$20,000 in training and career counselling. Teams get 45 days to build a business, but there’s no fixed start or end date, you can apparently jump in at any time. Only a limited number of teams will receive initial funding, however. Speaking of funding, McKinsey is so adamant that no outside funding be used that it will be monitoring account balances during the competition (see the FAQ), so if you want to play, you’ll have to roll a new alt for the purpose. I actually think this sounds like a great project; it should attract young people who aren’t necessarily SL residents already, and it’s a nice vote of confidence that SL is a place with real lessons to be learned. The build looks pretty nice too. Check out McKinsey’s »orientation island« and its »Infocenter«.

3pointD’s D-Briefs feature started just about a week ago, and in its second appearance I mused about possibilities for a briefs icon to mark the features. Well, that’s just what I got, from a reader calling himself (or herself) “anonymous.” 3pointD thanks you for your contribution, wherever you are. Herewith the news in brief: 24 hours of live music, plus Intel and Philips in SL. (more…)

• Iminlikewithyou and Game Design in the Web at kev/null
  Kev/Null on the game design of “iilwy” with response from founder in the comments
  (tags: applications community design economics game play social web)

DoMyStuff.com actually launched in April, but it represents an interesting dovetail with some of the ideas that knock around among some of the younger metarati. In particular, a few people have been talking about wish markets: marketplaces that let buyers announce what they’re looking for and receive offers from vendors, rather than the normal course of commerce as we’ve come to know it, in which vendors announce their products and receive offers from buyers. Wish markets are cool not only because they tend to promote competition if they’re broad enough, and thus lower prices (as on Priceline), but also because they allow you to shop for the thing you actually want, rather than having to choose from the limited number of things that are already out there. You can tell a wish market that you want something that might never have existed before, and if you’re willing to pay enough for it, the market will create it for you. Just like having a wish fulfilled (for a price, of course).

DoMyStuff has created what’s more or less a wish market for chores and other small tasks. It’s not terribly unlike Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where employers crowdsource small tasks, for small change. But DoMyStuff services involve either “local tasks,” which include stuff like Clean My House and Do My Laundry, and Yard Cleaning, or “global tasks,” which are more like Upgrade My WordPress Blog and Find Me Clients, that can be done from anywhere (similar to several sites that list small jobs for programmers and designers). The listings are essentially RFPs, or Requests for Proposals, and are even referred to as such in the php script that runs the site. What that means, of course, is that competition for jobs drives the price down, instead of competition for products driving the price up in an auction market like eBay.

My favorite thing about DoMyStuff, though, is not necessarily the market mechanism. That’s been seen before, here and there. It’s the fact that this market is designed for face-to-face meetings, to create a more dynamic market for chores, of all things. (Isn’t there a Cory Doctorow chapter about a similar system?) (more…)

Mitch Kapor, an early investor in and board member of Linden Lab, creators of the virtual world of Second Life, will give a talk this evening in SL, all about the Level Playing Field Institute, where he also sits on the board and which “promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces by removing barriers to full participation,” and about philanthropy in general. Mitch’s talk at last year’s Second Life Community Convention was a really informative and insightful look at how disruptive technologies happen (something Kapor knows a lot about, having helped make computers useful for large numbers of people). If he can have the same effect on reducing the kind of subtle bias in education and the workplace that holds people back without many people even being aware of it, it’ll be a great thing. Mitch’s talk goes off at 8pm SL Time (11pm Eastern), and you’ll be able to listen to it at »Sheep Island Auditorium«, »Crayon Theater«, and »Reuters Auditorium«. The late time unfortunately puts it out of reach of most European SL members, but hopefully the talk will be archived somewhere on the Web.

Don’t miss the Metaverse Meetup this evening at 7pm, where we’ll be back at the Fuse Gallery (93 Second Avenue, between 5th & 6th Streets, through the back of Lit Lounge) for the opening of Destroy Television’s gallery show, which I blogged up a week or so ago. More information from Jerry in several recent blog posts. Should be a hoot, as usual. See you there.

View22 Technology has announced what it calls a “3D Web commerce and media platform” that “simplifies the process of adding 3D Web applications and customer experiences into the marketing mix.” Known as Immersiv (and viewable in video clips on the View22 site), the tech resembles a fancy Flash app with a few extra features, including camera controls, integration with Google’s 3D Warehouse of Sketchup objects, support for a number of files formats, and a few other things mentioned at the end of this post. What’s interesting to me, though, is how View22 is positioning the product. If View22’s press release is to be believed, this is one of the first nearly plug-n-play 3D ecommerce packages to come along. (CyWorld USA is using it as an ecommerce solution for one of their media partners.) According to the release, “The new platform enables manufacturers, retailers, media networks, content developers and third-party integrators to quickly customize and deploy a range of in-demand applications such as 3D virtual stores and showrooms; 3D product configurators and visualizers; 3D social networking experiences; 3D Web sales automation systems; interactive 3D room planners; and interactive brand promotion and online advertising.” There may well be one out there, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a Web-based 3D ecommerce system that makes so many end-to-end claims for itself, from the aforementioned file format support to “integrated Web 2.0 services, customizable catalog and user interface, and an ad serving module” (see below). It remains to be seen, of course, how well it works and how easy it is to use, but it’s an interesting foray into the market nonetheless. (more…)

A year ago or more I blogged about a company called Immersion that was developing touchscreens that touch back — i.e., touchscreens for mobile devices that give haptic feedback when the screen is touched, so that you can actually feel the “buttons” pictured on the screen and users know they’ve input something. Simple idea, but a really nice usability feature, I imagine. Now Immersion has unveiled its TouchSense system at this week’s international symposium of the Society for Information Display (SID) in Long Beach CA. No word yet on who will be using the tech in their devices, but it seems only a matter of time before this or something like it is fairly widespread.

• YouTube - The civil war in four minutes
  Timelapse video of a map showing Civil War battles and movements…four years of war in four minutes. The video was produced by Harvest Moon Studio for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. (via kottke)
  (tags: animation history new video visualization war youtube)

GeoCommons is a cool-looking service designed to let you “explore, create and share geographic data and intelligent maps.” That is, it’s a map-mashup-maker. But this one comes with the built-in ability to publish your maps through a variety of channels, and provides access to “geographic information beyond anything Google Earth is producing right now,” according to an email I just got from a PR dude working on behalf of FortiusOne, the company behind GeoCommons. The service goes into public beta on 28 May, to be introduced at the Where 2.0 conference. The Web site description is promising, with talk of a large number of data sets to choose from, plus the ability to add your own, support for various kinds of tagging and metadata, and map sharing, syndication and social networking tools. (more…)

The virtual world of Second Life will apparently get native voice support and sculpted prims in tomorrow’s software update, as promised, according to back-channel chit-chat. The features have been available in beta for some weeks now, but Linden Lab apparently feels they’re now ready to go live in full release. That’s a pretty quick development cycle for LL, you have to hand it to them in this case. But get ready for a certain amount of disruption as SL culture grapples with the presence of voice (which caused a certain amount of social stratification when it was introduced into There.com) and new building techniques that are closer to the way the rest of the world does things and may, to an extent, increase the competitive pressures on SL’s native master builders. Interesting times ahead in the virtual world. [UPDATE: Further back-channel chit-chat seems to contradict at least the voice part of earlier reports. Either the right Linden doesn’t know what the left Linden is doing, or there be rumor-mongers among us. Tune in tomorrow to find out just what LL has up its virtual sleeve.]

Icarus Studios, which makes tools for building 3D massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds and other similiar environments, has a new next-gen platform and suite of middleware tools out, according to a press release from the company, which you can find below. (The Icarus platform is currently in use by “two unnamed clients covered by NDAs,” as well as the forthcoming MMO Fallen Earth.) It’s interesting to note what the release says about how well Icarus-built worlds can be integrated with the Web and other external functions. Icarus will feature “integrated working browsers, dial-out to real world phones, and real-time video streaming,” apparently, and will support functionality such as “user-generated content, in-world social and entertainment activities, diverse revenue models, and in-world profiled marketing on a secure and scaleable platform.” I don’t imagine middleware solutions are generally the best way to build open, Web-integrated, general-purpose 3D spaces, but this kind of thing could move standard MMOs further toward something of the sort, and generally get more people used to the idea of a 3D world that interfaces smoothly with the 2D Web, or that’s useful as a social-networking app, thus opening the door for 3D spaces to assume more and more of the functionality we now associate with the Web. (more…)

Holographic television displays are apparently closer than we thought, according to a company called SeeReal Technologies. They’re developing 3D holographic display techniques that would work on flat LCD screens and would not require special glasses. The system tracks viewers’ eyes and directs output accordingly. For more detail, you can read a good FAQ page on their site. Or show up tomorrow (23 May), at the Society for Information Display’s International Symposium in Long Beach CA, where SeeReal will unveil some of their new tech, according to a press release. Sounds promising. But how does it look?

Two SL videos, an interview with Little Big Planet, and the first presidential campaign to have an official SL presence. I suspect headline-writing is going to be the hardest thing about these D-Briefs I’ve started doing. By the way, does anyone have a “briefs” icon I can use for these? Feel free to send it along. (more…)

• Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game - New York Times
  nyt feature on seriosity and entellium & productive gaming!
  (tags: business design games gaming HCI marketing software)
• Gaming: 2012: Online Only Video: The New Yorker
  Will Wright does a Spore demo for the New Yorker
  (tags: games interview spore videogames)

Channel 4 Radio of the UK has launched a permanent presence in the virtual world of Second Life, where they plan to offer a variety of programming ranging across entertainment, music, documentaries, news and current affairs. The island was constructed by leading UK virtual worlds consultancy, Rivers Run Red, and officially opened today. It comprises a shop, where a free radio wristwatch can be obtained, a studio (whose use is currently unclear), a dance area and “interactive archive pods.” High above the island is a single-seater pod, but there did not appear to be anything playing when I visited. There is also a link to the Channel 4 Radio Web site, where the station already broadcasts its content. Whether being offered in Second Life can add anything to that content remains to be seen. (more…)

UgoTrade has a lengthy write-up of some of the work IBM has been doing in the virtual world of Second Life lately. [Via IBM’s Rob Smart.] The blog entry is all about creating links between the real world and the virtual world, so that sensor data and other information can be visualized in Second Life on a real-time basis. In the screenshot above, “The blue balls with white designs represent active Bluetooth devices. The pyramids scattered about the floor represent other people working, with the color designating things like physical presence or telepresence,” according to UgoTrade. This is just one kind of application that could start to make Second Life a much more useful place. I’d love to see entities and conditions being tracked around SL in real time. Why? Because there’s a ton of information to be extracted from a digital environment, which can then be applied to real-world problems from logistics to marketing to sociology, you name it. That said, this won’t start to get really interesting until we have a nearly plug-n-play solution. Which is probably one of the things IBM is working on. Keep your sensors tuned.

Metaverse services company in-world momentum has begun construction on a virtual Munich in Second Life, the company announced today. Tourist attractions like the Marienplatz, the Viktualienmarkt, and the Frauenkirche should be built out by the end of June, and offices and shopfronts will eventually be offered for rent to SL members. There are a number of blog entries in English, and you should be able to follow the project’s construction at the site. While there’s not much here to get excited about yet, one interesting aspect is the entry detailing how the team shrank Munich down to manageable size. In the end, though, this isn’t the kind of virtual reflection of real-world people, activity and events that could be one of the most interesting uses of Second Life, but only a virtual tourist attraction and demo project. There’s a lot of potential here, though, given the density of tech in Munich, so we look forward to seeing where the SL version of the city goes.

Linden Lab has bought Windward Mark, a company that creates realistic lighting and cloud systems for 3D online environments, according to a story in the Boston Globe. (The purchase was made for an undisclosed sum.) The company is apparently already at work adding their code to LL’s software. “Users should see a major improvement in visual quality within several weeks,” according to the article. I imagine this will be a contentious move in some quarters. There are many people who don’t very much love Second Life’s current lighting systems — but there are many as well who will question why money and effort are being used to improve lighting instead of hiring more talent to stabilize the underlying platform. Let the debate continue.

Amy Wilson has been painting really nice watercolors illustrating her travels around the virtual world of Second Life for some time. Now, she’s published them in a 32-page book, available on Lulu.com. If you dug Giff’s Avatar Expression, you may well dig Amy’s work. The paintings are lovely, and the idea of using a virtual world as the source material for a painting is one that interests me a great deal. Painters have long used the real world around them as their subject matter; why not do the same with a virtual world? Does that mean Amy is painting from life? You can chat about that and other topics of art and virtual worlds at an opening in Second Life being thrown in Amy’s honor on June 2. More details on the where and when of that event when I get them.

Virtual entrepreneur Anshe Chung will launch a virtual world-spanning financial market in early June, according to a news release on the Anshe Chung Studios site. The service will “allow direct capital flow and investment across virtual world boundaries,” and will link the markets of Second Life, Entropia Universe and IMVU. Anshe Chung Studios — which is run by German citizens Ailin and Guntram Graef — will provide “a virtual financial market, financial products and a set of services” linking the three worlds. Among other things, the service will allow Second Life residents to invest their Linden dollars in things like malls and other locations in Entropia. Second Life land funds and similar instruments would be available for investment by holders of IMVU and Entropia currency, and IMVU fashion businesses might receive investments in L$ or PED (the Entropia currency). It remains to be seen whether there’s much of a market for such inter-world investment, but Anshe has a very interesting take on the possible effects of making financial borders more porous: (more…)