3pointD.com

Saul Hansell has a pretty nice piece in The New York Times today all about 3D printers and the possibility of their becoming cheap enough for home use. It’s a great vision, although it kind of misses two things: first, even though printers can be had increasingly cheaply, the materials needed to make solid, sturdy objects are very expensive. Second, printing out a 3D object is not as simple as just sketching on paper or sticking some primitives together in Second Life. A lot of work has to be done to insure that the object you’re trying to print is in fact internally consistent in a way the printer can handle, so that it won’t fall apart in the end. Neither of those points are mentioned, but they’re not insurmountable obstacles. Material prices will of course come down over time. And one of the potentially most promising uses Hansell mentions for the devices are to do things like “print out replacements for a dishwasher rack at home” (which doesn’t require any design knowledge on the user’s part). I imagine this will be how they’re used most often, to print out simple items the designs for which can be downloaded over the Internet. I really dig that vision of the future, in which I don’t have to go to the hardware store to buy some new jewel cases for the CDs I’m burning for friends, or a new part for the coffeemaker I broke last week. It isn’t quite here yet, but it’s probably coming.

Jordan Bigel (aka Second Life’s Dire Lobo) of metaverse development company InWorld Studios sends along the news that his company is launching a new movie service for the virtual world of Second Life. Set to premiere this Friday, 11 May, the service is known as InWorld Cinema and has some interesting features — and is opening with a full-length feature film. Audience members occupy individual “vPods” and access scenes or chapters within the film via a heads-up display. Tickets cost L$260 (about US$1) and let you spend as much time watching the movie in as many visits as you like over a 48-hour period. (more…)

If you missed the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference, don’t worry: now you can close your eyes and it’s almost like you’re there. John Swords has now posted most if not all of the audio files of the conference sessions over at RezNation.com, home of SecondCast. You can find all the files under the Metaverse Sessions tag, even though they’re not, really. What they are is good, informative listening. You can catch a case study of Pontiac in Second Life, the Electric Sheep Company’s Sibley Verbeck giving a keynote speech, IBM’s Colin Parris talking about his company’s plans for virtual environments, my own blatherings on a fun panel about the future of these things, and more. Happy listening.

Thursday, May 10, will mark the expansion of IBM’s presence in the virtual world of Second Life when the company opens “a new and unique island,” designed as a combination R&D lab and communications center for the company’s BeNeLux division (that’s Belgium-Netherlands-Luxembourg, to you) and its clients. Other than that, not much information is available about »IBM’s BeNeLux sim« at the moment, but we’ll bring you updates if we arrange a tour. The sim is closed to the public at the moment, but the place certainly looks cool enough in IBM’s press shots.