3pointD.com

• 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…)