3pointD.com

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.