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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.