3pointD.com

Comcast, the largest provider of cable services in the US — and one of the world’s leading communications companies, providing broadband Internet and a host of other digital services — have had »an island« under development in the virtual world of Second Life for what seems like an eternity. I have tried on numerous occasions to gain access, since it looks rather intriguing on the Satellite Map view. Last night I gave it another go, and was pleasantly surprised to find myself standing in front of a teleport board, offering all manner of interesting pursuits. I had not picked up any hints that this site was due to open, and certainly the only other person present when I arrived was a developer, beavering away on various bits of fine tuning.

The build, from Millions of Us, is really too much to describe in one post — but I will give it a go. Most of the island is geared toward entertainment, with much for the seasoned traveller to try out. The main feature is a snaking tubular arrangement, which brought to my mind images of a particularly bizarre accident in a pipe factory. This turns out to be a raceway where up to four teams can compete against each other, around three laps of the tubular track, in zippy little flying cars. Unfortunately, as a solo adventurer, I evidently didn’t count as a team and it flatly refused to rez me a race craft. I had more luck outside, where I took the opportunity to ride (and repeatedly crash) a rather skittish jet-ski. Again, a track has been laid out to allow you and your friends to race these unmanageable brutes. (more…)

June 13 will see cable new network CNN kick off something it’s calling a Future Summit with a “landmark television event.” Why does 3pointD care? Because the series, which looks like it will unfold more on the Web than on the air, starts with Future Summit: Virtual Worlds, featuring everyone from Linden Lab CEO Phhilip Rosedale to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield, Funcom CEO Trond Aas, and people like EA co-founder Trip Hawkins, Jimmy Wales and Nick Yee, among others. There’s precious little information on the site about just what’s happening and when, but it sounds like it should contain a lot of information of interest to metaversal types. (more…)

Second Life resident Forseti Svarog (aka the Electric Sheep Company’s Giff Constable) has put together a cool collection of SL screenshots showing, at last count, 46 bridges that have been built in Second Life, including the quite beautiful example above, from the Svarga region of SL. Forseti’s looking for more, so drop him a landmark in SL if you know of any bridges that aren’t in his set. If he can find enough, maybe he’ll make a book out of them, as he’s done in the past with shots of SL avatars (a physical book) and the great builds of SL (a virtual one).

Cool British journo-researcher Aleks Krotoski has a couple of really good interviews up on the Guardian Gamesblog with veteran games designer Mark Eyles, who’s now in academia. In part one of their interview, Eyles talks about “ambient gaming,” and describes the thinking behind his game, Ambient Quest. (In part two, he talks about academia.) Ambient Quest is PC-only and requires a game-master, of all things, so I haven’t checked it out yet (and I actually have a hard time understanding how it works based on the description on its Web site), but the idea is cool — although it strikes me that it’s hardly as ambient as Justin Hall’s Passively Multiplayer Online Game, where I’ve become a level 77 Seer by dint of doing almost exactly nothing. Regardless, the ideas that Eyles is exploring are fascinating (read his paper on ambient RPGs), and dovetail with thoughts that have appeared on 3pointD and elsewhere in the guise of things like lifelogging and ideas about bringing game-like feedback mechanisms into the workplace (a la Seriosity). The interview raises some interesting questions — Where is the line between gaming and recording behavior? Does PMOG qualify as a game just because it lays the trappings of games atop a record of the things I do every day anyway? — and is well worth the read. And if you can figure out how to play the damn thing, let me know.

Sky News, the leading satellite news broadcaster in the UK, assisted by brand consultants and SL builders Rivers Run Red, recently launched »an island« in the virtual world of Second Life. The launch event was tied into a broadcast from the Guardian Hay Festival, an annual literary festival held in the picturesque and distinctly bibliophilic town of Hay-on-Wye. Sky News are setting out to be the first real-world television news service to establish a permanent bridgehead in the virtual world, and thus steal a march on their opposition. Until now, UK television news and current affairs programmes have had only sporadic involvement in Second Life, most recently with the broadcast of BBC2’s “The Money Programme” (also managed by Rivers Run Red).

I understand there were virtual queues of around 700 people trying to gain access to the launch event, which garnered a lot of good press in the blogosphere. However, as I tend to avoid such functions and their attendant lag, I did not venture into the island until much later, once the fuss had died down. To say the site is now quiet is something of an understatement. I have been back a few times, and on each occasion there have been at most 3 or 4 other visitors. (more…)