3pointD.com

Ceedubs (in red t-shirt) looks out from the virtual gallery and through the screen, while Destroy, housed in the real version of the virtual kitchen cabinet at center, looks on, and the real CW (not pictured) looks in from outside. Confused? Good.

Electric Sheep Christian Westbrook reports that he has now posted a downloadable series of the adventures of Destroy Television in the virtual world of Second Life. (Downloadable series of enormous files, that is.) Destroy, of course, is the multiuser avatar who lifelogs her every virtual moment on Flickr. But because she’s taking a screenshot every five seconds, ceedubs has been able to cut these all together into a very cool series of short films. The films are taken from the ten days in which Destroy was on display at the Fuse Gallery in New York City, and includes the 683MB monster I’m downloading at the moment — downloading because I want to see how much of our wedding Destroy managed to capture. It sounds all good fun and games, but there’s a serious side to it as well: consider what Destroy’s up to in the context of things like Justin.tv and Ustream. The original plan (not sure if it’s still the plan) was to embed clickable information into Destroy’s home movies, using a service like Click.tv, which seems to be dark at the moment, but which lets you embed links and comments at any point in a video clip, displays them as an overlay on the clip, and lets you click directly to that point. Imagine that kind of digitized information overlaid on your own lifestream, complete with whatever other information was embedded in the environment around you. Second Life constitutes an excellent testbed for that kind of service. Useful? Not at the moment, but it will be.

Virtual worlds entrepreneur Anshe Chung seems to have inadvertently caused quite a stir on the 3D avatarized chat platform IMVU, where she (she is really two people, a husband and wife) makes 3D objects that IMVU members can buy for their virtual environments. Anshe apparently lowered prices on some assets that other people had incorporated into their own products — a move that, given the vagaries of IMVU development, seems to have affected the derivative products by allowing competitors to introduce lower-priced virtual goods. Judging from forum traffic and comments on a recent 3pointD post, a lot of people over in IMVU are mightily pissed off. Anshe has apologized, but as usual, people seem to believe what they want to believe. Anshe has been a polarizing figure in the virtual world of Second Life over the years, so it’s hardly surprising she’d attract similar controversy in IMVU. It’s an interesting question, though, of whether she’s attracting more controversy being a user who has accumulated developer-like weight over the years, or whether a similar cock-up on the part of the developer would attract more ire. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to discuss these kinds of things at the Virtual Goods Summit this Friday, where I’ll be moderating a panel.

I’ve somehow broken the Glitchy Links that usually appear here, so Glitch has had to send this along by hand: It’s a 3D email application called, what else, 3D Mailbox, which represents your email in three dimensions — i.e., as objects in an environment I think you can navigate as you would a first-person shooter game. At the moment, there’s a single “level” which is built to resemble Miami Beach. According to the site, “Beautiful models represent good email, and sleazy guys represent spam.” Coming soon (if you pony up the $29.95 for the premium edition) is the Los Angeles International Airport level (I think a “wtf?” is not out of place here), where your email is represented as jetliners. Man, there would be some serious congestion at LAX if my inbox were trying to get clearance to land. The trailer (above) quite brilliantly invites users to “hang out with your mail poolside or feed your spam to the sharks.” Is this a threat to Seriosity’s Attent? Probably not. But Robert Savage, who’s behind 3D Mailbox, apparently likes the value proposition in representing flat data as 3D objects, since he’s done it before with VisitorVille, which turns statistics about the people who have visited your Web site into, well, people. To me, these feel like rather lonely applications. Or perhaps they’re just testament to the current frothiness of 3D.