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I hadn’t heard of Mappa Novus until someone dropped it in the comments here. The Mappa crew is doing interesting work creating maps of the virtual world of Second Life that seem to be mashed up with the Google Maps interface, and overlaid with data layers about population, land sales, etc. On top of that, they’ve layered some advanced edition maps that you can subscribe to for $7.95 a month or $19.95 for three months, which give extra data about land sales. The whole deal seems to be able the real estate business, as there’s also a land search tool available. They also have printed maps available for sale. (more…)

With the success of Nicktropolis and even more so WebKinz, Club Penguin, and things like GoPets and more (Animal Crossing, anyone?), virtual worlds for kids have become the hot ticket this summer. Two new ones are on their way: one an educational 3D theme park, the other a cool 2D “world” designed in part by Aardman Animations, the outfit behind the excellent Wallace & Gromit cartoons.

The Aardman offering is known as WebbliWorld, and is populated by all kinds of avatars and features beginning for the most part with W- or Webbli-. That’s WebbliWallace above, the avatar I created by sticking together the bits and pieces on offer. Not really an immersive multiuser world, as far as I can tell, WebbliWorld instead offers a range of Flash games and activities designed to educate young ‘uns and inspire them to take on real-world activities like sports or mucking about in the garden. You can view other Webblis profiles, but communication seems limited. (more…)

The Electric Sheep Company (which sponsors 3pointD) yesterday launched its new shopping site for the virtual world of Second Life. Known as OnRez, and launched with little fanfare, the site really constitutes the migration and overhaul of the old SLBoutique (which now redirects to OnRez), one of SL’s longest-standing shopping sites. The Sheep bought SLBoutique early on in the company’s history, and had been struggling with its codebase ever since. OnRez represents the chance to get new users interested in the Sheep’s Web-based services, and as such is an important step forward. Will it work? (more…)

Groups are a standard feature of the virtual world of Second Life. They provide communities for avatars with mutual interests, and can range across every interest or specialization known to avatar-kind. Within Second Life an avatar can be a member of up to 25 groups. Sometimes they are used to restrict access to specific areas, but more often they are used as a communication medium, as it is possible to send messages to all (online) members simultaneously.

A couple of months ago a new group was founded by Nick Wilson (aka 57 Miles in Second Life) of the popular Metaversed blog. It was called “Things To Do” and was based on the simple premise that Second Life is a social environment in which it is enjoyable to share activities with people, and make friends. Things To Do has since grown into both a popular group and an effective communications channel. But it also illustrates some of the limitations of social tools in Second Life, and raises some interesting questions about how to reach and manage large communities of people within the virtual world. (more…)

The Guardian had not a bad story the other day about the potential for virtual worlds, focusing mostly on business uses. In contrast to some other recent takes on this in the press, the Guardian story seems more balanced to me, acknowledging that things are still at an early stage, and also tipping their hat to a wider universe of worlds than only Second Life. The article also calls out one of my favorite subjects: the convergence of virtual worlds and Web 2.0, which is still at a nascent stage. Judging from who’s quoted there, the article seems to have been inspired in part by the upcoming Virtual Worlds Forum Europe (more on that here), which takes place October 23-26 in London. I’ve been hoping to make that, but it’s looking less and less likely. There’s an excellent roster of speakers that are going to be on hand, though, so if you’re in the area, go for it.

Check out this demo of a 3D rendering engine concept that the Useless Pickles blog hacked up in JavaScript. It works by manipulating the borders of page elements so that they appear as triangles — which means it could conceivably be used to render objects of some complexity, since most 3D objects are rendered out of meshes of triangles. Of course, JavaScript probably doesn’t scale to that point, but it’s a very interesting hack nonetheless. Nice stuff. [Via Hackzine, from whom I’ve stolen the image above.]

Check out the mobile wizardry of Second Life resident Wrestling Hulka, who has a limited version of the virtual world running on the Nokia n800. [Via Metaversed, from whom I’ve stolen the pic above.] Cool stuff. Recall there was another mobile client for Second Life that was developed earlier in the year. 3pointD hears that others may be working on similar apps — although I’m not sure I need an “immersive” experience on my mobile device. What I definitely would like, however, is the ability to interact with people who are in the virtual world via my phone and functions like instant messaging, my virtual currency account, etc. That’s far more useful, but is apparently less sexy and more difficult, since I don’t hear as much about people developing these kinds of functions. We can only hope.

I won’t be able to make this, unfortunately, but what sounds a really interesting panel will be held this Thursday, July 19, in the virtual world of Second Life. Kicking off at 6pm SL time (9pm Eastern), the panel will be a “Virtual Roundtable,” discussing “what drives the virtual human connection.” Moderated by Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company, it features some great speakers: Susan Wu of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Charles River Ventures, Beth Coleman of MIT, Robin Harper of Linden Lab, and Chris Carella, creative director of the Electric Sheep Company. (more…)

The YouTube video above is a very cool way to leverage the expressive capabilities of the virtual world of Second Life, if you ask me. It describes the Second Chance Trees reforestation project, which was designed and built out by social media communications company Converseon, in partnership with Plant-It 2020, a non-profit whose business it is to plant and maintain indigenous trees around the world. For each virtual tree planted »on Second Chance Trees island« in Second Life (at a cost of L$300, or about US$1), Plant-It will plant one tree in the real world. Now, the Second Chance Trees project has a chance to be funded to the tune of one to five million dollars (and plant a corresponding number of real-world trees) through the American Express Members Project, where Second Chance Trees has made it into the round of 50 finalists. Vote for the project if you dig what you see.

I couldn’t get this to work yesterday and I still can’t today, but one of the Electric Sheep got it working and it sounds fascinating. Someone (said to be a teen) has created an Ajax-based client for the virtual world of Second Life. Is this the start of browser-based SL use? That’s a potentially revolutionary idea. From the original post describing AjaxLife:

Due to some combination of boredom, wanting to talk to people in SL, and inspiration from a vague memory of something Interfect Sonic did, I decided to start work on an AJAX based SL client.

It’s still under heavy development, but the result so far is an application/page/site called AjaxLife.

It now works on the MG (I think!)

Features
* Basic map
* Teleports
* Accepting/declining teleport offers
* Local chat, instant messages (partially — you can’t start them except with online friends)
* Inventory received notifications
* Friend on/offline notifications
* Balance change notifications, etc.

It also correctly logs you in and out, and notifies you if you were disconnected for any reason.

Let us know if you get it going. [Via Vint Falken.]

Virtual worlds researcher Aleks Krotoski, who’s been working on a Ph.D. about social networks in virtual worlds, has posted about some of her findings, which are available in the form of an excellent video presentation you can find at the Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences (scroll down). You can also download the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. Aleks is doing very interesting research measuring the ties among people in the virtual world of Second Life, and is farming results from an opt-in survey she made of 10,000 SL residents. What’s to be learned here? According to Aleks, you can discern several things: (more…)

The latest company to catch on to the fact that computer games provide compelling feedback mechanisms is Amazon.com, which recently launched its Askville service, where users earn virtual currency for answering other users’ questions. A lot of attention has been paid to the accompanying Questville, which, according to the Askville FAQ (at Experience Points, Levels and Quest Coins, question #7) is described as “a new website” where “you will be able to use your Quest Coins to participate in exciting new adventures and other cool things!” Most everyone takes this to be a virtual world, although I’m not sure where that idea originated. Regardless, what’s more interesting to me is the fact that Amazon is leveraging game mechanics to expand into another new area of service, i.e., what’s essentially a human-powered knowledge search. Askville rewards answerers with Quest Coins that will be useful in Questville. Of course, you get extra coins for embedding Amazon widgets in your answers. What’s really going on here is a kind of human-powered advertising program akin to AdWords, but with only one advertisers, so that people embed Amazon ads in what are essentially search results, rather than using an algorithm. The question is whether Questville will be a compelling enough experience to keep real experts coming back to answer questions in Askville and earn more Questville coins. And is it actually a virtual world? Interestingly, RCE Universe’s Nate Randall asked Askville the question, What is Questville?, but the entry has received only four answers so far, and it doesn’t seem they’ll be available to view for another day or so. Stay tuned.

There’s yet another virtual worlds conference that’s just popped up in my email. This one’s Serious Virtual Worlds, September 13-14, in Coventry, England, of all places (it’s being put on by something called the Serious Games Institute and sponsored in part by Coventry University). It’s bloody expensive, as our British friends would say, but only a few of the speakers have been announced as yet. That combined with its location in what’s vaguely equivalent to the Research Triangle of the UK is another sure sign of the (pre?) maturation the virtual worlds sector. Any industry that can fill a conference center with guys in suits has certainly arrived. All that said, there’s the potential for this to be a vaguely interesting couple of days. If it can spread the word to wider quarters then it’s done its job. The press release for this one too leads off with the word “first,” however. Read it after the jump. (more…)

Blogger and Second Life resident Tao Takashi has posted a good review of a new Java-based virtual world from Germany called StageSpace, which is still in alpha. While there are some technical problems to overcome in this area, these kinds of worlds could become very popular in future. Why? Tao writes: “The main idea is to manage individual branded virtual worlds for their clients.” Consider the fact that no Hollywood movie gets released these days without a Web site — it’s not a far leap to imagine the day when no movie gets released without a browser-based virtual world. Tao also points out a related problem that will have to be solved: “If more and more seperated virtual worlds come up it will get very annoying to join them. It’s not like Second Life where the next community might be just a teleport away. And multiple accounts are already a problem with all those web2.0 apps these days. Editing your profile, finding and inviting all your friends again will be joined by customizing your avatar as nobody wants to look like a noob. This also might get costly I assume.” Indeed.

The latest entrant to the raft of virtual worlds conferences planned for this year is the Virtual Worlds Forum that will take place in London on October 24-25. I’m going to try to make this, even though I’ll have been in California two weeks earlier for the autumn edition of Virtual Worlds 2007 (which we reported earlier), which takes place October 10-11. The London forum is already featuring an impressive list of confirmed speakers, including Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Mike Wilson of There.com, Raph Koster of Areae, Richard Bartle of MUD1 (the first virtual world), and many more. Registration should open later this week; we’ll try to give you a heads up. Text of a recent press release after the jump. (Pay no attention to the first word of the headline.) (more…)

What do you do when a group of troublemakers is disrupting the operation of your virtual world? If you’re Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, you ignore the griefers themselves and simply go after the owners of the land they happen to be operating from. Big props to our managing editor over at the Second Life Herald, Pixeleen Mistral, for catching the story of southern California’s Woodbury University, which had its private region in SL deleted a couple of days ago. Why would the Lab wipe Woodbury’s investment? Because a group of SL residents who were not part of the university and who have long been accused of causing trouble have apparently been using the Woodbury land to build and test their disruptive devices. There’s definitely culpability on the part of both the griefers and the university, but LL has shown some really poor judgment in the way they’ve handled the situation thus far. (more…)