3pointD.com

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.]