3pointD.com

I had the chance to spend some time at Virtual Worlds 2007 with Nicky Morris from 3B, an interesting virtual world service I’ve blogged about before, and Nicky described to me some of the features of the 3B relaunch that’s planned for somewhere around May. According to Nicky, 3B is moving toward deeper Web integration and a more YouTube-like feel in some aspects. If you’re not familiar with 3B, it’s a service that basically grabs the content on your MySpace or other Web page, and uses it to automatically create a 3D space you can navigate as an avatar and invite your friends to. The space that gets created is more or less a room in which the various walls are textured with the images and videos from your site. I like the idea of making it easy to get content into a 3D space where you can hang out with friends, much as Kaneva does, although it remains to be seen which of the many similar services that are now popping up wins this. 3B is hoping to advance its cause with a raft of new features and ease-of-use enhancements.

Among those are a bunch of new emotes and “attitudes” that will broaden the communication possibilities between users, as well as better implementation of a “buddies” function. The interface is also getting an overhaul so that you’ll be able to give 3B your MySpace username and password and the service will grab the URL, instead of users having to copy and paste the URL themselves, which Nicky says is escaping some people. (Which would indicate that 3B’s users are pretty young.) You’ll also be able to scrape your eCommerce site into 3B and set up your own store. 3B already has Firefox inside it, and Nicky says the company is now working on implementing Flash there.

It took me about 2 minutes just now to upload my MySpace page to 3B, and the result was mildly cool, with various friends’ pages showing up on the walls of my room. I like that it’s so easy. Also nice is that you can click on any wall panel and you automatically zoom in on it. Click it again and you’re viewing it as an interactable Web page. It also looks like there’s a lot of navigation and search functionality built into the app’s browser. Oddly, though, I was able to create my 3D space, and then had trouble signing into the 2D site. I haven’t got the entire hang of it yet, and the guidance through the system isn’t entirely clear, but things are looking interesting.

To make finding your friends and other users easier, 3B is also enhancing its Web-based interface to add more social networking features. Within the world, collections of rooms are accessible from central hubs (which users can also create), which sounds similar to how you get around in ActiveWorlds. Individual rooms are already accessible via a URL you can plug into a Web browser, which launches the 3B app.

3B’s revenue comes from contextual ads they put on a couple of the many walls in each room, and from selling additional designs on top of the standard set of room designs on offer. There are also advanced tools for creating your own room layouts (you can view room source in XML), and some kind of 3DSmax import is supported. 3B has seen 200,000 registrations since its soft launch in November of last year, but Nicky wouldn’t say how many people are actually using it: “Until you reach a certain level of unique monthly users, that’s the point at which you’re more open about those numbers. We haven’t reached that critical mass yet.” Fair enough.

I’m really interested in seeing where this kind of 3D-ification of the Web will go. I think that adding 3D presence and communication abilities to your collections of content is a very powerful idea. I’d love to wander around with someone on a guided tour of their Flickr set, for instance. Things like Kaneva and 3B are coming at the issue from a different direction than Second Life, building the world around the content rather than inserting the content into the world. My guess is that we’ll end up with something closer to Second Life, but a lot of good ideas are built into both Kaneva and 3B, and I think they merit some attention.