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I checked into the virtual world of Second Life tonight for a sneak peek at two islands that were just opened by Amazon Web Services as a community-building effort for AWS developers. According to SL resident Jeffronius Batra (aka Jeff Barr, Amazon’s senior Web services evangelist), »the islands« — which are an official Amazon project — will not only provide resources for developers but also link to and show off what the AWS development community has created inside Second Life. (Jeff mentioned Jnana as an example. You can read more about what they’re doing in SL on the AWS blog, or just visit »Jnana in Second Life«.)

The virtual architecture, by Joshua Culdesac (who lives in France), is very handsome, though some of it was too tight for my camera. Jeff did the terraforming. Amazon took delivery of the islands in December, Jeff said, though planning had been going on before then. Amazon’s virtual estate is near an IBM island (and not by accident; Jeff invited them to buddy up), but there’s a mysterious island named Innovation that intervenes. Jeff hasn’t been able to get into it yet to find out what’s going on there. The Amazon islands aren’t quite done yet, Jeff says, but from what I could glean in my visit, they seem to have succeeded in being “very SL-friendly, not overly corporate,” as Jeff says they were intended. Amazon has been poking around in Second Life for something like a year now. Nice to see them finally get something going on an official level. (more…)

Mysterious news on the Millions of Us blog this evening: it seems there’s now a Microsoft island in the virtual world of Second Life. At least, that’s what the »teleport link« in the blog entry implies. And indeed, Microsoft has a build set up on its island devoted to Visual Studio — though it’s not clear what the rest of the island is for. And then there’s the blimp, which Millions of Us clearly wants us to be interested in, especially judging from the teaser video. It’s a pretty nice blimp, actually — although if you get too close to it, it first gives you a security warning, and then teleports you to your home location! More will be revealed at a launch event at 3pm 6pm SL Time (9pm Eastern) on Thursday, 10 May. Until then, it’s interesting to note Microsoft’s presence in Second Life. Various people from Microsoft initiatives like Channel 9 have set up shop in Second Life, and a mad Microsoft marketer chose some interesting spots to make the launch of Vista, but I think this may be the first big Microsoft presence in SL. Hard to tell what it means coming out of such a sprawling company, but it will be interesting to watch. Especially if there’s something good in that blimp.

Not alone in the wilderness

RuneScape, the browser-based massively multiplayer game from Jagex, now has a million paying subscribers, the company reported today. Just $5 a month gets players “exclusive quests, skills and a huge map of the fantasy world Gielenor, to explore.” The fact that it’s being shelled out by a million kids (or their parents; the RuneScape demographic is reportedly very young) is fairly impressive. Among Western MMOs, only World of Warcraft can boast more than a million paying subscribers. (Most MMO subscribers, including WoWs, pay around $15 a month.) And, as Matt Mihaly pointed out some time ago (in asking whether RuneScape would reach 1 millions subs), the game reportedly has some 5 million players, including those who play for free, and concurrency rates above 200,000. Jagex says they have 150 support staff devoted to the game, if that’s any gauge. [UPDATE: Matt has more details from an interview with the Jagex dude, Andrew Gowan.] I think it’s pretty significant to the future of media that there are a million young teens paying for this game, and four million more playing it from time to time. More evidence that 3D multiuser environments are here to stay as part of the media landscape. Most readers of this blog don’t need to be convinced of that, but there are many, many people out there who aren’t yet clued in. Successes like Jagex’s should help with that.

Nate Randall of RCE Universe sends along the news that Second Life mogul Anshe Chung has won one of five banking licenses recently auctioned in the virtual world of Entropia Universe. Though billed as “banking licenses,” they really give their holders the right to use the in-world interface and non-player characters to make collateralized loans and collect interest, which is an interesting way to go about it. Entropia notes, of course, that “Should an interested party hold a real banking license in the real world, many more services and features can be added.” It doesn’t appear any of the winners meet that qualification, although they are listed only be avatar name, so you never know. It’s an interesting prospect.

Randall seems to have scooped Entropia itself, which is still running the auction announcement. According to Randall’s figures, Anshe seems to have been almost the shrewdest bidder, winning her license for PED600,000, or US$60,000 — the Entropia currency trades at a fixed 10 to the U.S. dollar — while the other winners bid PED590,608, PED900,002, PED950,001, and PED999,000. The auctions were held in the in-game auction system, Randall reports, where bidding was fierce in the final minutes. (more…)

Without an announcement on its official blog, Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, seems to have introduced a new capability for its in-world building tools that will allow them to better support established formats, something that SL builders have long found sorely lacking. The new feature should change the landscape for the SL building community by inviting in modelers whose skills have not been applicable before.

The new addition is known as a “sculpted prim” (short for primitive, the word used to denote the basic building block of SL objects), and should make it possible for 3D artists who are used to working in more standard formats to work more easily in Second Life. The scultped prim takes its shape from information encoded into the color channels of a texture. For reasons beyond my technical expertise, this makes it possible to create a more complex, more natural shape than is possible with the current set of SL build tools.

More importantly, it means that SL objects are suddenly a lot more interoperable with objects and shapes from other worlds and modelling programs. According to the Second Life wiki, “We provide an exporter for Maya, and hopefully exporters for 3ds Max, Blender, and ZBrush will be available soon. We also have plans to provide a sculpt editor within the Second Life viewer.” The wiki doesn’t say where this Maya exporter is available, but according to Tao Takashi, it may be in the next preview build of the client, due shortly. (more…)

Following the news of the new mainframe platform for virtual worlds that IBM is working on, I had the chance to talk to David Gelardi, IBM’s vice president of industry solutions, who is heading up the effort. “This is a brand new way to support the needs of virtual worlds in an environment that begins to look like 3D commerce,” Gelardi said. “Think more in terms of a future state where there is a transaction taking place that is a buying experience of some kind.” The “hybrid environment of immense power and flexibility” that IBM is creating will rely on the Cell’s processing power for rendering, the mainframe for cryptography and its ability to handle the processing needs of a massively multiuser enviroment, and Hoplon’s software for physics and messaging.

“I would argue that the world doesn’t yet understand the promise of [virtual world] technology,” Gelardi said. “We see this technology moving into banking and retail and anything where the consumer is involved in a transaction of commerce that they would today do over the Web, online shopping, online banking. The problem is that rendering is kind of weak. We haven’t figured out how to accelerate that yet, and how to marry that to transactions.” (more…)

The International Herald Tribune breaks the news that IBM is launching a new mainframe platform specifically designed for next-generation virtual worlds and 3D virtual environments. In concert with Brazilian game developer Hoplon, IBM will use the PlayStation3’s ultra-high-powered Cell processor to create a mainframe architecture that will provide the security, scalability and speed that are currently lacking in 3D environments — a lack that is one of the factors keeping them from becoming widely adopted. If it works, it sounds like worldmakers working on IBM’s platform should be able to support concurrencies far above todays’ capabilities, and implement commerce systems far more secure than is currently possible.

The IHT story talks about a server system that will permit higher levels of concurrency at greater levels of rendering and realism. The machines will be priced beginning at hundreds of thousands dollars, according to the story.

While it probably won’t have much impact on the state of virtual worlds right off, IBM’s new infrastructure could make a big difference in the long run, by enabling much greater numbers of concurrent users in next-gen virtual worlds, and by creating more secure possibilities for commerce. Big media and entertainment companies continue to be interested in virtual worlds, but they are also skeptical in many cases because there is no way to support many thousands of audience members at a single event. (more…)

It seems Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (of such classics as Robocop and Showgirls, but also Soldier of Orange) will use the virtual world of Second Life to audition actors for an upcoming film. According to a press release, radio and television spots are advertising an open call for all those interested in auditioning for Black Book 2, the follow-up to Verhoeven’s popular Black Book. Starting today, “Verhoeven will hold virtual auditions in Second Life.” [Lost in the] Magic Forest, a division of Dutch media production company Revolver that issued the press release, produced a machinima spot being broadcast on Dutch television to promote the auditions (as near as I can tell through what seems to be a language barrier). (more…)

SAP, the German software giant, is about to open its doors officially in Second Life. Rather than going for an out-and-out island build, they have opted for a more conservative approach, opening a relatively small office on the Second Life developer island of »Silicon City«, owned by The V3 Group, who are sponsoring the ITE’07 event, that starts tomorrow (Friday, 20th April). (more…)

Unless I’m much mistaken, it looks like Mattel’s new Barbie Girls, to be launched later this month, will be a physical doll that can interact with a virtual world, and should be a very interesting new experiment in that kind of crossover entertainment. BarbieGirls.com is a multi-user isometric browser-based virtual world just launched by Mattel for fans of the company’s Barbie dolls. It’s pretty simple stuff (see screenshot at end of this post), but it looks like it could be tied to the company’s physical dolls in interesting ways. The Barbie Girls concept is due for a broader launch on March April 26. Mattel isn’t saying what that involves, except that “the toy blends fashion doll play, the Internet and music,” according to the L.A. Times. But clues can be found in the Barbie Girls world, where you can visit with friends, shop for clothes, earn B Bucks by playing games, and do many of the other things that are fast becoming standard in virtual worlds. If you’ve been to Habbo Hotel or CyWorld, you know what I’m talking about.

As usual, it’s the shopping that’s interesting. When I tried to buy the rather attractive pair of pedal-pushers pictured above for Walkerette, I was told to “Connect your Barbie Girl to buy this fabulous fashion!” (The “Tell me more” link, however, is blank at the moment.) That indicates to me that the physical Barbie Girls dolls will be interactive with the virtual world on the Web site. That’s a pretty interesting concept, especially if you can buy physical clothes for your Barbie Girl that match the ones she’s wearing in the virtual world. Maybe you get extra B Bucks if your physical Barbie Girl meets up in the real world with her virtual friends. Stuff like that, and more. Very cool. I’m looking forward to hearing more about this. I may even have to get myself a Barbie Girl. Uh-oh.

Walkerette at home

Virtual-world services company Rivers Run Red will today launch its virtuallife.tv, a television network for Second Life, at the MIPTV digital content market in Cannes. This was originally slated to launch back in November, of course, so we’ll see what this launch consists of. But new details of the service have emerged, so it seems an infrastructure has been built out for the in-world television network, which is now awaiting content, some of which Rivers will try to gather at MIPTV. (NOTE: This is not to be confused with Virtualive.tv, a project of Morpheus Media, which will stream concerts live to Second Life.] (more…)

Coca-Cola set up in Second Life

Coca-Cola is taking its first steps in the virtual world of Second Life with a contest in which SL members will be invited to “imagine a virtual vending machine with limitless possibilities.” In concert with new-media marketing firm crayon and virtual-world services outfit Millions of Us, Coke is running “an open contest for Second Life residents and the general population to design a virtual experience machine through its Virtual Thirst competition. . . . This contest is not a search for the virtual version of a real-life vending machine that distributes bottles and cans, but the mission to create a portable device for Second Life’s ‘in-world’ digital society that unleashes a refreshing and attention-grabbing experience, on demand.” The contest is to be announced today in an in-world press conference with Coca-Cola execs. (more…)

The Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) launched a new beta search service for the virtual world of Second Life today, at search.sheeplabs.com, according to Electric Sheep Christian Westbrook. What’s unique (as far as I know) about this service is that it doesn’t rely on users to manually list their products but instead spiders the SL Grid to automatically collect information about items marked “for sale.” (Read more about how it works on the service’s About page.) The service allows avatars to opt out of the system, or to list all items they own, and doesn’t crawl private islands. Results are returned with a teleport link, price, object creator and owner, and description. According to the Sheep, it also puts less load on the system than a single avatar, so it shouldn’t create much lag.

Having someone spider the SL Grid is something I’ve been looking for for a long time, so I’m looking forward to seeing how this works in practice. Having users manually list objects, as the many other SL search services do, is a far from comprehensive solution, but it’s been the best we’ve had until now. If all goes as planned, this should push SL search forward by leaps and bounds. (more…)

There’s a long article on the virtual world of Second Life in this month’s issue of Southwest Airlines’ Spirit Magazine, which features a close-up avatar shot on the cover. Why bother blogging this here? Because in-flight magazines have massive readership and reach a broad cross-section of people who may or may not be interested in technology. As far as the mainstreaming of virtual worlds goes, getting the cover of an in-flight mag is a very cool thing. And the article’s not that bad either.

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. (more…)

The Second Life Drupal Group has an interesting piece of news: a Drupal framework is apparently in development that would allow Drupal modules to interact with objects in the virtual world of Second Life. There’s no code on the project page at the moment, but it’s coming “Real Soon Now,” according to a comment made today by the developer (assuming it’s not an April Fool’s joke, which I don’t believe it to be). 2bits, a Drupal consulting and development company, initially announced the “release” of the framework about a month ago, but that announcement seems to have been premature. If it is, in fact, in development, it will be interesting to see what users make of it, and it could be a nice marriage of Drupal’s open-source content management system with Second Life’s semi-open-source platform. Another small step toward integrating virtual worlds with the wider Web?

I had lunch yesterday at Virtual Worlds 2007 with a couple of guys from the U.S. Department of State, who told me the State Department is considering launching an official project within the virtual world of Second Life. Specifically, this would be an initiative of State’s Public Diplomacy wing, which is headed up by Karen Hughes. Before we go any further, I should note that your tax dollars were not used to feed 3pointD; my tasty lobster salad was kindly picked up by a venture capitalist who was also at the table.

Though any State Department project would at first be very small and include no persistent State Department presence (I don’t think State has budgeted any money for SL yet), it sounds like the public diplomacy department (essentially State’s outreach and PR arm) is considering Second Life and virtual worlds in general as a potentially powerful new communications channel, and that if early experiments go well, it could mean an expansion of their activities there. This is potentially a great way to make more information available about the State department, and get more people engaged in the workings of government, which can’t be a bad thing. We don’t really hear enough from most government bodies in a way that’s palatable; one wonders how some longtime SL residents might react, however.

[A note before we go on: I’m not talking the week off from blogging because of the Kathy Sierra affair, but I am going to try to mark all my posts today with a message like this, despite the fact that some other people have a blogging boycott on today. I’m not sure a boycott is the right thing for me, but I don’t mind interrupting a few posts for a public service announcement about an insult culture that has run right off the rails. Now back to our story.] (more…)

I missed the beginning of the remarks by Colin Parris, vice president of digital convergence at IBM Research, because the panels are stacked a bit back-to-back and I was on the one directly before he spoke, but the first half of his presentation consisted of laying out some of the potential benefits of integrating virtual worlds with current business processes. The second half of his remarks consisted of looking at what IBM is doing and planning in the space. I’ve transcribed them pretty well below. (more…)

Gideon Wiis in Second Life (photo by Glitchy)

Gideon May of the team behind Lifecrawler showed up at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference today with a laptop and a Wii controller that’s he’s begun hacking to control his avatar in the virtual world of Second Life. You can already move your avatar around using the Wii controller’s D-pad with Gideon’s system, and he just needs to find a Radio Shack and buy some hardware and he’s going to try to make avatar navigation a gestural function of the Wii controller — by the metaverse meetup on Friday! Awesome. After that, it’s on to using the force feedback system to indicate collisions, and hack out some alternate controller schemes that would allow a user to navigate their avatar via the keyboard but play games within Second Life by waving the Wiimote around. Neither Glitchy nor I could think of anyone who’s done this before, though it seems so cool and obvious. Let us know if you’re in New York and you want to lend Gideon a hand.

Reader Martin Scheffler sends the news that free open-source peer-to-peer virtual world-making platform Croquet has just got a version 1.0 release for its SDK. Nice.

The kit provides developers with a flexible tool to create virtual spaces with built-in networked telephony and a “late-binding object-oriented” programming language that allows multiple users to jointly create, animate or modify 3-D objects and dynamic simulations. Developers can also import and share resources, such as 2-D web applications or multimedia content, from their own systems. Working together across multiple locations, they can change simulations while they are running and work together to create new applications — all in real time.

3pointD would love to hear about any work being done in Croquet. Feel free to send updates to themetaverse [at] gmail [dot] com.

After I saw the I-D Media team in Berlin, I met up with Jeremy Snyder of the Berlin-based Metaversum, which I learned is currently working on a virtual world that will feature Web 2.0 integration that sounds along the lines of what’s being done in Kaneva, though perhaps with some extra features. Metaversum’s world has been in development since July of last year, and currently has about 40 people working on it, Jeremy says. (There’s also a hiring notice on their site.) First, though, the company is building out the social networking piece of things, a service known as Yumondo. This is described as “a Web 2.0 platform that will integrate with the world,” and will feature social networking, photo sharing, collaborative event planning and perhaps some other features that have yet to be decided. Look for that in April or May, with any luck. The world itself will be coming “later this year,” and will integrate with the Yumondo platform. The world will feature user-generated content, but it doesn’t sound like it will be quite as free and flexible as that found in Second Life. (Perhaps more like Sony’s PS3 home service? Remains to be seen.) However, it looks like importing of 3D models may be supported, which would be a nice feature. (more…)

The non-profit EnviroLink Network has just launched a cool build that puts geolocated Google Earth-type feeds onto a replica globe in the virtual world of Second Life. Josh Knauer of the EnviroLink blog just sent over the news, and I couldn’t resist blogging it on the spot. The »GeoGlobe in SL« captures KML, GeoRSS and RSS feeds and displays them as miniature SL primitives at the correct location. Zoom in on a prim and you can read the headline and click through to the Web page it’s associated with. (more…)

The nose knows nothing in virtual worlds, but that hasn’t stopped Calvin Klein from launching a virtual version of their new ck IN2U fragrances for men and women in Second Life, according to a press release. The virtual launch accompanies the real-world launch of the same scents today, March 21. Since avatars can’t smell, the virtual perfume bottles will enable SL users to spray each other with bubbles that “initiate dialogue,” as the release puts it — probably requesting the sprayee to engage in a Calvin Klein animation. There will also be “graffiti bottles” available from the Calvin Klein build, put together by Justin Bovington’s Rivers Run Red on their Avalon island in Second Life, where Calvin Klein is holding a L$1 million photography contest to accompany the launch. Finally, if you’re in the UK you’ll be able to click through to a Web site and order a free sample. (more…)

NASA, the U.S. space agency, is getting ready to launch its own exploration into virtual space. NASA’s Learning Technologies arm has issued an intramural call for proposal ideas [UPDATE: now postponed, oddly] for the development of a massively multiplayer online game that is intended to be “the front-end of a larger synthetic environment.” The program is funded to the tune of $1 million a year for fiscal years 2007, 2008 and 2009. [UPDATE: I’ve changed the headline from “earmarks” to “budgets” per Daniel Laughlin’s comment below.] While the call for proposals is internal only, “Each proposing team must include a partner with commercial-quality game development experience. It is expected that this requirement will necessitate partnering with external organizations and that the majority of funding will be used for game development.” [Emphasis added. And thanks to Troy McLuhan of the International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life for sending over the news.]

While the Web page doesn’t say so specifically, NASA is apparently compiling its own list of potential outside developers for the project, and Daniel Laughlin, the contact for the project, is also looking at Second Life as a possible platform. For more information, you can download a PDF of the 16-page CFP. It describes the MMO as an educational project “with the primary goal of engaging young people in NASA’s mission. It also mentions that several projects will be taken on in the first year, and then a single project will be chosen from among those to receive the balance of the funding. So whether you’re an SL developer, a Multiverse world-maker or some other kind of MMOist, strap on your oxygen tanks, and email your space credentials to Daniel.D.Laughlin [at] nasa [dot] gov. Zero-gravity virtual world here we come! What a fantastic project. I love when I get to use the “space” tag on 3pointD. Go, NASA!

Qwaq, a company I blogged about last June, has been planning to “enable a rich ecosystem of interlinked Croquet spaces, that is as easy to navigate and extend as today’s Web.” News from the company yesterday flags its first product, Qwaq Forums, which offer customizable “virtual spaces for real work.” The spaces are built on the peer-to-peer open-source Croquet platform, which was demo’d to great effect last fall to a bunch of metaversal types, but which we haven’t heard much from since. It sounds like Qwaq is a custom build-out of a Croquet implementation, tweaked for the needs of a specific business. It would offer multi-user interactivity, and a persistent 3D work environment. And because of how Croquet handles external applications, it should be relatively easy to drag something like an Excel spreadsheet into a window in Qwaq, and then let anyone in the space edit it. (more…)

Okay, my need for a PlayStation 3 just got a lot more urgent. Before you do anything else, watch the trailer above, which just went up on GameTrailers.com after being shown at GDC. It shows a PS3 service from Sony called “home,” which is, yes, a free 3D online space where you’ll be able to customize your avatar and your own private home, hang out with other users there and in various common spaces, stream your media into your virtual pad (as in Kaneva), and chat via voice, emotes, short pre-loaded phrases or with a USB keyboard, as well as hook up with other people and follow them into PS3 games. In terms of pushing the metaverse out to the mainstream, this is pretty huge news. And it’s got a great look to it, too. Many thanks to reader Victor Piñeiro of pure west documentaries for sending along the link.

[UPDATE: Our spies at GDC have filed a few more details, which you can read after the jump.] (more…)

According to a press release on the amBX site of UK consumer products company Philips (which features the virtual world of Second Life as the most prominent thing on its home page), Philips has licensed its amBX technology to metaverse services firm Rivers Run Red, which will “produce a dedicated amBX-enabled environment” for Second Life. What’s that? Read on. (more…)

LEGO.com has a press release flagging a new MMO for kids it has in development with NetDevil (who worked on the mediocre Auto Assault, among other things). Due out in 2008, according to NetDevil, there aren’t any details available about what gameplay will be like, but you can bet it will involve some very cool snapping together of virtual plastic blocks. If this works well, it could be awesome. I’ve blogged before about how much I’d like to see a fully functional virtual LEGOlike in some place like Second Life (especially if it incorporated Mindstorms-like qualities, but I’d be more than happy to see it come to pass in LEGO’s own virtual world. It’s just the kind of thing that could make a world of world-builders out of the next generation, which is quite an amazing prospect, when you consider it. [Thanks, Micah!] (more…)

Tringo, the engaging cross between Tetris and bingo that was originally developed in the virtual world of Second Life, has come full circle, and will celebrate its launch as a PC download today with a virtual launch event in SL. Created by SL resident Kermitt Quirk (aka Australia resident Nathan Kier) over his Christmas vacation in 2004, Tringo quickly spread like wildfire across the SL grid and became yet another thing that was going to “kill SL“. Instead, it was picked up by a real-world game developer and launched for the Game Boy Advance later that year. Now Australian casual games portal Two Way Ltd. is launching it as a US$20 PC download, and celebrating the same in SL with a launch event on »way2play island« at 1:00am SL Time tonight (late on March 1 / early on March 2) due to the Australian launch being scheduled for 7:00pm Sydney time. Another tidbit from the press release: Tringo 2.0 is apparently on the way.

MovieTickets.com has launched an experimental island in the virtual world of Second Life, according to a press release. They’ve built »a huge theater« on their MovieTickets island in Second Life, where you can go to watch trailers of the latest films and click through to the MovieTickets.com page where you can find local showtimes and purchase tickets. The theater build is actually pretty cool, with a spacious lobby and tall screening rooms that make a lot more sense than most of the screening locations I’ve seen in Second Life. I’m not sure there’s huge advantage in going 3D with this service, but MovieTickets apparently has further plans. (more…)

Episode #53 of SecondCast is up on the SecondCast site (or can be listened to in the sidebar here, or downloaded from iTunes), and it’s fairly hilarious right off the bat. Like really hilarious, as in the first three minutes will have you on the floor. And the bleeps! Hear Lordfly file an abuse report against Johnny’s face. Pretty excellent stuff.

When you’re done with that, go check out Episode #1 of the relaunched Grid Review, the machinima news project being produced by Edelman and the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog). Now benefitting from the Sheep’s absorption of master machinimators the Ill Clan, as well as expert narration from SecondCast’s own Johnny Ming, the Grid Review is suddenly totally entertaining (whereas the old format was only somewhat entertaining in its own format, if you ask me, despite the presence of some great machinimators). Let’s hope they can keep it up.

Murat Aktihanoglu, who I met at the recent metaverse meetup, sends words of a mashup he’s developing that will make Google Earth into a multi-user application with the help of Skype. Needless to say, this is the kind of thing that excites 3pointD, and is in fact something we’ve been looking for for some time. You can download an early version at the somewhat oddly named Unype site. Unype lives between my Skype and yours, and between Google Earth and Skype on both machines. Fire up Skype and GE, click to connect your instance of Unype to them, click to connect to a friend within Unype, and then have your friend click Unype’s “follow” button. Then, when you navigate in your Google Earth, Unype automatically navigates your friend’s Google Earth to the same place. That’s cool as far as it goes, but there’s more coming, Murat says. (more…)