Posts Tagged ‘ avatars ’

$5,000 Reward For GoPets Avatar Bill of Rights

GoPets CEO Erik Bethke is set to break new ground in the area of virtual worlds by proposing to turn his service’s end-user licensing agreement and terms of service document into a plainly written bill of rights. [Via GamePolitics.com, pointed out by Nate Combs.] In a recent LiveJournal post, he offers $5,000 for help in [ READ MORE ]

Face to Face With CyberExtruder

Are you a Second Life resident who is fed up with your appearance? You’ve scoured the shops, looking for an avatar face that would be unique to you; something that captures the very essence of you — or at least, the persona you wish to project in Second Life. But you just can’t find it. [ READ MORE ]

MapJack Looks Like Google Street View in Focus

MapJack.com is a new Web site offering the kind of street-level views that Google Maps‘ Street View feature does, only in better focus and with a more interesting interface. MapJack only has San Francisco, for now — and only part of that city, to tell you the truth — but if they can add more [ READ MORE ]

Tencent Tells its Story at Virtual Goods Summit

David Wallerstein of Tencent began the Virtual Goods Success Stories panel at the Virtual Goods Summit with a presentation, mostly to demonstrate what Tencent is doing in China: Chinese Internet penetration is only 10.5 percent. Wireless is 35.2 percent. Roughly 40 percent of Internet usage in China takes place in Internet cafes. Tencent currently has [ READ MORE ]

Destroy TV Directors Cut Now Available

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 [ READ MORE ]

Alternate Reality Games or Fiction of the Future?

The virtual world of Second Life got a little bit stranger for me this week. I went over to see Destroy Television the other day at the gallery where she’s hanging out at the moment, and my avatar, Walker Spaight, ended up marrying her! (That’s Destroy’s rock at left.) Now, if you know me and [ READ MORE ]

Japanese Child Avatar Portraits from Second Life

Eva and Franco Mattes, the Italian artists and pranksters who put on the 13 Most Beautiful Avatars show in February, have another series of portraits on display, starting June 2. This time it’s Annoying Japanese Child Dinosaur, a portrait series featuring avatars constructed in the virtual world of Second Life to resemble Japanese children. (I.e., [ READ MORE ]

UpNext Launching Virtual Neighborhood Search

UpNext is in closed beta, but it sounds like it could be very cool. According to Mashable, it provides “a 3D virtual cityscape, providing users a way to explore cities. UpNext will offer ways to search visually online to find out what’s going on in their city, or cities, on a local level.” Very cool, [ READ MORE ]

Playboy Magazine Enters Second Life

If you check out the latest ad buy on 3pointD’s cousin publication, the Second Life Herald (see the right sidebar, top), you’ll see that the inevitable is finally about to happen: Playboy Magazine is entering the virtual world of Second Life. No word yet on what form Playboy’s presence there will take, but it would [ READ MORE ]

Etsy Considers Crafting Its Own Virtual World

It was just over a year ago that I first blogged about Etsy, the online community for makers and sellers (and buyers, of course) of crafts of all flavors and kinds. Because they’re here in Brooklyn and because they have their metaversal aspects about them, I thought I’d go and pay them a visit recently. [ READ MORE ]

Zwinky Builds Virtual World For Toolbar Avatars

With 4.7 million “active users,” Zwinky lets you create and share avatars, emoticons, cursor icons and other stuff that teens seem to love, all from your browser’s toolbar. Now, IAC, the company behind Zwinky, hopes to lead those millions of users into its new virtual world. Known as Zwinktopia, the world “will provide Zwinkies a [ READ MORE ]

Physical Book of Second Life Avatars On Sale

Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company (aka Second Life resident Forseti Svarog) has published a book of avatar portraiture from the virtual world of Second Life that’s now available not just in a virtual edition but as a real, old-media paper book as well. Out for about a week now, Avatar Expression gathers “56 [ READ MORE ]

Destroy Television Returns for NY Art Exhibit

Just when you thought it was safe to watch lifecaster Justin.tv, or broadcast your own life with Ustream, along comes a virtual life you can not only watch on the Web but take part in controlling, a kind of collaborative stream of avatar consciousness — and one that’s going to be on display in a [ READ MORE ]

New Barbie Dolls to Interact With Virtual World?

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 [ READ MORE ]

Lacoste Seeks SL Avatars For Modelling Shoot

Preppy French fashioneers Lacoste have put out an open call for models from the virtual world of Second Life. From now until May 2, you can submit a photo and description of your avatar at the Lacoste Web site (warning: contains highly annoying Flash, resizing and unturnoffable music). Internet users will then have the chance [ READ MORE ]

New Identity, Lifelogging and Presence Tools

Pete Cashmore’s excellent Mashable has featured a couple of interesting sites in the last few days that are moving closer to the kind of identity-building tools I’ve been thinking about lately, including the identity-information aggregator I Twitter-predicted for epredator: OtherEgo and YouGetIt let you aggregate your social networking-style identities on a single page. MobileOX is [ READ MORE ]

3pointD Turns 1: On The Metaverse Ahead

No April Fool’s joke this: 3pointD turned one year old today! It was in the early hours (early minutes, actually) of April 1, 2006, that I posted my first Hello, World! here. Something like 1,400 posts later (can that be? WordPress must be over-counting) and our mission remains the same: “At its most fundamental level, [ READ MORE ]

L Word in SL Pushes Itself Onto MySpace

The L Word build in the virtual world of Second Life (created by the Electric Sheep Company, sponsors of this blog) has apparently generated quite a following, and is reportedly one of the more successful corporate VW communities in Second Life. Now an interesting thing has happened: Fatty Cardiff, one of the earliest L Word [ READ MORE ]

Second Life Nerds On Now at Nerd of the Week

As Jerry notes, Negin and Kimmy’s latest Nerd of the Week has been posted, this one examining the Second Life Nerd in detail, based on interviews conducted at our latest metaverse meetup with all your favorite Second Lifers. (The interviews are actually interesting, FYI.) If you haven’t seen Nerd of the Week, check it out [ READ MORE ]

Three Second Life-to-Web Services Updated

Three services we brought you recently that mash up the virtual world of Second Life and the (also virtual, in its way) World Wide Web, have had new versions released in the last few days. Sloog, TwitterBox, and SLateIt, (originally blogged here, here, and here), are three instances of one of my favorite things: they’re [ READ MORE ]

Will Collaboration Be Enough For Qwaq?

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 [ READ MORE ]

SXSW Xcript: Avatar-Based Marketing

Overheard at the panel on Avatar-based marketing: “It’s fun, you can sit down, make out with people.” I got most of this panel, including a couple of the audience questions. Moderator, Tony Walsh of the Clickable Culture blog Panelists: Paul Hemp, senior editor Harvard Business Review Linda Zimmer, CEO of MarCom:Interactive Eric Gruber of MTV, [ READ MORE ]

SXSW Xcript: Where the F is Mapping Now?

Dan Catt’s mapping panel was a very cool session that was difficult to synthesize at the speed it went by, but I think I got most of what the panelists said. All very 3pointD. Moderator: Rev. Dan Catt, from Geobloggers.com and Flickr Panelists: Tom Carden from Random Etc. Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr Jerry Paffendorf [ READ MORE ]

RatePoint to Launch Second Life Ratings Service

RatePoint, which provides a way for users to rate, share, discuss and connect based on how they rate sites on the Web, will launch a new avatar ratings service for the virtual world of Second Life on Monday, according to a press release. I’ve been talking to the RatePoint crew over the last week or [ READ MORE ]

Multiuser Google Earth Mashup in Development

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. [ READ MORE ]

Rocky Horror in Second Life, March 1

Finally! I’ve long thought the Rocky Horror Picture Show would be the perfect film to screen in the virtual world of Second Life. After all, it’s the original weird costumed participatory media experience, filled with sex, mad scientists and terrorized newbies — just like SL! Well, start working on your Frank N. Furter avatars, because [ READ MORE ]

Mixed-Reality Fashion Talk in NYC Tuesday 2/27

If you’re in the New York City area tomorrow, Tuesday, February 27, and want to participate in or just attend a discussion of male fashions in both the real world and the virtual world of Second Life, drop by the A.I.R. Gallery at 511 West 25th Street, Suite 301, in Manhattan, at 5:30pm Eastern time [ READ MORE ]

13 Most Beautiful Avatars By 19,373 Artists

Jerry Paffendorf, Rik Riel, my friend Micah and I dropped in Saturday night at the 13 Most Beautiful Avatars show at the Postmasters gallery in New York. The prints on display were beautiful 36″x 48″ prints of avatars taken from the virtual world of Second Life by a pair of artists named Eva and Franco [ READ MORE ]

Real-World Gallery Show of Virtual Portraits

SLInsider reports that the Postmasters Gallery in New York City will be mounting a show of portraits of Second Life avatars on February 17. The portraits were shot by Eva and Franco Mattes, as far as I can tell, and have been digitally printed on canvas at 36″ x 48″, all of which sounds like [ READ MORE ]

Tyra Banks Launches Virtual World

Well, it’s official: celebrity scents are over. As of tonight, you’re nobody if you don’t have your own 3D virtual world. Just ask supermodel-cum-talk show host Tyra Banks, who opened Tyra’s Virtual Studio this evening with a grammy party. “The studio is a free virtual world where you can listen to music, chat with your [ READ MORE ]

Contest: Design Your Own Coffin in Second Life

Here’s the weirdest thing to hit my in-box in a while: A design-your-own-coffin contest in the virtual world of Second Life. Held by Dutch funeral company Uitvaart and coffin-makerer Bogra, the contest starts February 6, when free modifiable virtual coffins will be available at the Bogra office in SL’s »Tathlina« region. Residents then have until [ READ MORE ]

Fox Atomic Holds SL Machinima, Photo Contests

Interactive online community site Fox Atomic is launching a machinima and photography contest in the virtual world of Second Life, with an eight-day trip to Costa Rica for two as the grand prize. Yes, that’s the real Costa Rica, not the virtual version. The news comes from a blog entry from Millions of Us, which [ READ MORE ]