Posts Tagged ‘ interface ’

AjaxLife: Browser-Based Second Life Viewer?

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 [ READ MORE ]

Go For a Real Run Through the Virtual World

The YouTube video above comes to 3pointD from Birgit Frenzel of I-D Media, whom we last met in Berlin, back when the Lifecrawler team had begun to offer client services in the virtual world of Second Life. The video features some new hacks the German team has apparently been cooking up, including the ability to [ READ MORE ]

UpNext and Other Location Apps at Where 2.0

Artur Bergman, writing on O’Reilly Radar, has a good wrap of the location-based services that were trotted out last night at Where 2.0. We posted yesterday about UpNext, about which there’s now more detail, and Artur has good insights into other services as well. UpNext sounds pretty cool, featuring “a 3D cityscape of New York” [ READ MORE ]

New 3D eCommerce Package From View22

View22 Technology has announced what it calls a “3D Web commerce and media platform” that “simplifies the process of adding 3D Web applications and customer experiences into the marketing mix.” Known as Immersiv (and viewable in video clips on the View22 site), the tech resembles a fancy Flash app with a few extra features, including [ READ MORE ]

Touchscreens that Touch Back Reach Out at SID

A year ago or more I blogged about a company called Immersion that was developing touchscreens that touch back — i.e., touchscreens for mobile devices that give haptic feedback when the screen is touched, so that you can actually feel the “buttons” pictured on the screen and users know they’ve input something. Simple idea, but [ READ MORE ]

Finger-Mounted 3D Mouse From Undergrads

A team of five undergraduate students from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute has designed a prototype of what looks to be a cool 3D mouse that you wear on your finger like a ring. The MagicMouse works using ultrasound receivers that picks up sound waves emitted by the ring. You can move around in three axes [ 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 ]

Hamsters Are Gamers, Humans Are Pacman

Check out this video of a game called Metazoa Ludens that you and your hamster can play together. The hamsters apparently dig it. (There’s also a PC World story with more details.) It’s a bit like Mice Arena, only perhaps not quite as much fun, since in Metazoa Ludens your avatar isn’t being chased by [ READ MORE ]

IBM’s Colin Parris Dives Into Virtual Worlds

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 [ READ MORE ]

Wii Interface for SL as Soon as Friday?

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 [ READ MORE ]

More on Lifecrawler: Client Services on Offer

Gideon May, Birgit Frenzel and Dirk Lusebrink (l to r) of I-D Media, the team behind Lifecrawler Faithful readers may recall the Lifecrawler service I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, which looked like it would give users the chance to put a streaming Second Life window on their Web page. I had the [ READ MORE ]

Next-Gen: Web Integration in Virtual Worlds

The presentation I gave in Berlin on Thursday was ostensibly on “virtual worlds, media and identity,” but as I’ve been going over it I’m finding it’s extending itself into a small picture of what the next generation of virtual worlds might look like and how we might get there. A lot of it was stuff [ READ MORE ]

New Brainwave-Based Controller For Games

This flew by me in the run-up to SXSW, but Matt Mihaly caught it: it’s a new brainwave-based controller intended for use in developing computer games, from a company called Emotiv Systems. What’s interesting about this, and what seems to differentiate it from similar systems that have shown up on 3pointD in the past (but [ READ MORE ]

Alpha Release of Third-Party Thin Client for SL

SLeek is a third-party client for the virtual world of Second Life built from the open-source client code released by Linden Lab in January built around code developed in the libSecondLife project. What’s special about it is that it’s a thin client, “useful for situations where you want to be in-world, but don’t want to [ READ MORE ]

SXSW Xcript: Joi Ito and Justin Hall

Venture capitalist and World of Warcraft addict Joi Ito and lifelogger Justin Hall sat down for a conversation together in Room 9C on Monday afternoon at South by Southwest. Ben Cerveny joined them midway. Title of the talk: Online Games: Beyond Play and Fantasy. Ito: I know everyone says this, but we’re going to try [ READ MORE ]

Philips Ambient Tech to SL via Rivers and SDK

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. [ READ MORE ]

The Beautiful Simplicity of Twitter (and BlogHUD)

Second Life resident Koz Farina, creator of the very popular BlogHUD tool for blogging from within SL, is developing a system to allow you to cross-post your BlogHUD posts to your account on Twitter, the hot new social site that lets you miniblog along with your friends. Koz is already feeding all BlogHUD posts to [ READ MORE ]

Linden Lab Approaches A Crossroads

In the space of two days, Linden Lab, maker of the virtual world of Second Life, has made three separate announcements that indicate trouble may be on the horizon for the company — if it hasn’t already arrived. Two of them have raised renewed alarms about the platform’s scalability. Though CEO Philip Rosedale blithely assured [ READ MORE ]

Ogoglio SourceForges Ahead

Trevor Smith, who’s been hard at work on his open-source 3D platform, Ogoglio, has begun a SourceForge project, where he’ll eventually make the code available. While there aren’t any file packages yet, you can browse the repository if you want to get a look at the bits of code Trevor has made available so far. [ READ MORE ]

BumpTop, Where Have You Been All My Life?

I can’t believe the YouTube clip above has been up there for six months and I’ve only just found it now. I no longer want a touchscreen, now I want a BumpTop interface (which got Dugg a couple of weeks ago and is now all over the Internet, of course). Watch the video above. It [ READ MORE ]

New Tools For The 3pointD Generation

Two new applications out recently — Yahoo! Pipes and IBM’s QEDWiki — contain much promise for the 3pointD world. They’re basically mashupmakers (mashuppers? mashers?), GUI-based systems that let you create your own mashups without having to get too deep into code. They’re still a bit beyond my ability to really check out without spending a [ READ MORE ]

Mind-Blowing TouchScreen Company Launches

The Google Earth Blog carries the news that Jeff Han, who developed a truly amazing multi-touch screen interface at NYU, is now commercializing the product through his new company, Perceptive Pixel. Fast Company has a great piece on Han, and there’s a bandwidth-intensive video to watch, which shows some pretty mind-blowing stuff. When I first [ READ MORE ]

Virtual/Real World Control Panel In Second Life

SL resident Williem Leandros sends news that he and a friend have built an interesting real-world control panel that can both control objects in the virtual world of Second Life and in turn be controlled by them. The real and virtual controllers are “entangled together through a Python web server” so that turning a knob [ READ MORE ]

James Cameron’s Virtual World Film Greenlit

Filmmaker James Cameron of Titanic fame (and, probably more importantly to readers of this blog, The Terminator), has just gotten the go-ahead on his next film. What interests 3pointD about this is the fact that it will be filmed in a moviemaking version of a virtual world, and new details of the process have emerged [ READ MORE ]

The L Word Comes to Second Life

Fans of Showtime‘s long-running series “The L Word,” which is a kind of San Francisco lesbian version of Sex and the City (and a pretty entertaining show, actually), now have a place to hang out in the virtual world of Second Life. Built out by the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), »The L [ READ MORE ]

Novint 3D Haptic Ships at Higher Price

We knew it was too good to be true. Remember the extra-cool “Falcon” 3D haptic mouse from Novint Technologies that we blogged about way back last spring at E3? Well, it’s being made available later this year, just as Novint promised, but not at the $100 price point that was predicted at E3, at least, [ READ MORE ]

Shared Markerboard For Second Life

The screenshot at left is lifted from a BlogHUD post by Second Life user CDB Barkley, which flags a shared markerboard created by user Cubist Scarborough, which you can see in the Cottonwood sim. It’s a pretty nice piece of work. You sit on one of a handful of chairs and click through to a [ READ MORE ]

HUD-Free Language Translation for Second Life

Second Life resident Max Case, inventor of the free Babbler heads-up display that allows translation between various languages in text chat within SL, has now come up with a standalone object called the De-Babbler that translates other people’s chat for you. The Babbler required the speaker to choose a native language and a language for [ READ MORE ]

3pointD On A Wii — And So Much More

It’s no Snakes on a Plane, but it’ll do. Since I can’t be bothered with pre-ordering things, I suffered through the holidays with an Xbox360, but I’m feeling more and more like I need a Nintendo Wii. Not because I’m such a hot gamer (I suck at Gears of War worse than Matt Mihaly), but [ READ MORE ]

Interfaces of the Future, in London Today

I love London. I’d particularly like to be there today (or tomorrow), when the London Science Museum has a cool-sounding Future Playground showcase of gaming peripherals of the future (described in detail on the BBC’s Web site), as part of its Game On exhibition on the history of computer games. It’s worth pondering what such [ READ MORE ]

Control Game View By Turning Your Head

The device sounds cooler than the headline, trust me. It’s the TrackClip PRO from a company called NaturalPoint, and it turns your headset into a mouselook controller. Clip it onto your headset, and the motion of your head controls the direction of your view on screen, freeing up your mouse hand for more important matters, [ READ MORE ]

Convert Your MySpace Page to 3D Space Via 3B

Linda Zimmer over at Business Communicators of SL flags what sounds like a very cool application: a downloadable 3D browser called 3B that allows you take existing 2D Web content and make an avatarized 3D space out of it that others can visit. From the site: “3B allows you take any web sites or photos [ READ MORE ]