Posts Tagged ‘ There.com ’

Join the Visionaries at Virtual Worlds 2007

I’m off Monday for the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in San Jose next week (online registration ends tomorrow! see below), where I’ll be moderating what should be a very cool roundtable on the future of virtual world platforms. We go on Thursday at 11am, on the strategy track, with a very flattering title: Visionary Panel: [ READ MORE ]

Virtual Goods Summit: Why Virtual Goods Matter

Nabeel Hyatt of Conduit Labs moderated a panel on Why Virtual Goods Matter, and What’s Driving User Adoption, at the Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford University. Panelists: Craig Sherman of Gaia Online Daniel James of Three Rings Amy Jo Kim of Shufflebrain Byron Reeves of Stanford University and Seriosity Reeves: The human brian is not [ READ MORE ]

There.com Landowners Get Weather Controls

Landowners in the virtual world of There.com got new control over the weather at their plots yesterday, according to the company. As of yesterday, “all members owning zones, neighborhoods or property lots will have new options for customizing the environment and weather for their locations in the virtual world. Owners will see two new pull-down [ READ MORE ]

Virtual Worlds 07 Audio Files Now at RezNation

If you missed the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference, don’t worry: now you can close your eyes and it’s almost like you’re there. John Swords has now posted most if not all of the audio files of the conference sessions over at RezNation.com, home of SecondCast. You can find all the files under the Metaverse Sessions [ 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 ]

MTV’s Virtual Hills Pushes 3D Social Networking

As noted here, MTV is expanding its virtual world, Virtual Laguna Beach, to incorporate Laguna Beach spinoff show The Hills. (Read more about MTV’s virtual world initiative and how it came together in my piece in the February issue of Wired, which has just come out.) MTV’s vHills apparently launched last Monday, while I was [ READ MORE ]

Is the Metaversal Category-Killer Dead?

Raph Koster flags an Escapist article in which Allen Varney covers “boutique MMOGs” and the fact that they can not only be profitable but can garner significant niche audiences in a similar manner to very narrowly focused Web sites. This kind of thing is along the lines of some of my thinking about virtual worlds. [ READ MORE ]

Virtual Concert Available on MTV’s Urge

It’s audio file day here at 3pointD, apparently. This is a kind of cool thing forward to me by a friend: young indie-emo-whatever-rockers Cartel, who’ve been featured on MTV’s reality show Laguna Beach, have released a three-song mini album of the live tunes they played during a virtual gig in the network’s online world, Virtual [ READ MORE ]

Virtual World Tax Debate Gathers Steam

I spent Friday and Saturday at the joint State of Play / Terra Nova symposium at the New York Law School. There was a lot of interesting talk, but probably none more so than the panel on taxation and virtual worlds that was held Saturday morning. Dan Terdiman has an excellent wrap on CNet, though [ READ MORE ]

Wild Griefer Wins There.com

Well, the There Film Festival, anyway. Check out “Wild Griefer,” the winning entry, by There.com resident Francis_7. The film is a five-minute music video based on a song by the same name, written by Thereians Banshee_Kate and Stungthumbz. And it’s all about griefing! (Of course, as There.com’s press release points out, “The lyrics and dialogue [ READ MORE ]

Laguna Beach to Air First in Virtual World

An early model of Virtual Laguna Beach built out in Second Life Good news, metaverse fans: This week’s episode of MTV’s eye-opening reality show Laguna Beach will premiere not on television but in the “music” channel’s virtual world, Virtual Laguna Beach, built on the same technology as There.com. The show will go on at 9pm [ READ MORE ]

Virtual Laguna Beach Goes Live, Gets Neighbors

MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach, the virtual world tied to its hit TV show, gets its official launch this Wednesday, according to an article in The New York Times. The article also reports that MTV plans two other virtual worlds to join VLB in coming months: “VMTV is a music destination where visitors can club-hop among [ READ MORE ]

MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach Parties On

Virtual Laguna Beach, the virtual world built for MTV using There.com‘s technology, is still running slightly under the radar. But that isn’t stopping MTV from putting on some parties in their beachfront world. Though it’s currently in a kind of public alpha test, VLB is holding a fashion show this evening at 7:00pm Pacific Time. [ READ MORE ]

MTV the Next MySpace?

An interesting article in MediaWeek wonders whether MTV Networks might have plans to build a MySpace-like social network out of various properties it’s acquired lately, including things like Xfire and Neopets. While MTV’s still-in-alpha Virtual Laguna Beach isn’t mentioned by name in the article, it can only lend more weight to the theory, despite the [ READ MORE ]

Second Life CTO Flags Upcoming Changes

The closing keynote talk at the Second Life Community Convention this past weekend was given more or less in tandem by Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale and Chief Technology Officer Cory Ondrejka. While the pair were their usual charming and amusing selves, their act having been well honed by now, they looked back at the [ READ MORE ]

MTV to Open Virtual Laguna Beach in There

World of SL is a new project by SL resident Tao Takashi (who’s also a contributor to 3pointD’s Flickr group) that aggregates all the SL blogs Tao can find (and there are a lot of them). Slightly amusing is the fact that the big story on World of SL today is not about SL at [ READ MORE ]

Synthetic Worlds Take Shape at Indiana U.

Ted Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and perhaps the person who’s done most to advance the study of MMOs as an academic discipline, has launched a new Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University. The Synthetic Worlds Initiative is a research center at Indiana University whose aim is to [ READ MORE ]

Frock to Frock Competition in There.com

The fashionistas of There.com are going frock to frock over the next nine weeks to find out who’s the best designer of fashions for the virtual world. The There Fashion Challenge pits a dozen of the world’s top designers in weekly design competitions, commencing with a pirate outfit challenge that’s currently up for judging. The [ READ MORE ]

Attend Supernova in SL, With Branded HUD

When I posted the other day about going to the Supernova conference in San Francisco (I leave tomorrow), I forgot to mention that you’ll be able to virtually attend part of the conference by logging into Second Life this Thursday. And, probably not coincidentally, it looks like you’ll get a branded heads-up display when you [ READ MORE ]

Google’s 3pointD Aspirations

Very Spatial yesterday flagged an interesting story on the BBC about Google‘s mobile aspirations for the future. That, combined with talk coming out of Google’s Geo Developers Day that various people have reported to me, has finally convinced me that Google may at least be starting to think about some kind of multi-user version of [ READ MORE ]

SL Hits Quarter-Million Members

I don’t usually post about Second Life membership numbers, but reaching the quarter-million mark (which I spotted on SL resident Tateru Nino‘s blog) seems significant to me. Tateru follows up with a post attempting to look a bit more closely at the numbers. Neither she nor I have great insights into the matter, but the [ READ MORE ]

Personal Avatars: The Future of the 3D Internet?

This was going to be a brief post about some new features of the ActiveWorlds software that was just released, but it turned into a longer contemplation of how the 3D Internet will work once many, many more of us have a presence in such online spaces. Chris from SWCity, a community in ActiveWorlds that [ READ MORE ]

Teaching Science in Virtual Worlds

Sixth-graders in Wisconsin are apparently using an avatarized virtual environment built at Harvard to learn about science. MUVEES, which is saddled with one of the most unwieldy names I’ve come across in virtual worlds (Multi-User Virtual Environment Experimental Simulator), lets users don avatars to navigate a shared 3D online space filled with “virtual architectures,” “digital [ READ MORE ]

Marketing to Avatars — Or to People?

Paul Hemp of the Harvard Business Review has an interesting article in the current issue about “Avatar-Based Marketing,” i.e., marketing to avatars in virtual worlds. What’s interesting about the piece is Hemp’s oblique examination of identity; does the fact that you’re inhabiting an avatar when you’re receiving a marketing message affect your purchasing decisions? Or [ READ MORE ]

There.com Heads East

Social virtual world There.com has launched an alpha version of its service in the Philippines in association with local social networking site Groovenet, according to this announcement on the There site. There Philippines exists separate from the main There grid, on its own hardware, though it may eventually be merged with the current grid, according [ READ MORE ]

Positional Audio System for 3D Online Spaces

The Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre in Australia is bringing positional voice and audio to online games and 3D virtual spaces. Its Immersive Communications Environment will represent environmental audio and users’ voices positionally: the gamers and gunshots that are closer to you will sound louder, while those that are further away will sound fainter [ READ MORE ]

Will Harvey’s Case Study of IMVU

Will Harvey, founder and CEO of IMVU and founder of There.com, gave an afternoon keynote talk here at SDForum titled “Virtual Worlds Meet Instant Messaging,” which is what IMVU is all about, Harvey said. Not only that, but IMVU is “the best 3D instant messenger,” he said — though he noted that the competition isn’t [ READ MORE ]

PeopleTagging? Pondering Identity in 3pointD

Here’s an idea that’s been kicking around in my head lately: PeopleTagging. It grows out of the question of who I am online. Am I my Web site? Am I my email address? My toon name? My password? Or am I the person sitting at the keyboard, and if so, how do you translate that [ READ MORE ]

VR-Google Earth Mashup in the Conduit?

VRCO Inc. is a company that specializes in creating interactive 3D visual representations of various kinds. “VRCO’s business is immersive environments and we wish to enable as many applications as possible,” reads its Web site. A lot of its products seem to be middleware apps that allow other apps to communicate in 3D, or which [ READ MORE ]

A City for Exploring in ActiveWorlds

SW City’s Cirrus Street This blog post alerted me to what sounds like a huge and thriving city in ActiveWorld that I hadn’t heard of before. SW City apparently covers 130 square km. of virtual space, and is filled with impressive builds, judging from this YouTube video. Billed as “the largest city in ActiveWorlds,” the [ READ MORE ]