Virtual partners seek to make relation off line
Cambridge researches shines a more positive light on relations that spring from virtual encouters, positioning the 3D online space as just a medium to pursue their relations.
3D scene embeds easy as you tube
Nice way of embedding 3D into webpages as part of the rest of the content. I see a nice application as a basis for serving 3D advert campaigns onto high traffic websites. Expect to see 3D products exhibited along your blog and news websites. its by SceneCaster.
updated april 25th 2009
Scenecaster partners with mental images for 3D content in the cloud
Exit Reality, enter 3D website
I caught ExitReality through a broadcast on Life On Line, a web based, avatar hosted talkshow about all things virtual. Danny Stephanic explains in the next video how it works. As usual, you will need to install a plugin, and so far it only works with my Internet Explorer and Firefox, even tho im a Google Chrome user by nature. (Wil it work on other OS’s besides Windows I wonder?)
After viewing tothport.nl through this browser I got to see a 3D space, filled with little signposts – Each signpost representing a link in the sites frontpage. I will have to play around with it more to see if I can get my site to look anywhere near usable in 3D using this technology, but its definately got my attention now, as it brings 3D to web by transforming existing 2D content.
Collaborate on common desktop applications in a virtual world
On the side line I spend time with a number of friends building up a grid based on open simulator, the open source answer to Second Life. At current we have a grid with approximately 50 regions and 300 user accounts, of which half is active at least once a month. The great thing about open source is .. that its open. So a lot of add ons are being developed, and I expect this system to out smart the functionalities that Linden Labs Second Life offers one day.
Real Xtend is virtual world software originally based on open sim and is a very interesting basis to start building your own 3D applications. The one thing i wanted to mention today is the combination of Real Xtend with VNC to share standard desktop application within a 3D world. The most simple application of this is to sit down together and edit that Power Point presentation together, while all the participants are spread out geographically in the actual world. Its this sharing and collaborative editing that makes virtual worlds a killer app for companies in-house, making the tele-worker part of the office based team again.
Read the full article over at Cyber Tech News
IBM Lotus Samespace 3D goes Beta
We’ve seen this idea before in the form of RiversRunRed’s Immersive Workspaces; combining online 2D and 3D tools to collaborate and share idea’s. Today IBM has announced its going to Beta with selected clients in the combined use of its Lotus Sametime software with virtual 3D environments. Lotus Sametime will be able to interact with Second Life, Open Sim and Forterra’s worlds, imho a good set to be able to cooperate with.
Now, the next step is being able to pull off the same trick, but now using any virtual world platform as a basis and having it integrate with IBM’s Lotus, Microsoft Outlook or any other existing ’2D’ collaboration tool.
Level Up, Open Grid standardisation
Very roughly drafted, but we have a IETF group to start work on interoperability for virtual worlds, the MMOX working group. Its goals and milestones concern communication, scenery setting (primitives), authentication and intergrid teleportation to be worked on between now and june 2010. “Current proposed work items for the group include the Linden Lab Structured Data (LLSD) draft. “
Related is this article from the Intel blog with questions on how digital content may have a differing value depending on which grid you are on. Though the draft proposal for the working group does not mention it, an Open Grid standard is also going to have to deal with standardising trade for in world currencies that have real world values. Someone needs to answer the question on how much 1000 World of Warcraft gold is worth in Pixie Hollow Acorns…
NATO Wants Sim Afghanistan to Test War Plans
NATO commanders in Afghanistan want a virtual version of the country, to test out battle plans and forecast future unrest.
Afghanistan’s often-explosive mix of tribal, ethnic and religious power politics has been catching outsiders off-guard for the last couple-thousand years. This time around, America and her western allies are trying two controversial, competing approaches, to prepare for the surprises. One embeds in combat units social scientists, trained in making foreign cultures more understandable. The other dumps everything that’s known about the country into a software model — and then watches what develops in this Sim Afghanistan.
Last last week, NATO began its search for for the newest “simulation capability.” This one should “be able to model the Afghanistan engagement space in the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure and Information (PMESII) domains,” a call for white papers notes. With all that information in hand, war planners can then “assess and validate how specific future events or actions could impact on the current situation through the creation and simulation of a hypothetical/simulated environment.”
Of course, this assumes the program is loaded with next-to-fool-proof data on Afghan economics, politics, and culture — and understands how all those various elements interact. Not bad for a “COTS [commercial off-the-shelf] solution which may require limited development work.”
Veteran counterinsurgents have long been skeptical of how accurate these models can really be. “Wait a minute, you can’t tell me who’s going to a win a football game. And now you’re going to replicate free will?” retired Lt. Col. John Nagl, who helped write the Army’s manual on defusing insurgencies, told Danger Room in 2007. “They are smoking something they shouldn’t be,” retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper quipped to Science magazine. “Only those who don’t know how the real world works will be suckers for this stuff.”
Still, coders and researchers at Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon University, SAIC, BAE Systems, and Purdue University have all lined up, to make similar sim societies.
White papers for these new models, NATO says, “are due no later than 25 February 2009 at 1600 hours Eastern Standard Time.”
Source:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/02/nato-wants-sim.html
Twinity targetting London & Moscow next
Photo realistic Virtual world
UK diabetes campaign sets up in SL
As part of its awareness campaign for “diabetes, the silent assasin”, Diabetes UK has built a headquater in Second Life and represented itself on social networks Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. Though I dont think they are going to be succesfull in Second Life at least they are showing wits about actively involving new media.
I visited the Second Life headquaters to see the efforts they made; The building is nice, but they have failed to use the community elements of Second Life to draw attention to the campaign. If you want people to notice you, you need to organise events – so have concerts in/ around the building from UK based live musicians.
They do have a signboard up with links to various online pages, so information can be accessed from Second Life’s headquaters. A big boo boo is using the videoscreen to show the website; it looks pretty, but after the initial display of the site, i cant actually interact with it from within Second Life. They would have been better off displaying a campaign video in that precious content channel.
