I was interested to try this out but Firefox 3.03 kept crashing whenever I went to VTOReality.com and attempted to claim the site and customize the 3D landscape. Another day or perhaps another VTOR author wants to try this out (?)

I like the concept of making the entire 2D web available as 3D and letting webmasters create the world as time goes on, but they need to get this on Mac and Linux and shore up the Firefox gremlins. If you find this concept interesting too, then keep your eye on playce.com:

plaYce is “Making the World a Playground” by providing a 3D virtual world for games, based on the real world. plaYce’s technology reconstructs the entire world in 3D and streams it with high frame rate from within the browser, providing an immersive “Mirror World” gaming experience, without a heavy client download.

Will have to see how this turns out.

Snow instead of ocean
If snow is more your thing than water, turn your speakers down (rather off, the music is horrible) and take a ride above the snow-capped skies of the Electric Oyster. Tilt your mouse and you’ll get a different camera view. I kept trying to crash, but you can’t. Bummer, it would be more interactive that way.

Make 2D photos more 3D-like
With Make3D you can convert 2D images on your hard drive or appropriately licensed in Flickr into a 3D model. Here’s an example of a picture I took of Mount Rainier. Free signup is required to upload (email required).

Painted 3D computer monitors 3D
While talking 3D, IZ3D is sharing some screenshots of 3D painted monitors for gamers:

These aren’t available for purchase as of this writing, but they offer you a way to put your name and email (use a throwaway one, just in case) to be notified when you can buy them. Saw this one on FriendFeed, thanks Chris.

3D Web browser
SpaceTime lets you load websites in a 3D space.

I’ve written about other attempts to do 2D websites in a 3D browser and while Space Time is notable for being a finished product where others have been more prototypes, it’s not something to switch away from Firefox, Safari or Opera any time soon.

Tag Galaxy
Using Tag Galaxy you can view Flickr photos on a space-like 3D interface as well as related tags.

Just enter in a tag like ‘3D’, click the planet and enjoy. Some good visuals and nicely done.

Yesterday, I looked at two new virtual world launches. The first one I’ve already blogged in a separate post that will be published either later today or tomorrow. The second and more interesting to me is Lively by Google which allows any Windows Google account user to quickly and easily insert a 3D virtual room into a web page.  Here’s an example inline embed (RSS readers, you may want to click into the post to actually see) of the underwater room I created from a free template in less than five minutes below.

Fellow writer Darius, also a fellow Mac user, noted that this does not work with the Mac yet. It does work in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Lively is fairly limited at this time. From what I could see you can’t create any objects yet, only add objects to your room what’s already available.

In the screenshot above you’ll see my underwater room has only three chairs because that’s all that were available. I didn’t see how to be able to sit in the chairs, so unless that’s possible somehow, these objects are merely window dressing. Update 11:11am PST: Lestat figured this out and shared. You just double-click on the seat cushion to sit in the chairs

In its current state, Lively is like IRC in 3D. You can meet your friends in a room and chat with bubbles over your head. I’ve seen many attempts to do this type of thing over the years but the only one that comes to mind as being a big success is Habbo Hotel.

Some bloggers are already stating this as a threat to Second Life, but that’s giving Lively way too much credit at this point. Sure, if Google gets behind this and continues to improve upon it, maybe someday but Lively in its current incarnation is no threat. When there is an ability to actually create original objects (can’t do yet), stream audio and video (can’t do yet), interact with objects (how can you do this?), then we can entertain this possibility. Linden Lab already has their own Lively room, BTW, called Linden Lab in Lively.

This coming Friday’s radio show perhaps we can demo this with a bigger group and see what we can break. For those who don’t want to wait, can join one of the popular rooms like the chess room which resembles a gigantic chess board and has had thousands of visitors as of this writing.

I’m going to try and keep this running in a separate window today. Feel free to stop in and see what we can break. I like the underwater seascape, but I’m not sure this will ever be any replacement for IRC to me. Not in its current state. What do you think?

Ze Frank is best known in the podcast world for his strange, witty and clever videoblog that he produced daily for a year, but did you know he had a snowflake creator that can be rotated in 2D or 3D?

Not terribly useful because you can’t export your creation to a website or do anything, but it’s kind of cool to look at, especially as the weather gets cooler. Ze labels it as a toy.

While staring at these images, do you see them as 3D? How about checking out the Tiltviewer which offers images from the Flickr photo service from Yahoo in a 3D rotating grid.

Here’s a challenge: try writing your name or drawing something a rotating 3D canvas. Trippy. Too Van Goghesq? Maybe drawing using the 3D Stereogram will be easier.

The rumored description by ARS Technica sounds believable:

ASU students received a questionnaire yesterday, screenshots of which were originally posted by a MacRumors forum member, that hinted strongly at Google’s plans. Specifically, the questionnaire intro says that students will be able to test a product that will be publicly launched later this year by a “major Internet company,” and the graphic makes reference to 3D modeling, video gaming, and avatars. It proceeds to ask questions about students’ involvement with social networks like MySpace and whether they have Gmail accounts.

Video games? Could Google be looking to expand their iGoogle product to include MMORPG? With news of Metaplace and the Sony PS3 Home project both arriving in Spring 2008, does this add a third player with a big G in their name to the space? Wouldn’t surprise this writer, as Google doesn’t really have a serious gaming platform — yet. Sure, you can add widgets to your personalized Google pages, but that’s nothing on the scale of what a real gaming platform could provide.

Though this is only barely related, this also reminded me of the commercial traffic tracking software, Visitorville which will show you real time visitors to your website, including buses with the Google logo on it when somebody arrives at your website from a Google search. Imagine if Google could wire up something like that where your customizable avatar plays in part what’s happening in real time — or close to real time as possible — on your website or personal home page? With Google Analytics, search, orkut, Sketchup (for the 3D avatar creation) they have a lot of the necessary pieces to glue together.

Or is this all just somebody’s 20% project at Google and nothing serious? As usual with rumors, Google isn’t talking, but that shouldn’t prevent the rest of us from having fun speculating at what the Wizards of G are secreting from the rest of us in Kansas.

If you’re looking at an interesting perspective of the other side: pulling Google Earth data into Second Life, take a look at fellow VTOR author, jvastine’s post: Google Earth & Virtual Reality.

Entropia Universe, the safest virtual world utilizing a real cash economy, has signed a license agreement to use the stunning high-tech game engine CryENGINE 2®, from German developer Crytek, creators of “Far Cry®” and upcoming “Crysis®.” This will make Entropia Universe the closest-to-reality looking massively multiplayer online game ever seen.

It’s said to be finished by mid 2008.

Some of the really cool features (seen in video) that I’m looking forward to are;

• Parametric skeletal animation system
• Breakable buildings & vegetation systems

This is going to bring gaming to a completely different level!

Download the wmv direct from Entropia Universe (better quality).

I mean, check those clouds out.

Linden Lab, you really came through when it comes to making the environments a joy to be in and to not produce the snowglobe effect. I seriously thought that this implementation would have taken a lot longer due to the acquisition of Windward Mark Interactive happening only last week, but it seems that there were already plans in the works.

Congratulations on your fine work in the First Look viewer (Mac version seen here on your left). But don’t get too comfortable. I’m still ready to rock’n'roll on some of those bugs that are still out there and there’s still a lot of refining work along with bug fixes that need to happen before you convince this guy that you’re game to play in the big leagues. But be assured that this was a huge step in the right direction. Huge. Enormous. Gigantic. Gi-normous!

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled programming while I stare at the sky for a while, and watch all of the flags that I see blow in different directions.

Second Life Insider reports that Linden is acquiring Windward Mark Interactive in an effort to bolster the 3D environments of SL. I previously had covered the issues with the detailing of environments and why SL lacked the shine that other MMORPGs seemed to be able to achieve.

One look at the Nimble system that Windward Mark has developed for 3D volumetric clouds and you can see how this could really be advantageous to Linden to have graphics as such integrated into the system. The realistic look of the environment could put Second Life in a whole new ballgame when it comes to environmental graphics.

Hopefully the integration efforts begin soon and is more smooth that recent feature additions. I personally look forward to more realistic environments that we all can buzz around in. It would definitely throw a whole new meaning to the term “escaping reality.” Meanwhile, let us gaze in awe at the screenshots and movies that Windward Mark has to offer and cross our fingers for the best that is yet to come.

Update(1): Linden’s official weigh in.  Check out the screenshots.   And what do you know…. they talk about cloud shadows on the environment. heh.

Have you been seduced by the Twitter trend? I haven’t in first or second life, although I have signed up for the service and used a couple times. Even if you have been bitten, er Twitten, I’m not sure how the above pictured mashup Twittervision 3D is all that useful. Sure, it looks neat for a little bit and is a cool demo, but what’s the point of this beyond eye candy? I get that we can see where this person just posted on Twitter on a spinning globe in the world but is that the only point? Not trying to bash it, I’m asking a serious question: what am I missing here?

For readers who don’t know what Twitter is and does, it’s a service which allows you to post short text messages (140 characters or less) via a wide variety of methods: text messaging from your cell phone, the web interface, in your Firefox browser search bar and yes, even in the virtual world of Second Life with tools like Ordinal Malaprop’s Twitterbox tool.

The draw of Twitter and competitors like Jaiku is that you can form groups and share IM-style conversations among each other. 57 Miles from Metaversed has a Twitter Group in world. Personally, I prefer IRC which has been around for ages for group discussions and conversations. I wonder why we don’t see more SL to IRC mashups. Maybe that’s a field of opportunity. I understand that IRC isn’t as sexy and new as this Twitter text messaging stuff, but it’s been around awhile and works good.

Wouldn’t IRC in Second Life be better?
One of the current complaints about Twitter seems to be the centralized server setup, scaling and load-related problems.

Sound familiar?

IRC gets around this by allowing anybody to setup their own IRC server. I’ve mentioned to the other VTOR authors how I wish Second Life had used IRC for the in world chat instead of a proprietary system. If we could bring our own IRC channel inside SL then we’d remove yet another centralized world problem.

Let’s visit an old friend that began many of the look and feel of MMORPGs. Quake. While Quake was not the first FPS, it was one that was wildy popular and one that incorporated the use of skinning for the models that was eventually open to the rest of the world. This was very apparent in modifications later on when you looked at the layouts of skins and found that what you were seeing in 3D was actually a 2D layer that was draped over the 3D body. These days, practically all 3D engines skin models as such. The more the polygons to fill out the skin, the more realistic. Still confused? Let’s bring it down a notch in terms that everyone can understand. Think of it this way. Take a bed sheet and drape it over you. Now if someone were to trace your features on the bed sheet, then take the sheet off and lay it flat, then that would be what a skin is like in a game.

Caption: Note that the moon doesn’t change from different angles, it just elongates like a flat image laying inside a curve.