There is a new book on the shelves: Augmented Reality. A practical guide.
Augmented Reality is the fusion of real and virtual reality, where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real-time. AR creates the illusion that virtual, computer-generated objects exist in the real world. All you need is a computer and a webcam. Learn new ways to interact with your computer. The possibilities are endless: data visualization, immersive environments, and, of course, gaming. This book will show you how, and teach you about game development at the same time. You can run the included demos, or use the ARTag API to customize your own AR applications.

Bibliographical information:

First Edition  January 2008
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pages: 328
ISBN 10: 1-934356-03-4 | ISBN 13:9781934356036

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From the Gogofrog-Website:

Gogofrog™ takes you into the ultimate 3D world. No downloads just the internet in 3D. Create your own ulimited online space, it’s fast, easy and free. Do things you simply can’t in 2D … See and chat with your site visitors, furnish your environment and change your whole space or yourself to suit your mood, store photos, read a book or share one, write a journal, interact, listen to music…

(more…)

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As I learned from O’Really Radar, the NASA has some interesting ideas for their next 2020 moon mission. The idea: communication with the homebase via real-time and synchronized avatars. Check out the video here:

Link to the article…

[Technorati Tags: NASA - virtual world - moon]

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The next generation of office spaces will be online 3D rooms, fit for collaboration (see also my posts in german about this trend here: “3D auf dem Vormarsch“). One of the providers of such services is Qwaq, an US-based company.

Qwaq gives the user a 3D environment (office) where different document are posted on the wall for interaction. Until now, there is not really a difference to 2D collaboration tools. But: you can immediately see who is working on what document / sheet, so you can approach him or start woking on some other doc.

Chats are possible - so there will be users using this room as a conference hall as well.
[Technorati Tags: 3D - virtual+world]

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A nice way to tell a story or to send a message is to design it the 3D way. With SceneCaster, it is pretty easy to do. SceneCaster is a free online-application with many different functions to build your own short movie.

You can store your scenes and also explore others from the website. To make it easy, SceneCaster provides “millions” of 3D objects to be used and modified.

Link: Scencaster

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The Metaverse Market Index MMI was shortly launched as a tool to observe the metaverse’ development. Until now, there was little comparison between virtual worlds due to missing indicators and standards. Now, with the new metrics, there is hope we can gain reliable data cross different virtual worlds.

Link: MMI

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A while ago I read an interesting article at Techcrunch about the future of eCommerce - and this is, you guess it, the sphere of 3D worlds. The main message is that future application will have a strong tendency toward virtual services of all sort.

If this is the case, I may think about the role of our representations in these worlds. Are avatars prepared to do such a new job? In Second Life (which is not the model it will be used in future applications), avatars are capable of many things, but are limited. With SL opening and invitation to third parties to add more functionalities into SL, this may change. To meet these demands, avatars must deal with

• security issues (money transfer)
• identity verification (ID card)
• money exchange (different currencies used in different virtual worlds)
• taxing (Do we tax avatars or the player?)
• geographical re-positioning in different environments
• …

This is a very spectacular phase of the human history, I would say.

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In earlier posts, I wrote about Metacrusher, a challenging project to web all these different virtual worlds together. Another huge step into the direction of virtual world open-crossings is the announcement of Second Life to open up its platform for third parties.

Second Life intentions to make its code open-source are driven by a survival strategy as more and more other big players of the “conventional” web look for a way into the 3D web scene. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and more are on the brink to release or enhance their 3D services to the mass market. That’s why Second Life may look for a chance to follow a similar model like Firefox, open up and enhance through third parties, become popular and stay at the top.

But this isn’t only a Second Life affair. IBM among others try to establish a 3D standard for interoperability, and it could be used to build / re-build 3D web sites working together and with the real world too.

Interestingly, the effects on avatars are neglected. How do you transfer your social network into an other environment? Or your special skills? Can you exchange your knowledge from here over there and what is with your funds? There is a huge potential for third service companies to jump right into this opportunity to offer complete new services.

Besides the economic effect of such 3D standards and interoperation, what does this mean to the value of avatars? Now, depending on your games, you as a player act through many different avatars. Which one will be used to wander through the worlds? Or can you take all of them as a group and control them as  a group? Like above, there are incredibly many options and open questions about the avatars on the move.

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Here is a small collection of virtual worlds. All of them apply to different audience / player types:

• Active Worlds
• Barbie Girls
• Club Penguin
• Cyworld
• Dubit
• Faketown
• Habbo Hotel
• IMVU
• Kaneva
• Millsberry
• Mokitown
• Neopets
• Red Light Center
• Second Life
• There
• Webkinz
• Zwinktopia

Some others are short before release - like Sony Home or Lego Virtual World. Looking at this, a project like Metacrusher makes sense and is necessary more than ever - the more the virtual sphere gets splitted in small individual fractions, the more valueable are bridges between them. The question is, if the owner of the single virtual worlds does like such a ‘global’ idea of transfer.
[Technorati Tags: Virtual Worlds ]

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This is a project of high interest and I read a very interesting interview at Virtual World News with one of the Metacrusher initiators.

“At the beginning, it’s the ability to port your information back and forth. How long does it take me to create an avatar in Second Life, but then I have to go through it in There.com? And then down the line, the idea is for your avatar to stroll through different worlds on the Metacrasher network, but it’s up to others if they want to be involved.

We’re reproducing sims from Second Life. So if you want, people can see it right from your website, and they can either buy what you’re selling right there, or hit the SLURL, or investigate other worlds.

Let’s say you have a mirror of your SL acre. Right next to it, you may be linked to someone’s WoW acre. And you have the chance to go between them and do commerce, either through Paypal or if it gets to the point of corresponding with everyone else’s, we might do that. Right now, we’re going to try and do it with real-life money, something that’s based on dollars. We’re working on that right now with the networking people. ”

This will be very very interesting! How does knowledge will be transfered from one world to another?

[Technorati Tags: virtual world - metacrasher ]

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