ReViving Virtual Worlds

I recently received a beta-testing invitation from 'Vivaty,' a new player in the SecondLife dominated (and dragging) virtual worlds game. I'm not too familiar with the company, but based on a quick Googling, it seems to be well funded and has solid leadership. The most interesting buy-in for me at this point is their Facebook integration. If its solid, that could be a great boost for them and a neat add-in for us Facebookers.

The current roadblock to any real Vivaty appraisal by yours truly is the Internet Explorer 7.0 requirement. No Firefox or Mac support yet! I haven't had the desire to update my long neglected IE yet, but I will be sure to try out Vivaty when I do. Stay tuned for updates!

A Valuable 3D Resource

I thought I'd post a resource for anyone looking to improve their 3D modeling skills. The Ego Lounge over at Ego-Farms has a bunch of really great tutorials and comment threads with helpful tips and discussions. It's also a great place to get feedback on your work or help with a particular problem or technique.

Ego-Farms is run by Eric Maslowski, a great guy and ridiculously talented 3D artist. Take a look at his portfolio if you want something to aspire to!

A 3D World

In a couple of weeks (May 12th), international industry leaders and other 3D proponents and interested entities will meet in São Paulo, Brazil for what is being called the 'X3D Earth' initiative.

Web3d.org lists the purpose of the X3D Earth group as being: "to create an infrastructure of open and extensible standards to visualize in three dimension objects from real world and constructions of information in a geospatial referenced context." This infrastructure will presumably be based on X3D and has the somewhat lofty goal of compiling and archiving all available (public and government controlled) terrain, imagery, and cartography data.

While I'm all for the ideas behind this initiative (open and centralized access to spatial data), isn't this sort of re-inventing the wheel? I realize Google's data isn't exactly 'open and accessible,' but they seem to have had great success implementing an architecture that fits many of X3D Earth's goals and has been proven popular and successful with users. With Google Earth's large user base and ever-growing repository of geospatial referenced content, would a functional X3D Earth implementation be able to reach the critical mass of users needed to be successful?

Maybe someone over at Google will take notice - it would be great to see some sort of collaboration here. I think everyone would benefit from improved data access and standardization and we wouldn't have to watch the death of another well intentioned Web3D initiative!