This should be good news for lots of would-be virtual world developers. From the Multiverse developer forum (Link):

The Multiverse Open Beta platform release is now available. Register with the Multiverse Developer Program, and you will be able to access the downloads here:

I’ve been stopping in to the Multiverse forums on occasion lately hoping to catch that announcement, so for those who were also wondering when it would be made available, have at it. And if you’ve not registered, head there first – Registration Link.

Just a quick note to point you to a post on the Second Life Insider blog (Link) discussing the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s project inside the Second Life virtual space. Very cool. My father once worked for the NOAA – something to do with computers and satellite images – so I look forward to seeing him over the holidays and showing this to him.

{Image Copyright © 2006 Aimee Weber}

Back in 2002 when I left corporate life to become my own boss, hoping to move into a combination of real and virtual design (even though something like Second Life hadn’t even yet popped up on the radar), I didn’t realize that metaversal consulting would so completely occupy my time as it does now; finding myself swamped to the point of my not being able to spend more time pursuing the things Second Life makes possible. And while of no legitimate importance to anyone else, those things are at least important to me. Consequently, after delivering an important batch of files last Friday, I spent some time surfing around to see what others have been doing to bridge the transreality gap and that led me to John Hurliman’s blog entry “Exporting Prim Data From Second Life” (Link). Needless to say his post resonated with me on several counts, so I’ll be keeping tabs on his progress. It would be great to have a two-way connection between Second Life and Blender.

I don’t recall if I’d previously read about this or not, but I’d not seen it: the Fab@Home additive-process, rapid prototyping device (Link), here shown creating a watch strap. It’s a nice resource site with plenty of information and apparently plenty more to come. I’ve not done much more than skim through the site but it’s a link I’ll be visiting with some regularity.

Besides the device itself, of interest to me both on the Fab@Home site and on the RepRap blog which alerted me to it a couple of days ago (Link) are discussions about 3D fab catalogues. There is a “Printables” library (Link) on the Fab@Home wiki and a new, anticipatory centralized location for RepRap parts (Link) that seems… ambitious. I’ll be very interested to see the first fruits.

Probably goes without saying that I’ve been thinking about just such things for quite some time. Recently I told someone how an immersive 3D catalog might be accomplished (I’ve been grinding on how to do it for years – since I first started modding Quake 3 – but I’ve always run into content theft issues). Maybe they or someone else will get something like it up and running. It’d be a trip to have that weapons warehouse scene from “The Matrix” play out in a virtual world.

{Image source: Fab@Home}

Okay, I’ll admit to not seeing a practical use for this at the moment; seems like this is the beginning of a whole new section in the dictionary beneath “shaky-cam” (“shaky-furniture”, “shaky-housewares”, “shaky-surgical tools”, etc). One thing for sure though: it beautifully illustrates the rapidly dissolving barrier between thought and physical thing. Definitely worth watching.

You can find pictures of the completed objects over on the FrontDesign website (Link).

{Update: you can view the official video here: frontfilm on YouTube (Link)}

via Core77