I’ve just posted a comment over on Mashable* that might be of interest (Link). And because I think industrial designers might be especially interested in some specifics, I’ll post the example I used in that comment in here as well:

Imagine the near future. I’m a toy maker with a rapid-manufacturing system (aka “fabber”) and I’m looking for new products to fab and sell. I don’t have my own designs and I don’t want to pay for any, so I play an online MMORPG that’s streaming to my PC. I see something I think would sell so I rip the 3D data from the stream, which – using today’s methodologies – would likely be a low-rez 3D mesh. It’s not sufficiently detailed like what I see on the screen, but that’s no problem. I search my cache for the 2D normal map image (or similar) that the game engine uses to visually enhance the low-quality mesh. The normal map, having been generated by a much higher-quality model of production quality, can then be used in reverse to create an entirely new model from the captured low-rez data (typically a command like “Edit>Convert>Use Displacement Map”). The result is that I now have a high-rez 3D model (much like the original) which I can further manipulate for fabrication and sale.

Who does this screw? Well, if that happened today, it’d be the game developer who gets the shaft. But if virtual worlds continue down the path of Linden Lab’s Second Life, where users create the content, it might be some average guy working as a janitor to feed his family and staying up all night designing these things and dreaming of a better life for himself and his family… just like his musician friends.

And of course this goes beyond simple toys. Someday someone out there will laser scan their prize gun and post the 3D data on the net. Of course it might be easier to simply check the cache of a service bureau’s rapid-prototyping system for those files.

I noticed something a couple of days ago over on the O’Reilly Radar site, but to be honest it hasn’t fully sunk in yet. From the post (Link):

To celebrate both the success of the eBay Developers Program and the removal of all fees associated with using their web services, eBay are holdling the eBay Developer Challenge. {quote removed} Tuck into eBay’s web services and build your own vertical search (think Rollyo for stuff), mash eBay up with Yahoo! Maps, Google Talk or any another web service(s), hack eBay alerts into your TiVo, …

I have a feeling there’s something especially significant happening here because I already see eBay as potentially much more than just a site for connecting people hocking old junk (not a fair perception, but one that is, I believe, still largely held by the general public). They are after all one of the original social platforms.

Long before Myspace and MeetUp and Friendster and all the rest, there was a site called eBay connecting people in one of the most important ways available: exchanging goods. Opening up their API will undoubtedly spur innovation and that can’t be anything but important given the starting point.

My first thought is that we’ll see some amazing mash-ups; maybe even a system linking eBay to a virtual world like Linden Lab’s Second Life or the open source, peer-to-peer Project Croquet and then from one of those to Myspace (for the music), Google Video, Flickr and more. The result could out-PLM the biggest PLM software developers (see my earlier posts on PLM – Link 1, Link 2, Link 3). And I still expect to be surprised.

Interesting story over on BusinessWeek called “Videoconferencing Gets Real” (although to me it should be “Videoconferencing Gets Virtually Real”). From the article (Link):

“Because the space is a common space in terms of its design, it eliminates the distance, it eliminates the barriers between us from an architectural point of view. I’m not looking at your place, and you’re not looking at my place — it’s us now being together in the same space,” explains Mark Gorzynski, HP’s chief scientist for Halo. The result isn’t an improvement in videoconferencing, but a complete shift: the nearly seamless melding of a half-virtual, half-physical space.

and

Architecturally, rather than accept the differences between locations, the Halo room is designed to smooth them over. In the process, it’s a step away from how architecture has been conceived for thousands of years. Rather than existing in a specific place, the half-physical half-virtual Halo room exists in space. With the Halo room, architecture itself becomes a communications technology.

Enjoy the idea. Because after you see the price tag the halo goes away.

I recall hearing about this kind of thing some time ago, but that might have been a news story on the technique of laser-burning seeds to yield these messages because I don’t recall seeing it being actually sold before this. To be honest, the sale of these things isn’t what I find interesting. It’s the options available over on Compact Impact’s sales site (Link):

Custom Design of both Message and Can is included with the order of 5,000 or more in quantity.

Only 5,000 units? That’s pretty impressive. Maybe the good folks over on Inhabitat can get them to show images of the process.

via Inhabitat

{Image source: Compact Impact}

There are a few interesting projects underway on Democracy Island, a project set up in the virtual world Second Life, but this one is an interesting surprise (I knew I should have attended the opening). From a Democracy Island blog announcement today (Link) :

Zarf Vantongerloo (who’s notary service on Democracy Island we looked at last week) has built a virtual machine that generates official Creative Commons Licenses applicable to the creations of Second Life residents from right within the virtual world.

I’ve mentioned Democracy Island previously (Link) and discussed issues of Reputation – which I consider pretty important to legitimizing virtual worlds – on this blog (Link) and on the Second Life forum, so Vantongerloo’s notary service is something with which I’m very familiar (Link). But what’s particularly interesting to me is that neither the notary service nor this license generation device could have sprung from any other virtual world since Second Life is the only one, of which I’m aware at least, that allows residents to keep the intellectual property rights to anything they create inside the simulation.

Of course, in a “free culture” why bother with owning anything? Kumbaya, brothers and sisters.

via the Second Life Future Salon blog