I just read a really cool article on – of all things – screws. For us industrial designers it’s got it all:

Thanks to the Coudal website for directing me to this Forbes article.

As part of their State of Play coverage, C|Net has posted an article on a SoP panel held today to discuss markets in virtual spaces such as “Eve Online” and “Second Life“. You can read the article here.

As a kind of continuation from my previous entry, I wanted to call attention to the Workspace Unlimited entry available here. I first became aware of this group from Belgium about five years ago when they showed up on the Map-Center website forum looking for information and help in using the Quake 3 game tools. At that point all they had was a pretty cool looking level (I have a picture somewhere in my archives I’d like to show, but no time now to hunt for it). Since then I’ve only looked them up twice. Well, as it turns out they entered the State of Play competition and included a Quicktime movie of their work that’s pretty interesting. Check out their movie here.

Well this is cool. State of Play announced a virtual architecture competition a few weeks back with the theme “public space” (or something of that nature). I considered entering something on which I’ve been working, a virtual learning space, but after researching the backgrounds of the judges I decided to concentrate on seeing my project through instead of doing something to match their expectations. And I’m glad I did because as it turns out, I’m part of the winning team anyway (this is where I post “woot!”.). Unbeknownst to me, Randal Moss of the American Cancer Society (here’s a pic of him in action) entered the virtual charity event SL Relay for Life (here’s a pdf of his entry) and I happened to contribute to that effort by designing and building the architecture around the opening ceremony stage (over three days with the encouragement of virtual residents Candy Fox and Punkie Hatfield, watching the activities with me in this pic). The image below was taken just after the charity ended and you can see all the entries on the State of Play website here. Good news for the weekend.

Clickable Culture brings word of something I’ve been expecting for a while now: a virtual volumetric search engine. For me this isn’t far off from my old RW RadTag concept (I put a lot of thought into the idea of spatial search when doing that little project). And like the comment I posted earlier on the virtual mapping tool, it takes advantage of the ability to employ spatial coordinates in ways not easily accomplished by RW engines like Google. Kudos to the Wet Ikon team.

So what’s next? Well, I suspect someone is going to realize {or already has} that they can take that mapping engine I posted about earlier and not just “carve” something, but collect accurate 3D mesh data similar to a “point cloud” (or better, go straight to a mesh) and export it to be used elsewhere… and then fabricated. I’m aware that people at one time wanted to export their customized avatars to the real world for this reason, but I’m unsure if virtual scanning was raised as a solution; well here’s a way to do it. Just like there are mall-based scanners to digitize people and put them in games or help with fitting clothes, I expect someone will create a virtual scanner that kicks creations out in a clean format (like .stl). Question is, who will do it first?

Then the next question (and it’s a kicker – legal eagles take note) is how long before someone combines the Roam Search and this Scanner (“Search ‘n Scan”?). And when that happens, will we then have the virtual world equivalent of some Chinese manufacturer pirating parts by doing a 3D scan of competitor originals? It’d be the equivalent of opening a catalog, seeing what you like, and then having the information you need to recreate it handed off to you. Yow. I don’t see how we won’t.