Via Trevor Smith’s blog comes word of something called “metacrasher”. From their press release on the site’s homepage (Link):

New York, New York- July 1, 2007- Metacrasher, Inc., a New York based company today announced the launching of the Metacrasher Project. The Metacrasher Project is a 3 phase project to initiate the connecting of all virtual worlds for commerce, content development, software development, by the creation of large networks of p2p and 3d web spaces that will communicate with the growing number of virtual worlds, MMOPG and any other kind of digital social network. the primary goal of the metecrasher project is to, by initiating this connection, allow digital content makers and service providers to identify business opportunities and to quickly reach consumers to monetize their products and or services on localized levels to global scales.

Worth keeping an eye on, I suppose.

{Update: Here’s some additional information posted in comments on Raph Koster’s blog (Link):

–

“hello all,
dropping by all the blogs and forums to first off thank the admins for linking to the site, second off answer questions and lastly say that our forums have been delivered for activation and will be up later today. i will put the link in another post once it’s up.

actually we mentioned areae because it is a virtual world that will be rolling out at some point. we have never said that we know anything about how areae is going to texture map their avatars. so for the record: this is not information metacrasher claims to know or claims to have any insight into.

you might ask: well why do you mention it on your site?
the answer is: we mentioned a number of virtual world projects on our site as our goal is to try and bridge them. we are showing an example of what would be possible

avatars and most all 3d characters usually have textures. second life has 3 to be exact. for the textures to be placed on an object UV mapping is required. now what if i want to take the texture that i worked really hard on in second life to a different avatar that has different uv texture mapping i would require a tool to do that. a tool to do that does not require proprietary info. of course the user or the world designer in this case Raph would have to tell us ‘this is how my avatars display textures using this type of mapping’ and then we would put it into the system.

most 3d artists can do this, if they have the mesh for the avatar and the texture and even better the uv mapping info. we are simply making it a process that is automated. we show an example of what this tool looks like and mention the different worlds out of respect and the fact that they exist.

of course we don’t know outback onlines format yet or aerae’s. someone would have to submit it. but the fact remains that if an av has user made textures, it’s format can be mapped onto different meshes if done correctly. that’s what the tool is for.”

–

When I initially surfed through, it was that UV mapping tool I found most interesting. Of course, as I commented elsewhere this morning, the real key is a truly unified 3D format… which may not arrive until long after I’m fertilizer.}