I naturally immediately signed up for an account (katlemieux) and briefly explored this Web-based world, which only opened to the public this Monday. So far, they have two types of “rooms” available which one can rent on a daily basis and invite people to join you for free, and two generic avatars, “Joe” and “Jane”, which can be customized to a limited degree. With a Pro account, one can upload textures to create a better looking avatar and wardrobe, etc., but so far I haven’t found any specifications for those.

In general it looks promising. The idea of a low-cost, Web-accessible virtual meeting space has some real possibilities, even if it’s not visually rich yet. Already one can link to a folder of images to display as a slideshow, or a video file, and a voice chat tool is available. Adding voice to a meeting room rental (US$5.99) costs an additional fee (US$4.99), but that’s not horrible considering that people you invite to your room don’t have to pay a cent.

So far I’ve only tried browsing this site with Firefox on Mac OS X.5, but (after adding a line to my computer’s Java settings, according to Transmutable’s very clear instructions, and restarting Firefox), it worked very well. Later I’ll fire up my virtual machines with WindowsXP® and Debian GNU/Linux, and see how it works on them.

I just received a couple of new products from Reallusion® for review, iClone2 and 3DXchange2.

This intrigued me because I spend a lot of my time and effort participating in a corner of the metaverse called SecondLife™, and at least some of that time involves designing and “building” models of objects to populate that virtual world. Unfortunately, at this time it is not easy or perhaps not even possible to import models into SecondLife, but that may not always be the case, and anyway SecondLife is not the only virtual world out there. I also have an account on Qwaq, for instance, related to the work I am doing with the Qwaq-SL Liaison group in SecondLife. That in turn is related to some activities regarding the future of the metaverse, particularly with some researchers at Stanford’s Humanities Lab. That group is putting on a conference next weekend, called Metaverse U, which I am helping to bring into SecondLife.

Anyway, to get back to the software, I haven’t done much more than install all the elements, look at the website and press kit, and open it up for a first peek. 3DXchange is particularly interesting since it allows one to access the Google 3D Warehouse and import 3D models for use in iClone2. But I will look at it more closely in the days to come, and relate my impressions and experiences here.