As Akela previously indicated, a new book on Second Life's virtual community is scheduled to be published in the spring by Princeton University Press. U.C. Irvine Professor Tom Boellstorff presents "Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human". His experience in SL as avatar Tom Bukowski has culminated in a promising introduction to the culture developed in this novel space. Through the involvement of the community in preparing his book for print, he has shown an appreciation for the creativity of Second Life residents and displayed a deep respect for the existing social guidelines.

Read on to find out how the cover art for the book was chosen.

Mashup Islander, or Christopher Dodds in real life, unveils connections between literature and real-time 3D art through his virtual moiré sculptures. His exhibit opened recently among a sea of enthusiastic visitors who immediately began exploring the interactive pieces. You may experience the work yourself on Info Island until November 15th, 2007.

Many thanks to Daruma Picnic, Elizabeth Rookwood, and Rookie Voyager for showing me around!

Who knew you could learn so much from hanging out in a virtual fishbowl? Artist Strawberry Holiday takes guests on a trip into the world of a 3D recreation of one of her real-life paintings through her exhibition at Kush City. Update: You can watch a machinima of it on Vlad Bjornson's Shiny Life site.

Besides being an interesting point of view to explore, the fishbowl installation also advocates acceptance for plus-size women in Second Life and beyond. On a canvas of blue water and a miniature midnight city, the artist's aquatic world is filled with plump mermaid sculptures, caught in the middle of their cheerful play. Although some residents present at the opening considered this work a combination between Van Gogh and Robbie Dingo, what captured me was the lovely way in which Holiday expressed her message. The style was fresh and lively, a definite must-see.

If you like the artist's work at Kush City, you can also see her work at The Second Louvre Museum or at her own Winged Gallery.

Thanks to Tayzia Abattoir for the heads-up!

As Akela previously indicated, Havok4 is indeed out on the preview grid. Andrew Linden gracefully donated some of his time answering a few questions and he will be available for office hours this weekend. Should you want to chat with him directly:

Go to the Brampton Linden Stage (Brampton 106/166/25)

This Saturday September 29, 2007 08:00 AM PDT

Tuesdays 21:00 PDT (ongoing)

Thursdays (starting October 4, 2007) 08:00 PDT

Thanks for your time, Andrew!

After many frustrations with existing machinima gadgets, CodeBastard Redgrave has created her own in order to shoot a small movie for her friends. The result is a simple HUD camera, perfectly suited for the point-and-shoot people or for those who do not want to spend time setting up complicated camera angles, which entail having build rights on the land of interest.

Artist Vlad Bjornson opens new avenues for expression through his Sculpted Thoughts art piece. The morphing sculpture impresses the eye with a smart mashup of sculptie functionality and the Second Life media interface. The sculptie object is coded to take on a new shape as it cycles through the textures from a QuickTime movie stream.

SL limitations in this area were surpassed with some clever and custom scripts made by the artist. For example, Bjornson's sculptie is updated at a speed of almost 8 frames per second in order to maintain a smooth animation (see the machinima demo above). "If sculpties reacted to the video stream properly, [the motion] would be totally fluid [...] SL probably doesn't pick up the changes otherwise", explains scripter Candide LeMay.

Thanks to Gwyneth Llewelyn for the tip. You can see the sculpture yourself at Caledon Highlands.

Under the motto of "social engine for Second Life", Robbie Kiama has recently launched a new and interesting product – MetaHUD. This new gadget is a neat combination between a Digg/StumbleUpon network for SL and an in-world, easy-to-search marketplace. The interface is very friendly and reminds users of a regular web browser. The buttons are nicely designed, with graphics that cut across language barriers. You can access the Digg/StumbleUpon feature under the Travel tab at the top and the marketplace under Items.

I typically use the gadget to tag favorite places as I encounter them, but MetaHUD also has a system for people to buy items (without needing to teleport to a store). Simply search under "Items" for things you wish to buy or do the search "/8 meta mart" and grab the partner kit to learn about advertising here.

Much like SLExchange, this MetaHUD does charge a percentage/commission of sales. The other similar service is OnRez, which has free listings for shop owners. It features both in-world and on the web purchasing options. (Thanks for that clarification, Forseti).

MetaHUD's search method seems to be more more efficient than the classifieds and it does allow sellers to input a picture and tags for specific objects (much like SL browser). If you're a fan of digg or del.icio.us, you'll definitely love this. Get your own free copy here and let us know what you think!

With 85,000 gallery information cards served from "The Galleries of Second Life" kiosks in the past 18 months, Sasun Steinbeck is one of the best-known supporters of the art community in Second Life. In a virtual world that gets most of the media attention from sex scandals and business, art has been a steadily growing community, with many accomplishments and victories. Steinbeck is one of the longest-running and invaluable catalysts spurring the development of the art world.

SL Art at Cannery exhibition is starting today at 3 pm SLT and is bringing together some of the best SL photographs in a show that will run through November. Sponsored by Rezzable Productions, the makers of the accomplished Greenies' Home Rezzable, the show promises to be a who's who of the photography art world of Second Life.

Notable names include Shoshana Epsilon, Vint Falken, Collin Savon, Melodious Source, Kean Kelly, Nephie Eerie, Rob Danton and Stephen Venkman, just to name a few. At the SLart at Cannery spot inworld, you can vote for your favorite piece and then check results on a special website set up for the exhibit.

Teleport there now and enjoy the industrial and chic ambiance that surrounds all these amazing works!

John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Go, and Charlie's Chocolate Factory, spent 30 minutes in Second Life on August 20^th, answering questions about his upcoming film, The Nines. The movie plot explores the intersection between the real and the virtual, while the promotional methods are heavily using transmedia to engage fans into alternate reality games. August announced that he is hoping to release a version of the movie that would allow fans to re-edit it.

The premiere for the The Nines is set for August 31^st in New York and Los Angeles, and September 28^th in Austin, TX.

Resident Juria Yoshikawa created a YouTube group for all machinima that tries to capture or document art in Second Life. If you are an artist or have ever filmed pieces that deal with your favorite artwork, please consider joining the group. Much like the various Flickr art groups, this is an excellent opportunity to see what is out there, be inspired, and eventually promote your own work.

Juria also had a interesting art installation that recently closed, Blink. You can see videos of it here, it looks fascinating and surreal.

Thanks to the Second Arts blog for the tip!

As previously reported by Tateru, 57 Miles from Metaversed.com moderated today a panel with Gartner's Steve Prentice (ST Mensing in SL), and representatives from Sun Microsystems (Fiona May), The Electric Sheep Company (Joel Greenberg), and Mystik business-school professor Robert Bloomfield (Beyers Sellers). Sadly, Skype was down all this morning and the panel had to resort to using SL Voice. This meant, at least for me, that the conversation faded in and out every few seconds. I'm sure 57 Miles will have more detailed notes up on his blog soon. Until then, here are two ideas that stuck in my mind:

Steve Prentice explained that his prediction that 80% of people will have a virtual life by 2011 was referring to the increasing popularity of virtual worlds/online gaming/social media as a form of interaction and entertainment. He was prompting companies to take note of this trend and explore with care as they learn. His subsequent attempt to caution companies mostly focuses on security issues and risk management of these platforms.

Joel Greenberg of the Electric Sheep pointed out that the problem is not security. There are some ways to get around that with private islands/restricted access. However, there aren't enough collaboration tools for enterprise use. And he's spot-on. I can count on my fingers what you can do in terms of collaboration in SL: build together, watch a movie/video, listen to music/audio, and present a slideshow of images. Many are trying to create gadgets that enable other types of collaboration, but the infrastructure is often times the limiting factor.

A group of residents gathered under the umbrella of Thinkerer Studios have announced yesterday at the NMC Symposium the search for a creative collaboration project that positively impacts real life. The prize consists of 30,000 Linden dollars and a fully paid parcel of land for a year (no mention of how large). Thinkerer Studios promises free promotion in both the virtual and real worlds for the winning entry.

To learn all the details, check out the official note or contact Thinkerer Melville.

I'm happy to introduce another cool gadget from Felix Wakmann and Diva Canto. It's called SecondView and it's a graphic RSS Reader that works both as a HUD and as prim-efficient object inworld.

As you well know, many RSS readers are quite disappointing due to the dynamic text need - each letter has to be rendered onto a prim - so you can imagine things quickly getting to 50+ prims. SecondView contains a total of 6 prims !

Web pages are rendered together (both text and image). The business model requires businesses/bloggers pay 15 Linden dollars per page upload and then the RSS feed is available for free to all readers inworld. Right now, the feeds you can read for free inworld come from SL on Yahoo! News Photos, NYT Movie Reviews, SLNN, Second Life Insider, Second Opinion, Secrets of Second Life, Heute Online, and Le Dauphine (French).

Take a look for yourself and feel free to post your thoughts on this gadget here :)

SL Browser is an inworld ad network created by Felix Wakmann and Diva Canto. So what makes this HUD gadget special enough to demand attention, you ask? Well, it indexes some 1.4 million products and averages 2000 searches per day.

But this isn't about numbers ... I'm excited about several features that surpass the searching capabilities available in the SL client. For one - you can search based on keywords and in your results you get the location and relevant object/keyword image (instead of the picture of a storefront). This helps narrow your search at-a-glance, without wasting time teleporting to a tens of sites to find something close to what you have in mind. It even sports an "impulse buying" option through the "Public" search feature. If you have that box checked, your HUD will react to searches other people make using the browser. If you like what you're hearing, go get your own here.

If you're a business owner and wish to update your object description, simply change the object description and the Browser will automatically update in a week's time. Felix is also working on creating tags for those who wish to have their objects stay un-indexed by his gadget. For the techies reading this, continue on to hear about how the browser works, pitfalls, etc.