4 Sources Of Free 3D Models (Read more...)

Free 3D Models:
Many free 3D Models to download, of furniture, vehicles, plants and others.


There are many high quality trains, aircrafts, ships (including a galleon) and cars.


Avatara: Avatars that can be used in Blaxxun's multiuser VRML worlds. There are humans, animals, vehicles, dinosaurs and more. The shapes are not too complex but are fast and fun to use as avatars in multiuser worlds.


VRML Models: Decent VRML models from different sources. Animals, mainly insects, an elephant and some other. The license of these models is not specified, although I think most of them are on the public domain.


SAVAGE: Enormous archive of dynamic 3D military models, all open source and in X3D. There are also code examples in X3D for building HUDs and other things that may be useful in worldbuilding, and some tools.

Vote For X3DV Module Suite In SourceForge (Read more...)

All the opensource projects in SourceForge can be nominated for awards in different categories. It's time to nominate your favorite ones.

To nominate a project you'll need an account in SourceForge, but you can create one quickly using your OpenID: http://sourceforge.net/account/login.php
Look on the right and you'll see that if you have an OpenID or an account on Yahoo, Blogger, LiveJournal or AIM, you can use it to vote.

Then, you can go to the page http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-nominate and search for projects to nominate. Another option is to visit their page at SourceForge and click the button for nominating them.

The projects with more nominations will later be selected for being voted by all the users.

The winners will receive a trophy of a robot. It's an award mostly for reputation.


Why don't you vote for the X3DV Module Suite? Just login in SourceForge and click this button:

You can vote each project you like in more than one category. For the X3DV Module Suite, you can vote it in "Best Project", and " Best Tool or Utility for Developers".

Thank you, and remember to nominate all opensource projects you like!

Other Planets And Virtual Worlds (Read more...)

Many worldbuilders, in some moment, have thought in creating a world located in a distant planet outside our Solar System, or maybe in our neighbour planet Mars. How would those worlds look? What is the color of their skies, seas and rivers? What strange animals may live in their lands?

Exoplanetology is a blog that talks about what science knows about those worlds. This site can be a source of inspiration for building these kind of works. Exoplanetology is the science that studies the planets outside the Solar System and life in them.

http://exoplanetology.blogspot.com/

Exploring its articles, there are a variety of small treasures for us, like videos of documentaries. I also found a software that is in development and will be realeased this month, exoExplorer. It's a software to visualize exoplanets and walk through them in an immersive 3D environment.

Screenshot of exoExplorer

And that takes us to the last site, the home of exoExplorer, and where you'll find news from the study of life in other planets:

http://www.planetarybiology.com/

More Events: Zaragoza And Bitfilm Festival (Read more...)

New events have been added to the Hiperia3D News Calendar Of Worldwide 3D Events.

Virtual Educa Zaragoza
Location: Zaragoza (Spain)
Days: Jule 14-18

IX International meeting of Virtual Educa Zaragoza. There will be a seminar about "Education in 3D Virtual Worlds". More info in their site:

http://www.virtualeduca.org/

Monastery of Stone (Monasterio de Piedra) Natural Park in Zaragoza.
Photo by vito7.

The language of the meeting will be Spanish. It is an international meeting but aimed to Spain and South America.


First Digital Film Festival: Bitfilm Festival
Location: The virtual world of Bitropolis in Twinity.
Days: May 1 to July 12

The Bitfilm Festival is a festival of digital films, that tries to keep a high quality of content.

Twinity virtual world. Photo by Torley.

This year, for the very first time, the festival is being held in both the real world and the virtual world.

http://www.twinity.com/en/bitfilm

Habitat: The First Virtual World (Read more...)

F. Randall Farmer has made public a promotional video of the first virtual world. Farmer is one of the co-creators of the first virtual world, Lucasfilm's Habitat.



He has a blog in which he continues to analyze his experiences and also the current events in virtual worlds, with the light that experience gives (Habitat Chronicles).

Randal Farmer announced this video in the Association Of Virtual Wolrds, in this article.

If you still don't know what the Association Of Virtual Worlds is, read this:

What is the AVW?

If you want to extend your knowledge about Habitat, you can also read the document that he made about the lessons that their creators learned building and running this virtual world.

In our list of "who was the first" we should add others, like the first multiuser 3D first person shooter game(simulated) was Maze Wars. Also, Habitat was 2D, but had many of the features that virtual worlds have. Later, some 3D multiuser virtual worlds platforms emerged, like Blaxxun, ActiveWorlds and Traveller.

The place to know more about this is http://www.vwtimeline.org/, where you'll find a timeline and many interesting data about all this stuff.