I have a confession: When I read press releases about Envizions' EVO Smart Console I am unsure if the company is run by self-assured, confident visionaries or if -- well, the situation is actually quite the opposite. I like (love?) the idea of an open source, Linux-powered gaming console. I like the potential it holds, the almost limitless features it could deliver, the creativity it could inspire.

I know that bringing hardware to market is rough, and that sometimes things get bogged down in regulatory processes and unexpected red tape. I know that balancing what you want to sell, what you want to deliver, and what your customers want, expect and request can be tricky. A company needs to hold on to its dreams and ideals -- and it needs to bring in cash in order to make those dreams and ideals happen.

It isn't easy, especially when you're selling something that isn't even at the "early adopter" stage. It's impossible to say if Envizions is going about this in the most logical manner -- it's uncharted territory. This is why Envizion's announcement of a 3-D online community (think Second Life) leaves me feeling even more conflicted about the EVO open source game console than ever.

Mozilla and graphics consortium the Khronos Group have announced a far-reaching new initiative to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the web. With many  representatives from Khronos on hand at this week's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, the joint initiative is being discussed there. As BBC News notes, "it could lead to widespread browser-based gaming as well as creating 3D environments in social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace."

By Wagner James Au

What you're looking at in the screen captures here and below the fold represents a small but significant milestone in open source metaverse technology.  If in the future, Orcs in a fantasy MMORPG are able to IM their friends flying starships in a sci-fi MMO, this may be remembered as one of the innovations which helped point the way.  It's called the Parallel Selves Message Bridge, a new addition to the code forge of OpenSimulator, the "Apache for virtual worlds" project featured on OStatic last year.  The Bridge makes it possible for users within one OpenSim world to send IMs to users currently logged into another Second Life-compatible world.  (OpenSim is reverse engineered from SL's viewer source code.)