Developer Pelican Crossing has announced the release of Blink 3D 2.0, its virtual worlds and 3D environment development platform.

Blink 3D 2.0 comes packaged with Pelican Crossing's inDuality client, a feature which allows virtual worlds from different vendors to be embedded in web pages. This initial release of the client only supports Blink 3D virtual worlds so far, but the developer hopes to eventually add support for other MMOs, such as Second Life.

The new program suite includes video tutorials, BlinkScript code examples, knowledge base articles, forty new enhanced behaviors, and Orthographic Views, the last of which supports dragging and dropping of assets. The digital content creation pipeline has also been improved from previous versions with automatic asset importing and synchronization.

Three editions for Blink 3D 2.0 with varying price points have been released, with Blink 3D Ultra Lite, a feature-limited edition, being available for free.

Said Pelican Crossing CEO Clive Jackson: “We are not talking here about simply customizing a pre-built 3D apartment. With Blink 3D you can create your own virtual world, whatever type you want, quickly, easily and for free. With Web based virtual worlds there is no land to purchase, no membership fees, controlled branding and user access. Best of all, you get to teleport from one virtual world to another, with the linked worlds forming the Metaverse.“

He continued: "We have seen land grabs before: domain names, email addresses, personal web pages and more recently social networking pages. Now we will start to see the grab for personal virtual worlds tightly integrated with social networking pages, the beginning of the 3D Social Web.