1. The Guardian (UK) – Virtual worlds: is this where real life is heading? “Recently a man bought a space station for $330,000, while last month Small Planet Foods, a subsidiary of General Foods, introduced a new brand of organic blueberries. What have these two products got in common? Neither actually exist. Well, not except as pixels in the virtual worlds where they are traded. Only the money is real. The space station was sold in the virtual world Entropia Universe, which has its own economy and currency. The buyer, who converted his $300,000 into 3.3m PED (Project Entropia dollars), is convinced that virtual shops on his virtual space station will produce virtual profits that can be converted back into real dollars. The blueberries represent a “brand extension” of a product that exists in the real world as US company General Foods aims to establish a presence in FarmVille, a game which exists as an application on Facebook and which at its peak has had nearly 80 million players. It is a classic example of a new genre.”
2. The Royal Gazette (Bermuda) – 3D concept adapted for the wider arena . “The use of 3D worlds on the Internet has been evolving from the gaming sector to a more expansive leveraging of the technique. Last week I wrote about how Citzalia, a site I am working on as editor, uses virtual 3D as an innovative means of navigating through information and for social networking. Companies, non-profits, government and other entities should also consider using the concept of creating 3D virtual worlds as a means of attracting and engaging visitors. Above all, they should keep in mind the idea of allowing users to have fun.”
3. IEEE Spectrum (USA) – Reducing World of Warcraft’s Power Consumption. “Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft consume a lot of their players’ time. They also consume a lot of energy, as more than a thousand servers can be required to create one game’s virtual worlds. Last year, Yeng-Ting Lee, a 26-year-old online game fanatic, began to wonder if there was an easy way to reduce their energy consumption. Lee, who is a research assistant at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan, says he has found a way to cut MMORPG power consumption in half. Last month he revealed the solution at the IEEE Cloud 2010 conference.”
4. Inforum (USA) – Video game industry tailoring more offerings to female players. “or years, video games have been marketed toward male players with ads that showcase unreal action sequences or alluring female figures guiding players through virtual worlds. But as the video game industry expands its consumer base, some female gamers are feeling a little less ignored by an industry that has realized not only men play their games. In fact, women make up 42 percent of the 215 million Americans who play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association.”
5. RTH Life (Switzerland) – Virtual reality you can touch. “Researchers at the Computer Vision Lab at ETH Zurich have developed a method with which they can produce virtual copies of real objects. The copies can be touched and even sent via the Internet. By incorporating the sense of touch, the user can delve deeper into virtual reality. Sending a friend a virtual birthday present, or quickly beaming a new product over to a customer in America to try out – it sounds like science fiction, but this is what researchers at the Computer Vision Lab want to make possible, with the aid of new technology. Their first step was to successfully transmit a virtual object to a spatially remote person, who could not only see the object, but also feel it and move it.”
6. Red Deer Advocate (Canada) – A virtual world to see, hear — and smell. “Virtual reality may seem all the more real in the future, with not only people’s sense of sight and hearing engaged, but also their sense of smell. A high school student from Elnora is part of the cutting edge research, having just worked on a project at the University of Alberta known as Smell-O-Vision. Ashley Brown, a Grade 12 student at Delburne Centralized School and the cyber school North-Star Christian Academy, was one of 60 high school students accepted into the Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology (WISEST) summer research program at the U of A.”
7.Computerworld (USA) – The (better) future of tech support. “Right now, getting help when something unusual goes wrong is a frustrating experience for customers. They’ve come to stereotype the experience as waiting endlessly on hold, deciphering strangely cheerful foreign accents, humoring technicians who are incapable of understanding — let alone answering — their questions, and taking time off to wait for a tech who doesn’t show. Tech support pros are just as frustrated, experiencing the same issues from their vendors’ tech support and dealing with users who start the interaction expecting nothing, despite their own cluelessness. But even with these drags on their morale, many sally forward and poke around cryptic forums, hunting for answers among the rants to find an answer for their frustrated users and reaching out to fellow support pros through social networks and the like.”
8. Chicago Tribune (USA) – Despite some blips, most see technology as boon for family life. “At first, Andrea Pryor admitted, she was a little nervous about installing a computer in her Chicago home. What exactly was this thing? What would it do to her family. Years later, she has her answer: It brought them closer. “It has kept us connected, with family scattered across the U.S.,” said Pryor, 57, a retired teacher. “I’m getting to watch my nephews, nieces and grandchildren grow up.”
9. The Guardian (UK) – How the internet is altering your mind. “Like nearly all the Guardian’s content, what you are about to read was – and this will hardly be a revelation – written using a computer connected to the internet. Obviously, this had no end of benefits, mostly pertaining to the relative ease of my research and the simplicity of contacting the people whose thoughts and opinions you are about to read. Modern communications technology is now so familiar as to seem utterly banal, but set against my clear memories of a time before it arrived, there is still something magical about, say, optimistically sending an email to a scientist in southern California, and then talking to him within an hour.”
10. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Linden Lab’s Value Down 21%, Teen Second Life To Close. “The value of Second Life publisher Linden Lab has plunged by 21.4% in the past five months on the private market, according to SharesPost. This drop in price has effectively sent the company’s value down by $100 million, with SharesPost now estimating Linden Lab’s value at only $271 million. The decline follows Linden’s announcement that it would cut 30% of its staff in June, shortly followed by the replacement of CEO Mark Kingdon with founder Philip Rosedale. Earlier today, the company also announced that it would shut down its Teen Second Life grid on December 31, 2010. Linden Lab was founded in 1999, while Second Life launched in 2003. Teen Second Life launched in 2005 as a solution for younger users who wanted to enjoy the virtual world but weren’t old enough to explore Second Life’s sometimes-adult grid freely. To compensate for Teen Second Life’s closure, Linden Lab will drop the minimum user age in Second Life to 16 on or before December 31, 2010. Accounts for 16 and 17-year-old Teen Second Life users will be transferred to Second Life’s Main Grid.”
Speak Your Mind